Full Description
Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice?
This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and "stuff," and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices.
The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Food and Material Cultures
Irina D. Mihalache, University of Toronto, Canada and Elizabeth Zanoni, Old Dominion University, USA
PART I: FOOD
2. My Mother's Aebleskiver Pan, Lena Mortensen, University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada
3. Shaping the Material: Turning the Food Studies Lens on Itself in Pursuit of 'Better' Food, Jonathan Deutsch, Drexel University, USA
4. Slices and Fillings: The Material Culture of Sandwiches, Megan Elias, Boston University, USA
5. While Supplies Lasts: The Materialism and Symbolism of Limited Edition Packaged Foods, Emily Truman, University of Calgary, Canada
6. Creating and Re-creating a Dish: On Craftsmanship, Cooking, and Food as Material Culture, Susanne Højlund, Aarhus University, Denmark and Claudia Squarzon, Copenhagen University, Denmark
PART II: ENVIRONMENTS
7."My life is on those Shelves...": Ingesting Culinary Cultures in a Mediterranean Port City
Jean Duruz, University of South Australia, Australia
8. Materializing Cold: Refrigeration and Food Infrastructure in Argentina during the Twentieth Century, John Soluri, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
9. Kitchens, Tools, Organization, and the Struggled of Everyday Home Cooks, Amy Trubek, University of Vermont, USA
10. Teaching with Food, Daniel Bender, University of Toronto, Canada and Lisa Haushofer, University of Toronto, Canada
11. "When the Numbers Prosper, the People Suffer": Robust Food Cultures, Tacit Knowledge and the Abstractions of Contemporary Neoliberal Culture, David Sutton, Southern Illinois University, USA and Leonidas Vournelis, Baruch College, USA
PART III: REPRESENTATIONS
12. In Conversation with Michelle Moon, Michelle Moon with Irina D. Mihalache, University of Toronto, Canada
13. Exhibiting the Mediterranean Diet in a French museum: The Case of Le Grand Mezzé at the Mucem, Julie Deramond, Avignon University, France and Nolwenn Pianezza, Avignon University, France
14. Who We Eat is What We Are: American Culinary History and Material Culture at Two Museums, Delores Phillips, James Madison University, USA
15. Working Around the Recipe: Cookbooks and Culinary Ephemera in Special Collections,
Elizabeth Ridolfo, University of Toronto, Canada
16. Fun in the Produce Aisle: On the Marketing (and Materiality) of Unprocessed Foods to Children, Charlene Elliott, University of Calgary, Canada
CONCLUSIONS: In Conversation with Food Visionaries
17. Tawnya Brant
18. Ozoz Sokoh
19. Vanessa Ling Yu
Index
