It is an honor to introduce this issue of Food, Culture & Society, the first issue for me and the new editorial team. We are grateful for the work of our immediate predecessors, Amy Bentley, Katherine Magruder and John Lang, as well as all previous editors and the entire board of the journal. Their work established and maintained the journal as a vibrant exchange of ideas that is international and thoroughly interdisciplinary. Our new team includes Amanda Balagur as Managing Editor, Emily Contois as Book Review Editor, and Jonathan Deutsch continuing in his role as Education Editor. Hannah Spiegelman is managing our social media – more about that below.
We are all excited to be working on the journal because this work puts us at the heart of the lively discourse that animates and connects food studies scholarship. Even the submissions that do not make it into the journal give us a glimpse of what scholars in related fields are working on. And the articles that we do publish move our interdisciplinary scholarship forward in diverse ways.
This issue introduces two new traditions: annual publication of the ASFS Presidential Address and annual publication of the winning submission from the ASFS pedagogy prize. We introduce these pieces in the spirit of community building. The President’s address will connect scholars who could not be at the annual conference to one of the highlights of that gathering and will give the president another way to engage with the membership of ASFS. The pedagogy prize piece will help the many of us who teach food studies to virtually visit each other and see how ideas that shape our work get developed in the classroom. It also signals what we hope will be a more regular pattern of publishing pieces on teaching in food studies. Mim Seidel’s description of her admirably engaged pedagogy is an excellent piece with which to begin this.
In the interest of expanding the journal’s community, we have also developed the social media presence of Food Culture & Society to recognize and promote the work of food studies scholars. Follow us and we’ll follow you back! If you have published an article in the journal, let us know about your latest publications and events and we will promote those to our followers, too. On Twitter we are @FCSJournal, on Instagram FCSJournal and on Facebook look for the Food, Culture & Society page.
With social media we hope to bring the insights of journal authors to readers and curious people beyond the usual reach of academic writing. Our goal is to be translational by doing what we can to connect non-academic and academic perspectives on food, culture, and society. To that end we are working on producing a podcast that will feature journal authors talking in more conversational ways about their research. We want the food-fascinated world to know all about what we do and how our work can be useful.
We will also be setting up regular events for the public in which journal authors can discuss a common theme in their work. Our journal is a well-established home for thoughtful professional writing about food and we plan to continue that tradition but also to find ways to open up our disciplinary discourses to broader audiences in order to stoke more conversations across the many platforms of engagement with food.
In this issue you will find articles that are both deeply researched and carefully argued but that can also be discussed casually. Next time someone mentions the ascendance of Nordic cuisine, for example, tell them you read all about the democratization of “artful dining” in Sammi Koponen and Mari Niva’s article about upmarket bistros in Finland. That the thrill of modernist cuisine is now available to more consumers surely means something new is on the horizon.
When a friend complains that their child won’t eat anything but macaroni, tell them that according to John Stephen McKenzie and David Watts, although tastes developed in childhood often linger in adulthood, tastes can change over time with the right impetus. In particular, worries about one’s own health can lead to changing tastes, not just changed behaviors.
If someone you know is worried about how much sugar they should or shouldn’t be eating (aren’t we all?) tell them about Karen Throsby’s findings that when people talk about sugar they apply a kind of panic mentality not found in discussions of other foodstuffs. Throsby warns that talking about sugar as an addiction both plays into fat-phobia and limits the ways in which bodies can be understood in their relation to sugar specifically and eating in general.
And while you are on the subject of group thinking around food and nutrition, suggest your friends check out the new article by Mary Kate Mycek, Annie Hardison-Moody, J. Dara Bloom, Sarah Bowen, and Sinikka Elliott. In this article, the authors explore how refugee and immigrant populations take ideas about nutrition with them as they travel but often find it difficult to maintain these ideas in the contexts of American marketplaces and in conversation with American nutritional advisors.
And if anyone asks for reading recommendations, our book review section should keep them busy and well-informed for many months.
In short, the articles in this journal are relevant to the conversations everybody is having right now about food.
We hope you will enjoy the whole issue!