Like a Moth to a candle-lit dinner: food and storytelling

ABSTRACT

As part of commensality, storytelling offers an important social function at the table. Using the theme of the 2022 ASFS annual conference, “Cultivating Connections,” four ASFS board members offer personal stories in the style of The Moth Radio Hour that consider the possibilities—and limitations—of making connections through food, whether it be travel, migration, COVID-19, or academia itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Commensality
• storytelling
• community
• limits
• possibilities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. I should note, that while for The Moth, one is not allowed to use notes, our speakers had the option to use them.

2. “Hurry hard” is what the skip (a.k.a. captain) of the team yells to the sweepers (a.k.a. the people with the brooms (which, nowadays, aren’t really brooms but funny little foam gizmos on sticks)) to get them to sweep harder and faster to make the rock (that beautifully polished piece of granite) slide farther down the sheet (that expanse of ice). There: now you can sound knowledgeable at your next bonspiel (a.k.a. tournament).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Beth M. Forrest

Beth M. Forrest is a historian and co-editor of Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place, and Taste (Bloomsbury, 2021) and President of the ASFS.

Cecilia Leong-Salobir

Cecilia Leong-Salobir is a food historian and ASFS board member. She is editor of Routledge Handbook of Food in Asia (Taylor & Francis, 2020), and author of Urban Food Culture: Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), and Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire (Routledge, 2011).

Lisa Heldke

Lisa Heldke is a philosopher, ASFS board fellow, and former editor of Food, Culture, & Society. She has authored and edited numerous works, including: Philosophers at the Table, On Food and Being Human (Reaktion Books, 2016), Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (Routledge, 2003) and Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Indiana University Press, 1992).

Zeynep Kiliç

Zeynep Kiliç is a sociologist and ASFS board secretary. She is a Fulbright grant recipient and director and producer of the award-winning documentary, Tables of Istanbul (2016).