Greetings from your editor. I am delighted to introduce yet another fine slate of food studies scholarship. These eight articles represent cutting-edge food studies research in terms of topic, methods, and data. Kendall Park’s “Ethnic Foodscapes: Foreign Cuisines in the United States” employs large data-sets to reveal a patterned geographical distribution of types of ethnic restaurants. Park’s impressive research confirms that different types of “ethnic restaurants” are located and concentrated in different kinds of neighborhoods (wealthy, highly educated/professional, or immigrant enclave). Turns out not only are we what we eat, but “we eat where we are.”
We eat where we are, but what we find edible as well as palatable, and how that intersects with race, nation, and power, depends on a multitude of factors. Andrea Montanari’s “The Stinky King: Western Attitudes towards the Durian in Colonial Southeast Asia” employs Elias’s The Civilizing Process to examine the historical colonial relationship between East and West and its effect on taste formation. Montanari’s analysis contributes to the growing body of scholarship on food and colonialism. Also employing a historical approach is David Anderson’s “Food and Childhood in Postbellum Plantation Memoirs and Reminiscences.” Anderson examines memoirs and narratives to understand how pre-Civil War nostalgic memories of food, kitchens, and cooks contributed to New South power relations and authority. These themes are further examined in Bernhard Forchtner and Ana Tominc’s “Kalashnikov and Cooking-spoon: Neo-Nazism, Veganism and Lifestyle Cooking Shows on YouTube,” highlighting the complicated intersection of politics, ideology, and consumption.
Shifting to another kind of tension, Laura Renee Moore’s “Food Intolerant Family: Gender and the Maintenance of Children’s Gluten-Free Diets” examines the complex role of parenting children following gluten-free diets. Employing data from interviews as well as social media, Moore notes that while mothers must carefully referee their children’s eating, they risk criticism for such intensive parenting. Tension over children’s eating is also manifest in Stine Roselund Hansen and Niels Heine Kristensen’s, “Food for Kindergarten Children: Who Cares?” The authors observe teacher/pupil interaction at mealtime in Danish kindergartens and find a disconnect between children’s bodily experiences of eating and teachers’ more rational health-focused approach.
Shifting gears somewhat, the last two articles focus on chefs and professional cooking though in quite different ways. Paul Nelson and colleagues’ “The ‘Locavore’ Chef in Alberta: A Situated Social Practice Analysis” employs social practice theory to understand the strategies, knowledge, and skill building required to commit to locally sourced restaurants. Finally, Ugo D’Ambrosio, Joan Valles, and colleagues’ ambitious piece of research, “Classification of Unelaborated Culinary Products: Scientific and Culinary Approaches Meet Face to Face,” demonstrates the inadequacy of current culinary classification systems, and offers a new interdisciplinary taxonomic framework for gastronomy that can integrate successfully with scientific knowledge and practice.
We hope you enjoy the articles as well as the book reviews ably commissioned and developed by FCS Book Review Editor John Lang. Thanks as always to Managing Editor Katherine Magruder, as well as the many anonymous reviewers whose expertise and effort we gratefully appreciate.