Greetings, colleagues. I am pleased to introduce Food, Culture and Society’s first issue of 2019. During the past year (2018), scholars hailing from three dozen countries submitted over 250 manuscripts for review, a significant increase over 2017 numbers in terms of both submissions and also countries represented. We take this as a good sign that food studies as an academic field is growing and developing throughout the world.
In response to this growing interest, in 2018 we increased the number of issues from four to five per year, allowing us to produce multiple special focused issues while also maintaining a firm commitment to publishing scholars’ individual submissions. In 2019 FCS will publish three issues comprising individually submitted articles, and two special issues focused on sensory labor and critical eating studies, respectively. Food, Culture and Society, as well as the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS), which sponsors this journal, is devoted to transdisciplinary research on food that crosses borders, methods, and epistemological frameworks. As editor, I value that FCS provides a space for scholars from different disciplines to publish work collaboratively, a process that helps further develop and strengthen scholarship.
The articles and book reviews in this issue are representative of FCS purposes and values. First up is Krishnendu Ray’s 2018 ASFS presidential address, “Suffering and social theory: towards an epistemology of pleasure and a post-liberal politics of joy.” Given at the 2018 ASFS meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, Ray reminds us food studies scholars that the academic’s skepticism is connected to (and has perhaps influenced) national and global political mistrust of media and disregard of facts. Ray writes that we as scholars must “develop affective investment” allowing us to “engage in the democratic process more successfully.”
The remaining slate of peer-reviewed articles are diverse in their methods, disciplinary approaches, and purposes. Yet, in addition to their focus on food, each article in some way builds upon important, foundational food studies scholarship. The first two focus on written texts. Rocco Marinaccio’s “‘A seething mass of rottenness’: regulating food and the landscape of modern New York” employs the literary eyes of William Dean Howells and F. Scott Fitzgerald to evoke the multisensory foodscapes of early twentieth-century New York City. Focusing on the “push cart wars,” Marinaccio builds upon the substantial food and immigrant histories of New York City, including those by Gabbaccia, Lobel, Santlofer, Smith, and Wasserman. Next is Mary Beth Mills’ “Cookbook confidential: global appetites, culinary fantasies, and Thai food.” Employing key scholarship on cookbooks, nationalism, and neocolonialism (Appadurai, Heldke, Manalansan, Narayan), Mills examines three contemporary English-language Thai cookbooks, pointing to “both the potential and the limitations for ethnic cookbook narratives to craft models of more equitable, anticolonial ways of eating.”
Turning to contemporary sociological studies, Nicklas Neuman, Karin Eli, and Paulina Nowicka’s “Feeding the extended family: gender, generation, and socioeconomic disadvantage in food provision to children” builds on Marjorie DeVault’s important work on gender and family meals. Updating and expanding the analysis intergenerationally, a main finding is that both fathers and mothers view “grandmothers and other women of earlier generations as culinary influences and as role models for good parenting.” Next, Tina Moffat and Danielle Gendron’s “Cooking up the ‘gastro-citizen’ through school meal programs in France and Japan” revisits school food debates through a cross-national comparison. Arguing that school meal programs in Japan and France have become sites of “bio- and gastropolitics,” the authors regard the exclusion of some children’s dietary preferences as “one more way that certain individuals are socially excluded in these societies.”
The final three articles each contribute to ongoing conversations regarding methods or data, seeking to (in order of appearance) advance food studies theory, build better instruments to measure food insecurity, or gain a more accurate picture of spatial data. Nicklas Neuman’s “On the engagement with social theory in food studies: cultural symbols and social practices” argues that food studies should be more engaged in social theory. Neuman (who might be the first author to appear in the same FCS issue twice) advocates that such an engagement “would increase both our empirical knowledge of food issues and the understanding of general social theoretical problems.” Next Roisin Elizabeth Drysdale, Mosa Moshabela, and Urmilla Bob’s article, “Adapting the Coping Strategies Index to measure food insecurity in the rural district of iLembe, South Africa,” explains that while there are a number of different tools to measure household food security, there is no agreed global standard. The authors employed focus groups in the district of iLembe, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in the effort to adapt the Coping Strategies Index (CSI) to this particular region. Finally, Justin Schupp’s “Wish you were here? the prevalence of farmers’ markets in food deserts: an examination of the United States” contributes to the ongoing conversations over the effectiveness of farmers’ markets in alleviating food insecurity. Employing large data sets, Schupp analyzes the effectiveness of farmers’ markets in this regard, as well as addressing the concept of food deserts in general.
The issue is rounded out with a set of fine reviews highlighting new scholarship in food studies, ably edited by Book Review Editor John Lang. Special thanks as always to Managing Assistant Editor Katherine Magruder, as well as Taylor & Francis editors Alison Daniels and George Cooper. Finally, many, many thanks to those of you who have contributed to the scholarship in this issue through your blind peer reviews.