As the pandemic continues to disrupt everything about our lives, I have been amazed to find that scholars in food studies continue to produce work at high volumes, submitting polished articles from many countries about diverse subjects. Only a few have attempted to study the effects of the pandemic, most holding off until we can gain the perspective of survivors. Because of the deliberative processes of academic publishing, the articles published in this issue were written long before the pandemic began and so remind us of the kinds of things we think about when our worlds are not framed with the term Covid-19.
This issue presents work that is interesting and useful. Rebecca Feinberg offers a reconsideration of wine-region terroir that engages a long history of global interconnections. The article begins with a great piece of scene setting and will make you think differently about what is in your next bottle. As Feinberg argues, “The old rules of wine, predicated on place staying still and remaining in the hands of one group, will eventually become insufficient to organizing ownership and prestige in this world.”
Nathan Hopson also takes up a transnational topic in his history of mobile teaching kitchens in postwar Japan. He explores why these kitchens were popular with their intended audience while also considering the influence of the US on the lessons. US influence meant that Japanese home cooks were trained to use American goods, such as wheat, corn and soy, which then became part of “traditional” home cooking.
Michael James Walsh and Alice Baker ask readers to think about the visual politics of representation of food on Instagram, a platform which has certainly seen significant shifts during recent long periods of lockdown. Walsh and Baker are interested in techniques of idealization that are used for presentations of “clean foods.” These representations contribute to an aesthetic but also a moral treatment of food imagery to distinguish the clean from the defiled and defiling.
The journal does not often receive methodological articles, so I want to draw special attention to Sofie Joosse’s article in this issue. Joosse offers a new methodology for collecting records of “every day food practices,” data that is hard to collect because many of us do not behave naturally when others are watching and people’s sense of what is good for them is so shaped by what they have heard in a variety of media, some of it researched and focused, other more free form. I would like to encourage more writers to submit methodological pieces like this because they help us to understand our field through our techniques and strategies, not just the finished work.
This issue’s pedagogy piece offers an easily replicated strategy that simultaneously develops knowledge and creates a foundation for further development in research and that could be particularly useful in this moment when so many are teaching remotely. Students learn something about the foodways of a place and also learn the broader lesson of what expertise in the field of food studies is. This is a great paired lesson to assist in forward motion into the field.
Our collection of book reviews includes a lucky pairing of a book about tea and a book about cookies, so I hope readers will take this as an invitation to treat themselves as they read through the journal, which also features reviews of Julie Guthman’s deeply researched and disturbing new book, Wilted, Fabio Parasecoli’s indispensable, Food and a new edition of Barbara Santich’s The Original Mediterranean Cuisine, in case months of pandemic cooking have prepared you for medieval reenactments.