George Solt’s ample narrative of the history of Japan’s beloved national food traces ramen from its origins as the calorie-rich sustenance of Chinese immigrants and manual laborers to a fashionable worldwide craze.
Author: gradfoodstudies
On one level, this book is a cross-disciplinary exploration of food and culture (Asian and Asian-American); on another, it is an intellectual yet personal yarn from a lover of all things edible whose background (Korean-American) and places of birth and residence (Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Hawaii) play a clear role in the choice of topic.
Eating Asian America addresses the question of why Asian and Asian-influenced food is an integral art of the American foodscape. The overwhelming Asian presence in the American foodscape is the result of external forces and inequalities that have restricted and defined Asians into an alimentary role.
The journal you’re reading right now isn’t like most academic journals. Graduate students made it—researched, wrote, solicited, photographed, edited, copyedited, and designed every inch of it.
This article takes up the concept of local food in the context of rural Central Wisconsin. It examines the encounter between two locals—that of the local food movement and that of the denizens of the area—as a means of unearthing the silences and assumptions implicit in the word as wielded by each community. Rather than having the naturalized meaning that many in food activism impute to it, the local is socially constructed and engages people with diverse worldviews.
This essay illustrates how Italian American home winemaking in Boston, Massachusetts, may be used as a lens with which to view aspects of cultural patrimony within the Italian American cultural experience.
This work employs visual ethnography to document a day in the life of a restaurant chef de cuisine, by examining the experience of a culinary practitioner rather than that of a consumer. The research is concerned with situations that may arise when a professional cooks on the spur of the moment, or “improvises,” when creating a new dish.
In this ethnographic account — a blind dining restaurant, where visually impaired people lead sighted patrons into pitch-black dining rooms and then serve as their waiters — becomes the field site for a “sensory apprenticeship,” an experiential approach to accessing sensorial, embodied, and affective ways of knowing that otherwise elude visual observation.
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