Editorial Letter / Testing the Limits

Our world is bursting with tall tales of things that will kill us and things that will save us. Liangying Ma and Gary Alan Fine draw us into the depths of Chinese social-media-mills with their legends of six-legged chickens, sodas with 1,500 additives, and atropine laden pigs and watermelons. They locate numerous unofficial information-making projects within the geopolitical frame of US-China relations. Chinese audiences bring long nightmares from the Opium Wars, yoking them to the postcolonial condition in an emerging superpower, to re-litigate the question of knowledge, power, nation, and authority. Cultural politics is no longer left spinning in thin air. That is the robust part. The authors connect empirical instances of fabrication to the uncertainty that haunts us in the modern world, poulticed by nostalgia for an unproblematic past. This essay reveals the need to connect digital ethnography to more robust theories of media technology and ecology. We have always had liars and scoundrels among us; what may be new is the possibility of anonymity and the ability to spread our creations at no cost, free-riding on new infrastructural systems. As authority accumulates at one end of the official pole of the nation-state and professions, the rule of experts may be fraying at the other end. More work is required to specify the relation between fabrication and democratization, the medium and the message, and link the strength of authoritative claims to the weakness of fragmented publics. Stronger analytical tools are needed to illuminate the present conjuncture, rife with alienation from the hidden abode of production of things and knowledge systems (which is hinted at), and the power of mass social media. So many of the ideas of young Marx and the Frankfurt School could be re-engaged productively here.Compiling a collection of essays on food, memory, and feeling always threatens to descend into cliché. Jingshu Yao and Sandra Trujillo pose the question: what changes, if anything, when we replace a madeleine in Combray with soy sauce simmered eggplant in Chinese Toronto, or roasted piñones on the edge of the Rockies? They revivify old arguments with new questions about gender and generation, where forgotten grandfathers figure more prominently than the more typical mothers and aunts. In the process, they draw our attention to a missing literature in Food Studies: a psychology that can bridge memory studies and social analysis. This opens a door to potentially new theorizations.İbrahim Çekiç and Yener Oğan pull us back to the material and social density of Ashura, a sweet dish of figs, chickpeas, wheat, and crystallized sugar that is, among other things, associated with Muharram. Forgetting is central to the process of canonizing: the remembrance of madeleines in Euro-American thought erases others, such as sumptuous meals from the Turkic world. Just as the European cannot be easily separated from the real or imagined Turk, many elements of the Ottoman world cannot be sundered from Persian or Arab domains through national or ethnic identity, especially when faith binds them. Here, the long and slow process of social remembering, as a collaborative ritual of sectarian sweet making, confronts the oddly American marketing gimmick of “superfoods,” which is neither real nor deeply imagined, giving us a pastiche of the super-traditional in the hyper-modern (as a review of Lisa Haushofer’s Wonder Foods reminds us). Ashura becomes the bearer of sweet sentimentalism. Is it sweetness then that bewitches our cross-cultural fantasies?If the previous section threatens to descend into cliché, the next essay invites us to the edges of untempered bricolage, with much too much moon in it. What if we imagined terroir not as the quality of a thing or a tradition, located in a place, but as a performative script where a great deal of acting makes the thing taste like what it is and where it comes from? This is the conceit behind Elizabeth McQueen’s attempt to yank together the vastly dispersed experiences of natural wine in Los Angeles—with its rhetoric of skin contact, sun, and soil—and illicit gin from the Niger Delta, reeking of murder, gasoline, green orange, and alligator pepper. What ties the two together is the warmth of other suns, with mythmaking measuring the space between them.The final section brings us back to the making and banking of memories in community cookbooks and their relation to mass media personalities and platforms. Two events tie the pieces together: the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, the deadliest residential fire in the UK since World War II, which killed seventy-two people and yet also produced a 127-page celebrity-driven cookbook called Together; and COVID-19, which killed hundreds of thousands per year in the UK in 2020/2021 and also produced a long-running Jamie Oliver cooking show titled Together. That coincidence of naming threads the two together, pushing us to the limits of credulity. Our sense of moderation is perhaps tested when David Bell devises two essays back to back, claiming his ruminations cannot be rendered in a single piece of writing. In the loosely linked pieces, he addresses questions of commensality at different scales, and frequencies, even suggesting the uses of commensality at a distance. He builds on “eating with the other” to invert bell hooks and Lisa Heldke’s arguments about “eating the other.” Alyshia Gálvez, of our Editorial Collective, reminded me that Oswaldo de Andrade’s Manifesto Antropófago (1928) should be the point of departure here, a long intellectual tradition in Brazil where the idea of consuming the other is a basis for much social theory about difference and colonial epistemologies. Bell weaves his critiques with the warp of Paul Gilroy’s restorative justice and the woof of Luce Giard’s everyday feminism, as a counterforce to a history of hierarchy and exclusion. One way to do that, Bell suggests, is to read Together as a community cookbook and an everyday kitchen rather than a celebrity one (even though Meghan Markle plays an important role in the collection).So, dear reader, you will have to decide on the limits in each of these cases. Give them a read and then write to tell us if we have strayed beyond the limits of reason and good sense in pursuing these themes in these formats.

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