Editorial Letter

This issue is a touchstone, the first of our twenty-fifth anniversary year. It is our opportunity—as a collective in dialogue with authors—to reflect on why readers have turned to Gastronomica on market shelves, in libraries, and online. In preparing this editor’s letter, I logged onto the University of Toronto library to download our very first issue. Over the course of this volume, the Editorial Collective will be reflecting on the development of Food Studies, through Gastronomica and through the work of our two previous editors, Darra Goldstein and Melissa Caldwell. I read these two issues across the years of critical food writing on cuisine and culture.From issue 1.1, Gastronomica began rewriting how cooking, food, and cuisine are made, consumed, and unmade. In its first pages, for example, Fabio Parasecoli introduced the Catalan chef Ferran Adrià, just making waves in his restaurant El Bulli. Parasecoli wrote: “gastronomy is a highly symbolic realm subject to discourse and interpretation” (2001). Gastronomica has now been interpreting gastronomy for a quarter-century. In the inaugural issue, William Nesto explored tradition and innovation (in Tuscan wine). Amy B. Trubek examined the intersection of environmental problems, extinction, and culinary change (through the disappearance of turtle soup from American menus). Marc Lappé turned to taste changes to warn of the rising tide of agro-technology and genetically modified plants. The broader themes of environmental change, identity, social and personal loss, gastronomic transformations, extinction, and innovation shape this anniversary edition as well, though all refracted through new theories and methods in Food Studies and through continuing social, culinary, and environmental change.“Eating (in a cultural sense) is impossible without taste,” Parasecoli reminded. Twenty-five years later, this issue reflects how the field of Food Studies has revisited, revised, and expanded this truism. Eating is, simultaneously, the alienated product of labor; a fruitless search for authenticity; an immersive performance in which some things served are not to be swallowed; a confrontation with imperial politics; a desire for belonging; and an experience of loss and extinction.Eating is also situational. In our first issue, Gwendolyn Owens introduced the technologically innovative kitchens of the 1956 “House of the Future,” noting that food could be “a feast for the eye, not necessarily for the palate” (Owens 2001). In this issue, Anne-Claire Yemsi Paillissé returns to the restaurant, in this case to Alchemist in Copenhagen, Denmark. Alchemist’s immersive experience challenges the essential assumption that dining must be a process of eating. Avant-garde food and drink, an implicit response to Adrià’s earlier challenge, combines with multisensory performances. In Japan, the pork bun, served in department store cafeterias in the early twentieth century, was stuffed with imperial ideology and racial anxieties. Kazuhiro Iwama notes that the dish’s growing popularity reflected the popular representation of Chinese cuisine as modern and a pan-Asianist reaction to Western dishes, especially beef. In homes in Rampur, India, khichdi—rice cooked with dal and spices—is a staple, not avant-garde. Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Tarana Husain Khan, and Duncan Cameron note the dish has also been technologically transformed, in this case far from the kitchen, in the fields of the Green Revolution, and that with innovation comes extinction. Replaced by new hybrids, the rice variety, once traditional to the dish, is on the edge of extinction amidst accelerating climate change.Camille Bégin returns to Gastronomica in a moving essay on food, gastrotourism, and loss, narrating a family visit to Chiang Mai, Thailand, in search of leisure, family time, and authentic foods. Instead, as they ate warmed-over tourist foods, they confronted an environmental disaster that, in turn, catalyzed a personal health crisis. From family, gastronomic, and environmental loss to bankruptcy, Jessica Whipple offers a poetic reflection on the rise, fall, and ethnic food kitsch of an American chain restaurant.These articles remind us that eating is the sensory end step in labor processes of growing, processing, cooking, and procuring. Michael Mangieri describes the experience of labor organizing in a small-scale New York bakery. Set against management claims to locavore artisanship, the bakers confronted the physical alienation inherent to food production, and ultimately the gastro-political tension between “good” union jobs and the production of “good” food. Through a focus on cosmopolitanism and cuisine, Nicole Berger explores a different paradox of gastro-politics. In Paris, France, food consumption and procurement represent a key form of identity expression for diasporic Tamils. Yet, Berger demonstrates, they must negotiate debates about culinary diversity as a national threat. Gastro-cosmopolitanism can offer a powerful way to resist official demands for assimilation, while maintaining community.Like all issues of Gastronomica, this issue is rich in tastes: jambon beurre, levain loafs, khichdi, pork buns, oversized meatballs, and idli, among others. Gastronomica is a call for solidarities in a world where cuisines can represent both exclusion and community but also for collaboration as the “best practices” of Food Studies. The articles here reach across lines of genre and discipline. Historians work with lab scientists. Tasting together invigorates ethnographic practice. Personal reflection offers eco-criticism. Baking becomes organizing. This first issue of our twenty-fifth year speaks to the powerful potential for the study of food and for creative food writing and photography. In coming issues, we continue to reflect on a quarter-century of our journal and imagine how collective editing can enrich the way we all think, write, and prepare our foods.

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