The Company You Keep
A reintroduction, and two conference recaps of note
It’s been a minute, so allow me to reintroduce myself: I’m Jess (she/her), a food-focused writer and editor based in Boston. By day I’m putting my head together with some of the best in the food media biz, taking the pulse of the food-preparing American public. By night I’m teaching, writing, and thinking about food history and culture. While you won’t necessarily get hot takes on food media going forward, or long-form recipes to prepare at home, I promise to share my take on the many topics unrelated to my day job: most specifically, snapshots from the history of American and global cuisine, pop culture at large, and inevitably a few dispatches from food academia when appropriate. Stay tuned!
During my offline month, I’ve been keeping quite busy. Beyond starting my new day job (a joy, but one I won’t be writing about here), I also had the glorious opportunity to join two new food gatherings with lots of fresh connections and creative opportunities to follow. The first was the inaugural M.F.K. Fisher Food Symposium for women in food & storytelling, hosted by Les Dames d’Escoffier International via their chapter in Nashville, Tennessee. In case it’s new to you (it’s still somewhat new to me), Les Dames is a philanthropic organization of women leaders in the food, beverage, and hospitality industry, and as such, there are a lot of women restaurateurs, chefs, mixologists, and food writers who have gathered under that spacious (and very stylish) umbrella. But for their first symposium centered on food writing and storytelling, it’s no surprise that Les Dames took inspiration from Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, the food writer who redefined the art of long-form food writing for generations of critics, journalists, and essayists. It’s easy to think of Fisher as a lone, brilliant wolf in the food world, but if you’ve read Provence, 1970, you know how much she relished the chance to gather with other food lovers, to affirm that her work—and the work of caring about food—truly mattered. And as she said it, “Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality.”
I was honored to receive a scholarship to attend the inaugural symposium from the Toni Tipton-Martin Foundation with support from the Julia Child Foundation, and upon arriving in Nashville, it felt in many ways like I’d been thrown into an episode of This Is Your Life. Friends from past academic, museum, and publishing ventures were all present, and it reminded me how fortunate I am to be embedded in a subset of the food industry anchored by generations of generous, talented women. I was knocked out by the panelists on Day 1 (all brilliant, but the genius of Kayla Stewart and Abena Anim-Somuah lit a fire under me) and inspired by the workshops on Day 2 (on strategies for interviews, representation in food writing, and the challenges of writing for specific channels, among many, many topics). But I was most galvanized by the dialogues that filled the in-between spaces–the honest exchanges over glasses of bourbon and sliders of hot chicken, the confabs during the hotel breakfast bar, and the huddled whispers and giggles during a few stressful minutes sheltering-in-place from a nearby tornado. (I was panicked, but other attendees had the good sense to grab bottles of wine before heading to the designated shelter spot.) Though I’ve never joined a sorority, this particular clan of savvy women is making me think twice–and reminding me that only in culinary community can we bring our work into full, transparent light.
The second culinary gathering of this month was not quite as dramatic (or as glamorous), but left me just as enthusiastic about the future of food, murky though it may be. At the invitation of colleagues at Boston University, Benjamin Siegel and Andrea Catania, I attended a two-day workshop titled “Eating to Change the World,” hosted by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and the BU Center for the Humanities. While I was presenting on observations from my second go-around teaching a cookbook-writing workshop, I was more intent on absorbing the expertise from the other attendees. Hearing my ideas in dialogue with other scholars, who were studying everything from food sovereignty to community organizing, from meat and violence to family histories in food, clarified exactly why this work matters to me. The implications of what we eat don’t exist in a tidy vacuum from the recipe to the grocery store to the table; they extend into every aspect of our daily lives, and shape the minutest of decisions that may very well determine what the future of food looks like. And though I’m always going to cheer for my little corner of the humanities, I’m grateful to have the chance to share my ideas with scholars whose expertise varies so much from my own. Whatever the future of food is going to be, I guarantee it’ll be interdisciplinary, and will require all of us to bring our best work to the table.
Though I have a few future conferences still locked in for the summer, you’ll likely see more here that reflects my day-to-day interests in food—the little bits of culinary knowledge that get me going down nerdy rabbit holes, and many reading recommendations that will drive you to your local library, bookstore, or even grocery store. Whatever fills this space, I promise it won’t be empty for much longer!
Recommended Reading: Right now I’m deep into parenting-focused reading, and so I have to drop recs for two books: Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (a must for any parent who needs a reason to put down their cell phone at the dinner table) and Virginia Sole-Smith’s Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture. Both are discomfiting to be sure, but also giving me some much-needed perspective on how to parent with compassion, kindness, and more than a little confidence…
The Perfect Bite: It’s finally ice cream season in New England, with no shortage of great creameries to choose from. But I was especially happy to grab a scoop today from Far Out Ice Cream in Brookline, which offers New Zealand-style ice cream (aka soft serve that mashes up real fruit and toppings into its flavors). My mix of vanilla soft-serve, blueberries and raspberries, and shards of dark chocolate was exactly what I wanted to cut this unseasonal humidity…
Cooked & Consumed: This week I’ve been battled a bad chest cold that turned into pneumonia (fun!), so I haven’t had much of a chance to cook for myself. But last weekend, I discovered a real humdinger of a recipe, for ricotta chocolate chip cookies. Cakey, not too sweet, and bite-sized, these were a surprise hit at a friend’s house, and made good use of the last of our fresh ricotta.