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By Fabio Parasecoli, Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, The New School.

Photo taken from Fabio Parasecoli's #homecook photos. Not in original publication
Photo by Fabio Parasecoli, #homecook photos. Not in original publication

By Fabio Parasecoli, Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, The New School.

Food is more than just physical sustenance: it produces meaning and sense, creating infinite culinary cultures where every ingredient, each dish, and meal structures are connected. These cultures are influenced not only by the past, interpreted and practiced as tradition, but also by new occurrences resulting from both internal transformations and the incorporation of external elements. As a result, meanings attributed to food are never completely defined once and for all but are endlessly negotiated and renovated through practices, discourse, and representations. However, despite constant changes, food cultures present an internal coherence, which provides parameters defining behaviors and objects as acceptable or deviant, and marking individuals insiders and outsiders.

These dynamics are particular important for immigrants, who can cope with the dislocation and disorientation they experience by recreating a sense of place around food production, preparation, and consumption. Certain food-related objects, behaviors, norms, and values from their areas of origin are maintained, more or less transformed, to become important points of reference in the formation of a sense of community. Some instead disappear, while others resurface after periods of invisibility.

While easing the anxieties caused by the constant and invasive exposure to their new environments, communal practices such as food preparation, shopping, and celebratory meals strengthen migrants’ identity. However, specific ingredients, dishes, and practices can become sources of emotional ambivalence. As comfort food, they connect migrants to their past; at the same time, their consumption mark them as outsiders in the host society. As important for the cultural reproduction of social life as they may be, such foods frequently undergo various degrees of transformation due to the availability of ingredients, the exposure to different flavors and techniques, and the need to adapt to a dissimilar rhythm of life. These negotiations, where the participants often do not enjoy the same positions in terms of power and privilege, constantly shape and reshape customs and traditions within the migrant community.

The table can be a safe place, but tensions and contrasts are always lurking. Due to gender, age, or occupation, some migrants might find themselves exposed only to limited and filtered contact with the host community, in which case the communal aspects of their experience are particularly relevant. Women are likely to be in charge of cultural reproduction through food, trying to meet expectations that certain dishes and meals maintain similarities with preexisting customs. However, they may also be the ones who engage more intensely with consumer cultures proposing foreign products, shopping modalities, eateries, and festivities, whose values and significance are interpreted through media, medical discourses, education, and labor relations. As a consequence, women can assume a variety of positions in a spectrum that goes from the staunchest defense of what they perceive as traditions to the enthusiastic embrace of culinary elements from the host community, which in turn entails further negotiations with other family members who may assume different approaches regarding the nature and relevance of food traditions.

These multilayered dynamics, embedded in constantly shifting situations, illustrate how food may be invested with great emotional significance and passionately embraced by all actors involved. Ingredients, dishes, and practices have the potential to become cultural markers that identify and rally individuals and communities, causing fierce attachment to food traditions. Even when the narratives about the origins of food tradition can be proved as historically unfounded, norms, attitudes, and values connected to them are not artificial and dispensable. From an emotional and existential point of view, it does not make any difference whether traditions are “invented,” that is to say born out of new contexts in the present but referring to old situations from the past. As a result, the notion of “authenticity” is contextual, constructed, and always mutating.

The rediscovery and the modernization of forgotten objects and practices can also take place through their transformation into heritage, which–as performance theorist Barbara Kirshemblatt- Gimblett aptly argued–“is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past”. Solidly rooted in modernity and in the global flows of goods, ideas, practices, capital, and people, the establishment of food heritage and traditions plays an important role for the imagination and the cultural capital of migrants, not to mention for their economic success as producers of appreciated consumer goods.

The identification and reproduction of foodways constitute a crucial component in the emergence and operation of migrant communities. Food establishes boundaries and secures stability through submission to practices, expectations and rules that, although experienced as traditions, constantly shift and evolve with the community itself.

Republished from the Huffington Post with permission.

By Fabio Parasecoli, Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, The New School.

foodnews 8.11.2015 shroomsfabio

Not to be outclassed by Milan, where the Expo 2015 – with more or less success – has turned the spotlight on food and nutrition as one on the most urgent issues of our time, Rome has now its own food-themed exhibitions.

A show called Food: dal cucchiaio al mondo (from the spoon to the world) is gracing the gorgeous spaces of MAXXI (the National Museum for the Twenty-first Century Arts) until November 8th. The theme is the relationship between food and space, examined through increasingly wider frames of reference: from the body to the world, and from the home to the street and the city. The exhibition showcases works from artists, photographers, and architects that exemplify the complex role producing, cooking, and eating food play in our lives. Short videos illustrate projects in urban agriculture from Florence to Nairobi, with ample consideration dedicated to the social and political aspects of food systems, as well as to their impact in terms of sustainability. The concept of landscape – and in particular agricultural landscape – emerges as a lens to examine the connection between human communities and their environments, not only in the rural world but also in the growing metropolises around the world.

Rich in content and dealing with extremely complex themes, the MAXXI show is engaging. It avoids excessive abstraction, and parses the information to make it easily accessible to specialists and non-specialists alike. Objects of daily use, architectural sketches and models, as well as pieces created for the exhibition, all guide viewers to look inward at personal daily habits and to consider their place in the food system.

The other show, which will occupy the magnificent structures of the Markets of Trajan, right next to the Imperial Fora, until November 1st, is L’eleganza del cibo: Tales of Food and Fashion. The exhibitions sets to illustrate the interesting and very little explored connections between food and fashion, both primal human needs as well as major domains of consumption and self-expression in contemporary societies. The show is visually stunning, using the architectural spaces and details of the Roman building to highlight dresses, foulards, and accessories from renowned fashion designers that include food (like a dress with transparent pockets full of popcorn) and kitchen tools (notably a necklace that represents spaghetti and a fork). The majority of the pieces, however, simply use fruit, fish, or other ingredients and dishes as motifs in the textile or in the shape of the dresses.

From this point of view, however, the exhibition is a missed opportunity, limiting itself to the surface of both food and fashion without going deeper than their visual aspects. For instance, there is no mention of any attempt to use the leftovers from edible crops as textile materials, or to employ edible, non-toxic dies in the industry. Any reflection on the similarities and differences between food and fashion as global phenomena is absent, as is meaningful dialogue around food and clothing productions as artisanal, utilitarian crafts, often considered inherently removed from high-brow arts.

Decoration, luxury, and necessity are deeply intertwined in both fields, and an exhibition like the one at the Markets of Trajan could have become an opportunity to convey some of these themes to the public in an entertaining and stimulating way. Maybe the desire to preserve the aura of glamour of high fashion, an important sector for the Italian economy, has narrowed the content of the show preventing it from starting more fully developed conversations about material culture in Italy.

Republished from the Huffington Post with permission.

BY SAM DEAN

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2012

“Fabio Parasecoli is co-editor of the newly released “A Cultural History of Food,” a massive, six-volume collection that covers “nearly 3,000 years of food and its physical, spiritual, social and cultural dimensions.” He’s also an associate professor and the coordinator of the food studies program at the New School and the author of “Bite Me,” a study of food in popular culture. Parasecoli recently spoke to The Daily about a worldwide food obsession and the myth of authentic cuisine.”

Read the entire interview at The Daily.

(As seen on the Heritage Radio Network Website)

A Taste of the Past – Episode 89 – Fabio Parasecoli

First Aired – 02/16/2012 12:00PM
Download MP3 (Full Episode)
From food culture in 800BCE to the present day, this week’s episode of A Taste of the Past will take you there. With the help of New School professor of food studies, Fabio Parasecoli, host Linda Pelaccio takes you on a world tour of food globalization throughout major world time periods. Parasecoli, who has also edited an encyclopedic 6-volume tome on the subject– A Cultural History of Food— discusses the rise of food scholarship in major learning institutes around the world as well how food, not just eating, is taking an ever-expanding presence in every aspect of daily life. This episode is sponsored by Fairway Market

“Food has become very important in social and political debates. So my question is were those debates already there at the Roman times, what happened in the middle ages? For example, is the family meal really an institution or did we create it 100 years ago and we just pretend its been there forever?”

–Fabio Parasecoli on A Taste of the Past

Hosted By
Linda
Sponsored by
Fairway

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4ulON4G1y4&feature=relmfu]

How do we build stronger foodsheds where urban buyers and close-by farmers and producers can connect and thrive? How do we implement new market relationships to change food systems at the local, regional, and ultimately at the national level?

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR GENERAL STUDIES |http://www.newschool.edu/generalstudies

The New School, Edible Manhattan and GrowNYC/Greenmarket present an afternoon of panel discussions and group conversations where experts, practitioners, scholars, and concerned citizens get together to explore these urgent issues including:

Liz Carollo, publicity manager, Greenmarket/GrowNYC.
Zaid Kurdieh, farmer, Norwich Meadow Farms.
John Moore, vice president, Dallis Brothers Coffee.

FOOD STUDIES | http://www.newschool.edu/foodstudies

Moderated by Brian Halweil, editor, Edible East End and publisher of Edible Manhattan and Edible Brooklyn, and Fabio Parasecoli, associate professor and coordinator, New School Food Studies Program.

Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building.
05/07/2011 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu


Fridays @ One – Food and Popular Culture with Fabio Parasecoli

The Institute for Retired Professionals presents this program of free events on timely topics for IRP members and friends and all members of the New School community. Institute for Retired Professionals |http://newschool.edu/irp

Food influences our lives as a marker of power and status and of gender, ethnic, and religious identity. The author of Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture and coordinator of Food Studies at The New School explores food in popular culture, especially “low brow” and even “trash” food, and offers insights into what we choose to put in our mouths. FOOD STUDIES |http://www.newschool.edu/ce/foodstudies

VIDEO CLIP of Katz’s Delicatessen Scene from the film “When Harry Met Sally”
NOT APPROVED FOR WEBCAST VISIT: http://youtu.be/F-bsf2x-aeE

VIDEO CLIP OF LADY GAGA’S “TELEPHONE” Featuring BEYONCÉ
NOT APPROVED FOR WEBCAST VISIT: http://youtu.be/EVBsypHzF3U

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu

* Location: Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, 5th floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street). March 4, 2011 1:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxISR9CUvfk]

This panel considers the life and work of Pellegrino Artusi on the 100th anniversary of his death. His 1891 cookbook, The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well, was a turning point in the history of Italian food, establishing a national culinary canon and creating a common culinary language for the newly unified country. His impact on Italian cooking is unmatched to this day. Panelists: Michele Scicolone, cookbook author; Roberto Ludovico, professor of Italian literature, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Mitchell Davis, vice president of the James Beard Foundation; and chef Cesare Casella, dean of the Italian Culinary Academy.

Moderated by Fabio Parasecoli, coordinator, New School Food Studies Program | http://www.newschool.edu/ce/foodstudies

THE NEW SCHOOL FOR GENERAL STUDIES |http://www.newschool.edu/generalstudies

Co-presented by the Food Studies program and the James Beard Foundation.

Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall.
03/31/2011 6:00 p.m

THE NEW SCHOOL | http://www.newschool.edu