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Presented by The New School’s Food Studies Program, this panel discussion is an invitation to get acquainted with Polish cuisine through the prism of history and society. It will take you on a journey across the centuries and flavors that have shaped the exceptional cuisine of a country co-created by many cultures. Polish cuisine is flourishing: chefs, producers, media specialists, and consumers are rediscovering traditional products and dishes, while often interpreting them through the prism of contemporary food trends. The result is an exciting and vibrant food scene which, however, is not well know outside of the borders of Poland. The event will feature traditional Polish bites. Four presenters will be moderated by New School Food Studies professor Fabio Parasecoli, who teaches food history, culture and the arts.

Professor Jarosław Dumanowski, the head of the Culinary Heritage Centre at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and a member of the research council of the European Institute of the History and Culture of Food (IEHCA) in Tours – is a specialist in early modern history and antique culinary texts who often collaborates with local producers, chefs, marketing specialists, and others. His presentation: A TASTE OF THE PAST. THE USE OF CULINARY HISTORY IN POLAND will focus on the historical roots of modern Polish cuisine and how it uses history as inspiration, documentation, and promotion. Prof. Dumanowski will also discuss the notion of “terroir” and “nature” as representing Mediterranean and Nordic approaches to cuisine, and the use of history for formal registration of traditional foods in the European Union. Monika Kucia, Curator, Food Writer & Designer based in Warsaw. Her presentation CULINARY PERFORMANCES AROUND THE TABLE will describe a variety of culinary events she’s been organizing. These events are labyrinths of tastes, smells and sensations. She invites people to go through an experience that involves eating, singing, smelling and touching. They bring people together in good spirit, hope and peace.

Dr. Annie Hauck, co-editor of Gastropolis: Food and New York City (Columbia University Press) and the author of My Little Town: A Brooklyn Girl’s Food Voice. Her doctoral dissertation emerged from an ethnographic study on the roles and meanings of food among members of Polish-American families in New York City. She educates on everyday urban green living with Brooklyn Mompost (www.brooklynmompost.com) and at Poly Prep Country Day School.’Transplanted; Still Firmly Rooted: 20th Century Polish Food Voices and Ways in Brooklyn, N.Y.’ Her presentation, TRANSPLANTED; STILL FIRMLY ROOTED: 20TH CENTURY POLISH FOOD VOICES AND WAYS IN BROOKLYN, N.Y explores foodways that Polish immigrants brought, adapted and practiced in urban Brooklyn in the 20th century.

Elizabeth Koszarski-Skrabonja is an artist, curator and art historian. Her connection to Polish spirits reaches back to her late father, Casimir J. Koszarski. As the first Manager of the Polish Liquor Department in 1936 for the International distributor, Austin Nichols, (located on Kent Street in Brooklyn), it was his responsibility and challenge to introduce an American public emerging from the constraints of prohibition to Polish vodkas. Her presentation THE VODKA CONTRACT discovers the hidden history of Williamsburg’s waterfront through a tale of entrepreneurship, romance, and war. Ms. Koszarski-Skrabonja shares the dramatic story of how her father’s passion for vodka changed his life—and how he brought a taste of home to New York’s Polish community in the form of three remarkable spirits:Zubrówka (bison grass vodka), Wisniówka (cherry vodka), and Wyborowa (pure rye vodka).

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The morning after Election Day, I found myself in a very small college town in rural Pennsylvania where people were celebrating the victory of their candidate. That forced me to accept the fact that, more or less, 50% of those who cast their vote have not only supported Trump as next president of the United States, but also changed the political balance in Congress, with all the consequences this entails. What this new landscape reveals has deep repercussions, as aggressive expressions of xenophobia, racism, homophobia, and sexism have been normalized and made acceptable for large segments of Americans. This is the reality that many of us will have to deal with on a daily basis in the most common interactions, from going to school to shopping and even just existing as a visibly different person.
I felt combative, more than confrontational. I had been invited to participate in a student workshop and give talks, finding myself reflecting on how the election would shape my role and duty as an educator, a researcher, a public intellectual, a writer, and as a practitioner. Of course, I do not have clear answers and my considerations are personal. I have no intention to tell anybody how and when to work through their own fears, grief, and anger, or how to navigate the future. For me, a core question is: how will I make use of and invest my privilege as a white male of European descent (although an immigrant), whose job is to teach and do research in food studies? What can I contribute as a professional?
That day, I participated in a workshop where students were discussing possible -and easily feasible – innovations to shift the way their peers eat in the cafeteria towards more sustainable and healthier models. While we were evaluating different practical interventions, I also moved the conversation toward the gender, class, and race identity issues underlying food-related behaviors, as well as their social and economic consequences in terms of accessibility, affordability, labor relations, and the environment. Later that afternoon, I gave a talk on food, film, and memory, where I tried to show how an apparently innocuous and fun form of popular culture such as food films can actually reflect, support, and reinforce values and practices that are predicated on the framing of whole categories of people as inferior and exploitable.
My work focuses on food, which may come across as apolitical but is actually profoundly entangled with power dynamics, social structures, and environmental issues that assume immediate, tangible meanings. As food did not emerge as a priority in the presidential debates and the discussions that surrounded them, it is not easy to gauge the direction of the new administration. However, the promise of greater deregulation, less EPA control, and the overall skeptical attitude towards climate change will move environmental issues connected to agriculture, fishing, and animal husbandry front and center.
The new administration’s favorable attitude towards the carbon-based energy industry could also slow down the efforts to increase the use of renewable resources in the food system and to shift towards more sustainable models. These issues will become crucial in the negotiations around the upcoming farm bill, where not only will Congress determine the future of US food production, but also the availability of funds to support the most vulnerable sections of the population through school food, SNAP, WIC and other programs.
In this context, it is important to emphasize not only structural and economic features, but also the cultural and social aspects that can generate dynamics of oppression and injustice. I believe my first call is to help students and the community at large outside of universities and intellectual circles recognize the relevance of these matters. In food studies, we now have sufficient students, programs, institutions, and relative media visibility to have some impact.
Above all, I am afraid I can’t enjoy the luxury of separating theory and applied practice any longer. It becomes crucial to pair the insights and the analysis that are central to food studies with hands-on projects and initiatives for change and social innovation. I will be moving my research and activities towards collaborations with designers, agronomists, scientists, engineers, information experts, and media operators, so that my teaching, writing, and doing become expression of a more profound engagement with the new reality.
A friend of mine in Brazil reminded me of the Italian politician and theorist Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on organic intellectuals, who share their knowledge and competence to usher change rather than concentrating uniquely on their professional world. It is urgent to devise creative strategies and form inclusive alliances around widely shared concerns in the food system, while questioning the priorities of the elites (which include myself) as well as the interests of the rich and the powerful. This election has brought home that what I make of the emerging political reality is also my responsibility. At least for me, the answer is rolling up my sleeves to get down to work.

Image Source: Gastronomy at BU

by Fabio Parasecoli

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Whether a college education in the liberal arts is worth effort, time and, above all, financial investment, has become a pressing question with wide social repercussions. The recent comments by President Obama underlined the urgency of the issue. In an economic environment where student debt is on the rise and the job market seems stuck in low gear, these are legitimate concerns. They also extend, of course, to those engaged in food studies. Why should young people decide to dedicate their time and money to study food and what are their professional perspectives once they graduate?

A recent — and apparently unrelated — article in the New York Times offers opportunities to reflect on the topic. In the article, economists David H. Autor and David Dorn discuss the impact of technology on middle-class workers while hypothesizing on the cause behind the increasing disparity in income between high-paying occupations and low-wage jobs.

Autor and Dorn argue that the growing mechanization in many productive sectors increases the demand for workers who can count on “problem solving, intuition, persuasion and creativity,” as well as “high levels of education and analytical capability.” At the other end of the spectrum, there is a great need for “so-called manual tasks,” which require “situational adaptability, visual and language recognition, and in-person interaction,” basic skills that most humans can perform in “low-wage, in-person service occupations.” Autor and Dorn suggest that middle-class careers will expand in sectors that require manual skills and the capacity of interacting with other humans, together with more abstract aspects of problem solving. They join Harvard economist Lawrence F. Katz in predicting growing numbers of “new artisans,” “those who combine the foundational skills of a high school education with specific vocational skills.”

I believe that food studies programs in the liberal arts — rather than in vocational training institutions — complicate this approach, which assumes that the “new artisans such as medical paraprofessionals, plumbers, automotive technicians, and customer service representatives do not require a college education.” A growing number of careers that have the potential to employ food studies graduates challenge the neat separation between intellectual and manual expertise. Some students already have a background as chefs, cheese makers, food stylists, and PR communicators. Others are interested in sectors ranging from policy making and nonprofit to international institutions and NGOs focusing on food system change, rural development, or social justice.

I propose that these young professionals, who often generate new employment opportunities as they develop their own research, projects and startups, fall in a different category — the “liberal artisan.” I thank philosopher Lisa Heldke (also past editor with Ken Albala of Food, Culture, and Society, the journal of the Association for the Study of Food and Society) for this definition inspired by John Dewey, one of the founders of The New School, where I coordinate a Food Studies undergraduate program. Dewey wrote, “The present function of the liberal arts college is to use the resources put at our disposal alike by human literature, by science, by subjects that have a vocational bearing, so as to secure ability to appraise the needs and the issues of the world in which we live” (LW 15,280).

In the seminal book Cooking, Eating, Thinking, which she edited with Deane W. Curtin, Hedlke considers food making as a “thoughtful practice,” a “mentally manual activity” or a “theoretically practical activity” that bridges the separation between “inquirer and inquired,” between “timeless truths about unchanging reality” and “the transitory, the perishable, the changeable.” I would extend the argument to many occupations dealing with food, which challenge the distinction between theoretical and practical knowledge and introduce innovative ways to relate to the world and to society.

In our program, we are going beyond the distinctions that Heldke identifies — for instance, creating the structure for chefs to come back to school and get their bachelor degrees. They can hone the analytical abilities that Autor and Dorn identify as essential for high-paying jobs without discounting the manual and practical skills they already have. We network with institutions and organizations that offer internships straddling the theory/practice opposition, from communication to activism, from urban agriculture to marketing. The goal of our public events is to create opportunities for practitioners and scholars to come together and exchange ideas and experiences as peers. As John Dewey did, we are confident that a new generation of “liberal artisans” will be able not only to find satisfactory careers, but also to have a positive and creative impact on the environments in which they find themselves operating.

from Huffington Post

(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

http://www.youtube.com/thenewschoolnyc#p/u/11/CHiqHb6sE2c

This panel considers wine and its role in U.S. culinary culture through a discussion of the life and work of Robert Mondavi, the pioneering Napa Valley vintner. Mondavi championed fine wine as an integral part of the good life in any country. Speakers explore his decisions as a producer, his marketing practices, his international collaborations and global influence, and related cultural and economic issues.Continuing Education
Panelists: Tyler Colman, author of Wine Politics; Frank J. Prial, former New York Times wine columnist; Charles Scicolone, sommelier and wine consultant; and Julia Flynn Siler, author of the bestselling The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. Culinary historian and New School faculty member Andrew F. Smith moderates. THE NEW SCHOOL FOR PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
Culinary Luminaries celebrates crucial figures in the past and present world of food and gastronomy. The subjects of past discussions include James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, Craig Claiborne, Joseph Baum, Clementine Paddleford, Pellegrino Artusi, and Michael Batterberry. Sponsored by the Food Studies Program at The New School for Public Engagement. Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall. 01/23/2012 6:00 p.m


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=LjfgHlvFzqo]

Mention the name of Joe Baum (1920-1998), and the restaurants that come to mind—Windows On The World, the Four Seasons, la Fonda Del Sol—tell you he was a man of big dreams. It took a huge personality and force of will to execute some of the most extravagant restaurant projects ever seen. Joe Baum had a tenacious attention to detail and a flair for the spectacular, with the ability to pull people together to solve seemingly insurmountable obstacles. A true visionary in the spirit of those previously honored as Culinary Luminaries: James Beard, Julia Child, M.F.K. Fisher, and Craig Claiborne. Meet the people that knew and worked with Joseph Baum and learn how he changed the industry.
THE NEW SCHOOL FOR GENERAL STUDIES |http://www.newschool.edu/generalstudies

Participants include: Milton Glaser, Graphic and Interior Designer on many projects for Joseph Baum.
– Hugh Hardy, Principal and Founder of H3 Hardy Collaboration Architecture, LLC.
– Michael Whiteman, President of Joseph Baum and Michael Whiteman Company.
– Kevin Zraly, founder of Windows on the World Wine School and author of Kevin Zralys American Wine Guide.

Moderated by William Grimes, author of Appetite City, former New York Times restaurant critic

Sponsored by the Food Studies program |http://www.newschool.edu/ce/foodstudies

* Location: Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall. 03/16/2010 6:00 p.m

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