Chrissy Remein – Page 3 – The Inquisitive Eater

Events March 16, 2016

Between Senegal and New York City: A Conversation with Chef Pierre Thiam

pierreforinquisi

Thursday March 31, 2016, 6:00 to 7:30PM

The New School
Starr Foundation Hall, University Center
63 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003

As cosmopolitan gourmets continue looking for the next new trend, many culinary traditions around the world are just now drawing the attention they deserve. West African cuisines are finally acquiring visibility, thanks to their interesting ingredients, their complexity, and their long history.Chef and restaurateur Pierre Thiam, author of the successful cookbookSenegal: Modern Senegalese Recipes from the Source to the Bowl, will discuss the unique food culture of his native Senegal – as well as the influence of African practices and dishes on the development of American foodways – with Fabio Parasecoli, director of Food Studies Initiatives at The New School.

The conversation will also explore the diffusion of West African cuisines abroad and the problems they face, from product availability to business challenges and customers perception.

Following the discussion, the Symposium in the Drum: From Africa to the New World | Randy Weston Artist-in-Residency, will perform traditional Senegalese music upstairs in The New School’s Tishman Auditorium at 8:00pm. Admission free.

Sponsored by the Jazz and Contemporary Music Program in the College of Performing Arts and the Food Studies Program at the Schools of Public Engagement.

To attend, please register here. This event has no entry fee.

Columns February 25, 2016

How Are We to Eat? Philosophers at Table

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

Almost everybody is familiar with the phrase: “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are”, which the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously included in his Physiology of Taste. The idea, later expressed by the German thinker Ludwig Schopenauer as “man is what he eats” (much more effective in his native language: Der Mensch ist, was er ißt) reminds us of how much our food choices have an impact on who we are. Over time, the old adagio has had subsequent incarnations, pointing to various aspects of our relationship to food. One of the best known is Wendell Berry’s statement that “eating is an agricultural act,” and that as a consequence we are co-producers through our decisions regarding what to buy, consume, and dispose of. Lately food designerPedro Reissig has turned the assertion on its head: “You eat what you are,” highlighting on how ideas and values about who we think we are influence our eating behavior.

In their book Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human, Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Heldke (whom I had the pleasure to meet for the first time many years ago during a conference on food and philosophy at Mississippi State University in Starkville, MS) extend the conversation to “How are we to eat?”, turning the spotlight on the undeniable fact that “food is a fundamental source of meaning and value in human life. Indeed, food is a fundamental source of human life itself.”

The book is delightful, deep but never pedantic. The great philosophers of the past are widely considered and their theories analyzed, but the goal is not to provide a historical excursus on what thinkers of the past wrote about food. The authors compare their work to plumbing, in the sense that they try to understand the nuts and bolts of how things work, and above all how ideas and values – often taken for granted and never fully discussed — greatly shape the way we understand and interact with the world. There is no more immediate perspective to do this than by looking at food, an experience that everybody, one way or another, shares.

Boisvert and Heldke reflect on everyday occurrences, rather than on abstract theories. A discussion about hospitality and whom we invite to our table leads to tackle larger ethical issues, such as the difference between being rational and reasonable, and the inevitability of interdependence among human beings. The topic of taste and pleasure takes us to a critique of theories of knowledge that peg us as detached spectators rather than active participants in our environment. As a matter of fact, the authors point out how “food reveals the inadequacy and inaccuracy of time-worn dichotomies like objective/subjective, mind/body and theoretical/practical.”

Food reminds us that we cannot maintain the fantasy of being self-sufficient and self-contained. Food enters us and more importantly becomes us. Our digestion is the result of the interaction between our organs and the host of microbes and bacteria that inhabit us (and that we stubbornly try to destroy). As Boisvert and Heldke suggest, “appetite re-emphasizes our continuity with the natural world. It makes aware of our multiple connections and interdependencies: with the sun, soil, ants, bacteria, earth-worms, plants as well as with other humans that grow, harvest, deliver and distribute foodstuffs.” If we let ingestion guide us in understanding our relationship with reality, we may embrace our lived experience as interactive creatures that need others, admitting that we constantly and uncertainly depend on external factors to survive. Rather than scaring us, the authors propose that this approach should lead us to discover ways of eating “experimentally, thoughtfully, wisely, judiciously. By tasting.”

Follow Fabio Parasecoli on Twitter: www.twitter.com/FParasecoli

Republished with the permission of the Huffington Post.

Columns February 10, 2016

The Vegan Studies Project: On Being Vegan in America

fabiovegan 02.10.2016

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

Veganism has been a relatively new addition to my personal foodscape. When I first moved to the U.S., eighteen years ago, I did not know what it was. I had never heard of veganism in Italy. At the time, it was not a common practice there (it is now). Now, although not a vegan, I can cook vegan meals. Many traditional Italian recipes are actually vegan, as meat and dairy were somewhat of a luxury until quite recently.

A few months ago I had colleagues over, and as a couple of them are vegan, I found it easier to make the whole meal vegan. And – not to toot my own horn – it was not any less enjoyable because of it. My only moment of hesitation was over the decision to use honey for a roasted carrot dish with cumin and cilantro. Some vegans consume honey while others argue that it is an animal product, and as such the result of exploitation by humans. This is a point that also the feature-length animation film Bee Movie makes, with some humor. In it, a bee convinces the insects in his beehive to stop providing honey to the humans. However, the bees also discontinue the pollination of flowers, causing havoc on the whole ecosystem. Although I do not believe it was the intention of Bee Movie to take on veganism, the plot hints to the complex relations between humans and animals, to which veganism tries to provide an ethical and political response. The presence of this theme in a children’s cartoon reflects its pervasiveness in today’s public conversations about food.

The motivations that lead individuals to go vegan, and the way society at large perceives and talks about them is the theme of The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror, by Laura Wright, a literature professor at Western Carolina University. Although the book is not an easy read, as its language is steeped in critical and literary theory, it focuses on news, advertising, and popular culture that is very much part of our daily experience. The title itself – meant “in the spirit of play” – suggests a certain proximity of Wright’s work with burgeoning fields of research such as food studies, fat studies, and animal studies. Veganism, which is now very visible in US social and cultural debates about food, health, and the environment, begs for a deeper understanding beyond any easy rebuttal.

The author’s main argument is that veganism is both an identity category – just like religion, sexual orientation, or national origin – and a practice, as it reflects itself in many choices ranging from shopping to cooking. As such, its manifestations are far from univocal, and it would be a mistake to focus uniquely on the experience of white vegans. Wright frames veganism within an ecofeminist approach, examining forms of oppressions that place nature, the body, and women in direct opposition – and in an inferior position – against culture, the spirit and men. In this context, the consumption of meat is marked as quintessentially masculine. Historically, the manhood of ethnic males that consumed limited amounts of meat or preferred vegetables has often been questioned in the US. Veganism is either perceived as a challenge to mainstream food customs or instead presented as the “idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength.”

For Wright, veganism is “in stark opposition to the consumer mandate of U.S. capitalism, and for this reason the actions of individual vegans pose a substantial – if symbolic – threat to such a paradigm.” The author argues that this contrast has become much starker after 9/11, when “nation, religion, and diet all functioned as the criteria by which we posited our difference – our very humanity – from the animality of our attackers.” Remember freedom fries? And how comfort food came back in vogue with a vengeance? Wright points out how in this kind of rhetoric, vegans are often described as extremists, dogmatic, and irrational.

The book proceeds to examine different aspects of veganism in popular culture, from the vampires in Twilight and True Blood who refuse to drink blood, to zombies and post-apocalyptic survivors. However, I found the author particularly effective in the two chapters that discuss veganism within the wider social and cultural debates about femininity and masculinity, from the comparison of women’s veganism to anorexia or, at least, a disordered eating pattern, to the symbolic emasculation of male vegan, perceived as an aspect of a supposed “crisis of masculinity.” I am not sure if Wright’s intention to open a whole new field of inquiry and scholarship will come to fruition, but she definitely offers many arguments that deserve attention and reflection.

Follow Fabio Parasecoli on Twitter: www.twitter.com/FParasecoli

Republished with the permission of the Huffington Post.

Video Archive January 17, 2016

2nd International Conference on Food Design – Keynote I The New School

Nov 12, 2015, in line with the successful First International Conference on Designing Food and Designing For Food (London 2012), this second conference, presented by The Schools of Public Engagement (www.newschool.edu/public-engagement/) at The New School (https://www.newschool.edu/), created another opportunity for the presentation and discussion of fundamental aspects of Food Design. Food Design was explored as the process aiming to modify, improve, and optimize individual and communal relationships with and around food in the most diverse ways and instances (food products, materials, objects, practices, processes, events, environments, services, systems, etc.)Professionals, practitioners, and researchers will shared reflections, projects, and experiences to assess the development of this new burgeoning field.

Watch the moving Keynote Address by Emilie Baltz.

Columns December 21, 2015

The Many Souls of African American Food

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.

Columns November 24, 2015

Food, Migrants, and the Making of Traditions

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.

Events October 14, 2015

2nd International Conference On Food Design

To Register visit The New School Events Page. For program details visit fooddesign2015.com

Columns October 1, 2015

Food and Technology: Clash or Synergy?

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

Our global food system is need of serious change, but the recipes for solutions diverge greatly, pointing to very different causes. Some may be worried that there won’t be enough food in the future, and offer greater outputs and intensive industrial agriculture as the answer. Others believe enough food is already produced around the world and consider distribution, access, affordability, and health as the main issues. Many worry about the impact of climate change and other environmental factors – from soil erosion to water scarcity and pollution. At any rate, there is a widespread sense that something has to be done.

Looking at these and other responses, we can identify various approaches in the debates that animate politics, the media, and civil society. At the risk of oversimplifying, these positions often build on two opposite attitudes toward science and technology. On one hand, some are convinced that the food system can only gain from the introduction of scientific innovations, ranging from laboratory experimentation on genetically modified organisms to replacement meats and the extraction of compounds and nutrients to be used in cooking, as recently proposed by the French scientist and now renowned author Hervé This. This position elicits visceral reactions, as many fear a total dehumanization of the food system, creating risks to human health and to the environment, as well as causing the exclusion of whole segments of the human population from crucial decisions about what we grow and consume.

Instead, others deem that we can be saved by going back to tradition and the past, rediscovering how our predecessors managed the environment, produced, prepared and ate crops and animal products. In this vision, human experiences are central to food systems, which should develop around ideas of community and engagement, sustainability, and the acquired skills of producers, shop keepers and, of course, those who prepare and cook food. This approach and the political choices it entails have been criticized as elitist and ineffective in tackling the enormous scale of the food system and its problems. While the first perspective considers globalization at worst as inevitable and at best as an advantage, the second decries it and looks at the local dimension as the golden standard. Taken to the extreme, these visions can turn, respectively, into a technocratic dystopia or into pastoral nostalgia.

We have nothing to gain from excessive oppositions, and it does not pay to demonize technology. The interaction of science and creativity can generate new opportunities in all aspects of the food system. If the diffusion of fast communication tools can be partly blamed for the financialization of food commodities markets, causing swings and waves of panic that can cripple the buying power of the poor, the diffusion of cell phones among farmers in remote rural areas allow them to have a better sense of fair prices for their crops, as well as to access financing tools and insurance. New technologies can be applied to develop vertical farming, sustainable fisheries, and humane animal pens. Of course, in all these cases what counts is who controls the technology, how accessible it is, and whether it favors and hinders the democratic participation of all actors involved in the food system.

As I have argued before, it does not make sense to incite any conflict opposing wholesome to gimmicky, vernacular to high concept, traditional to modernist, humanist to technological. An interesting example is the innovative collaboration between IBM and the Institute of Culinary Education, which allows chefs to relate to computers to create interesting new recipes and flavor combinations. The experimentation resulting from this interaction start from the information elaborated by the computer, but it is the chef’s experience and skill that transforms them into successful dishes.

We will discuss these topics in the panel “Feeding Tomorrow: Technology and the New Food Ethics“, organized by MOFAD (the Museum of Food and Drink) and The New School Food Studies program. We will then continue the conversation during theSecond International Conference on Food Design , which The New School will host from November 5th to the 7th. Designers, researchers, and practitioners from all over the world will gather to exchange ideas and experience of food design, technology, media, and the way they can have an impact on our food system. In preparation for the event, I will start a series of profiles on visible food designers, to start outlining the landscape of this new and growing field of research and professional practice.

For more about food culture, politics, media, and design, follow me on @FParasecoli

Photo: Supergloves Australia

Republished from the Huffington Post with permission.

Events September 15, 2015

Feeding Tomorrow Technology and The New Food Ethics

To Register go here.

Columns August 11, 2015

Food on Show: Two Exhibitions in Rome

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

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.