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Since around 2000, Japanese comics in which protagonists eat out by themselves garnered popularity. The solitude of the characters enable readers to relive the situation and even to communicate with them in a fictional manner. The success of such works led to dramatization, and they rapidly gained in popularity. This paper analyzes such comics and their adaptations. In particular, it focuses on two enormously successful series, Solitary Gourmet, which created the boom of solo-eating comics and What Did You Eat Yesterday?, which shows everyday life of a gay couple in Tokyo. The male protagonists successfully escape the traditional masculinity by eating and narrating tastes in monologues, which are traditionally used in female-oriented works. It serves as a device for suppressing and oozing desire here. Furthermore, other comics and their adaptations employing female protagonists deal with food in a more progressive manner. There, women are not depicted as objects of desire but subjective figures who liberate their character and desire through the act of eating, and when they eat together, the differences in their attributes get blurred and there even emerges a solidarity. Food has become a way of liberating and connecting people by dissolving the boundaries between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategy of greenwashing has come to occupy a powerful place in sustainable marketing by employing techniques aimed to alleviate the guilt of eco-conscious eaters while obscuring the realities of a company’s true environmental impacts. In this paper, we examine a particular kind of greenwashed marketing we call ‘‘ancient greenwashing,’’ which invokes references to ancient (precolonial) civilizations as a branding strategy targeted at consumers seeking a more authentic and sustainable way of eating. We contend that this marketing masks the colonial legacies that uphold and perpetuate the injustices of modern global food systems, and here we work to counter those claims by contextualizing them within the archaeological study of past sustainability and a discussion of green capitalism more broadly. In addition to compiling examples of ancient greenwashing of six so-called superfoods documented online, we also visited a sample of grocery stores to collect information about the accessibility, amount, and cost of ancient greenwashed quinoa and chia, and found a positive correlation between the brand prices of these foods and the presence of ancient greenwashing. We discuss these results and their implications for the ways ancient greenwashing works to mask deeper injustices in our food systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eels, pie, mash, and liquor is the traditional but largely forgotten food of the cockney, London working class. This paper examines the ingredients, rituals, and culture in one of the few remaining shops that serve a historical dish that is a living gustatory link with a hyper-local, early capitalist past and a gastro-nationalist present. The work takes as its starting point a sensory ethnographic investigation that interrogates a partially hidden world of performative, nostalgic memorialization in one of the very few de facto proletarian spaces within a city of neoliberal modernity. The spaces are, I argue, a negotiation with, and a micro-resistance to, the hegemonic culture memorialized within a largely insular, conservative cockney culture infused with a local patriotism. It further examines a food culture coded through ideas of respectability and manners, and via the concept of a "classed" body, the notion of sensation, disgust, and impurity that condense time and memory around the metaphor of the eel as cockney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on the operative dynamics of Chinese Contemporary Tea Art, eschewing a formalist reading that equates it with the gongfu ceremony, taking as a jumping-off point instead the Chinese terms that are usually translated into Tea Art: chayi and chadao. I analyze Tea Art through analytics that are raised by its own practitioners, namely the interrelated yet irreducible logics of yi and dao. First, I analyze the yi logic of chayi, demonstrating how the aesthetic register of Tea Art evokes broader, historically rooted ideas about the role of aesthetics as a vector for the moral transformation of society. Second, I turn to the dao logic of chadao, where I illustrate the ways in which Tea Art practice incorporates popular discourses on the interconnectedness of humans and their environment through interpretations of the dao and its adjacent concepts, transforming it into a modality ofself-work that reconfigures one's relationship to self, other, and nature. Third, I place the rise of Tea Art in a sociocultural context to demonstrate that it is neither the revival of an ancient Chinese tradition nor a purely invented tradition but rather a highly complex contemporary phenomenon built at a critical juncture of the Chinese modernization project where urbanites have increasingly pondered issues of spiritual and psychological well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, a Venn diagram appeared on the blog The Kitchn detailing the characteristics of what it called the "worst dinner guest ever." This maligned guest is not only vegan but also gluten and lactose intolerant and allergic to nuts and eggs. While a few commenters agreed with the implication that dietary constraints indicate a failure of appropriate guest behavior, most echoed what Lisa Heldke and Raymond Boisvert (2016) suggest is the dominant American view: hosts are generally obliged to accommodate the dietary restrictions of their guests. For Heldke and Boisvert, this is most obviously true when guests have food allergies and serious harm can be easily avoided by a change in menu. In this essay I argue that epistemic barriers can obscure hosts' perception of these ostensibly obvious cases, preventing them from fulfilling their obligations. Specifically, I argue that guests with food allergies and other "gut issues" can be subject to testimonial injustice that undermines their credibility, leading hosts to doubt or disbelieve their need for accommodation. Such guests may also be subject to testimonial smothering, discouraging them from disclosing their dietary restrictions in the first place. I argue that these forms of epistemic injustice raise multiple moral concerns and that hosts have a responsibility to practice epistemic humility regarding guests' reports of gut issues. Overall, this paper aims to enable hosts and guests with gut issues alike to recognize and overcome epistemic obstacles to good hospitality--the importance of which extends far beyond the dinner table. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fermented foods/drinks are one of many traditional food preservation practices known to ameliorate flavor and nutritional value and extend shelf life. They are also an essential element in creating a regenerative food system, one that seeks to create conditions that enhance already existing systems rather than just sustaining them. However, many gastronomic, traditional, and heritage foods such as noncommercial fermented products are not eligible to be sold at local or global markets and are considered hazardous and unfitting of food safety standards. Subsequently, these foods are often produced in homes, or as cottage industry products sold at farmers markets. In the United States, many of these products are made by marginal communities, Latin, Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, and Indigenous communities. These foods carry meanings of value, identity, and sacredness and have created a trans-local food ecosystem. This paper explores how Arizona, with its large and growing population of marginal communities, governs such modes of food production. Using an ethnographic multisite methodology of "follow the thing," the authors follow two fermented foods -- gundruk, and yoghurt/soft cheese -- observing how they are produced, consumed, and valorized in Arizona. We explore how the production of these foods unravels microbiopolitical entanglements, described through personal narratives and contextualized within the history of a larger regulatory structure. Like fermentation itself, these narratives reveal that we should welcome the unseen actors for a more diverse and inclusive food governance atmosphere while redefining what a local and place-based food system should look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the foreign direct investment (FDI) literature, studies show that investors prefer low-risk host states. However, the research focuses on investors from developed country democracies, such as the United States, ignoring the rise of China, an authoritarian developing country that engages in public and private investment. This paper investigates Chinese state and private FDI in 127 developing countries from 2003 to 2017 to determine the effects of political risk on FDI. We find that, as with US FDI, low-risk developing countries attract more Chinese state FDI, except in the case of natural resource investment, where Chinese investors appear to disregard risk concerns. For Chinese private FDI, on the other hand, political institutions seem to play no significant role, but political affiliations matter. Our work suggests that similarities between US and Chinese state FDI are increasing, while the investment strategies of Chinese private and state firms appear to be growing farther apart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese Communist Party has been surprisingly successful in carrying out its plans in the face of various challenges in the post-Mao era. Compared to their central counterparts, the operating patterns of local institutions in tackling such difficulties have been less examined. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring the party’s management of provincial standing committees (PSCs). As the highest level of local collective leadership, the PSC essentially sets the agenda for the province. Using a new database of PSC members from 1980 to 2016, this study provides a systematic illustration of the historical composition of provincial collective leadership. Instead of making drastic changes, the party has subtly shifted the roles of provincial leaders: it has redefined the role of the vice party secretary, adjusted the number of posts in the provincial government, and raised the level of professionalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a funding environment where commercial collaboration and "user engagement" are increasingly encouraged, this paper explores the ethical, political, and methodological challenges of various forms of partnership between academic researchers and food businesses. Drawing on two recently completed projects, the paper assesses the variable "power-geometry" of such partnerships, including the process of negotiating access, securing informed consent, and conducting and disseminating the research. The paper distinguishes between publicly funded academic research, where independence is more easily maintained, and market research and consultancy, where conflicts of interest are more likely to arise. Commercial collaboration is academically valuable in providing access to data and insights that are not publicly available, but can be treacherous if researchers are unaware of the uneven power-geometry of such partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws from a collaborative research project between the British Library, the University of Sheffield, and the British food retailer Marks & Spencer. The project collected oral history recordings of poultry producers to contribute to a national archive of food production history and to be used as the basis for analysis of the politics of contemporary poultry production. The paper demonstrates how partnerships across the archive, academy, and industry, though challenging, provide an opportunity for researchers to critically engage with the complexities of contemporary food production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of superfoods first gained traction in the mid-1980s and has only become more prevalent since. Despite this popularity, contestations exist over the validity of the term, the science behind it, and its utility for consumers. However, systematic and scholarly investigations into the idea of the superfood remain limited. Using content and discourse analyses on global Englishspeaking news media, this paper examines the breadth of comestibles considered superfoods, the ways in which these foods are being mobilized to address particular health concerns, and the wider socio, political, and environmental contexts surrounding superfoods. Our analysis revealed a total of 217 foods were considered superfoods, and were linked to 71 conditions, that primarily emphasize the ability of individuals to optimize their health by preventing possible future illness. We contend that socio-environmental researchers have much to offer into critical investigations of the superfoods phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary food provision is largely dominated by agricapitalism. Using the body of the chicken, the world's most pervasive source of meat protein, this paper tracks the interplay between materiality, spatiality, and temporality within agri-capitalism. It examines the myriad ways in which agri-capitalism distorts space, time, and materiality and deploys them as "fixes" to crises. It illustrates how these fixes reverberate back and forth between production and consumption to shape the spaces of alternative and mainstream food provision alike. It argues that the seemingly distinct spaces of consumption and production are in fact mutually construed and interdependent, and consequently, that shifts in consumptive practices, discourses, or temporalities and materialities cannot in themselves redress the implicit structural inequalities of agri-capitalism. This paper closes with thoughts on an insurgent food politics through which the spaces and possibilities of food can be reimagined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines taste as a factor in beer's arrival as a symbol of modernity in India, Japan, and China. From nineteenth-century colonial production of India pale ale to contemporary attempts by global brewing firms to profit from a burgeoning Chinese market, beer has had an important but largely unexamined role in modern Asian-European encounters. This paper follows distinct agents of transmission--merchants, migrants, and empire builders--and their interactions with local drinking cultures to shape the particular tastes and meanings associated with beer in these countries. The case studies illustrate the different relationships that each country had with Western imperialism: India as a subject of British occupation, China as a site of commercial competition between imperial rivals, and Japan as a nascent imperial power in its own right. Beer gained least acceptance in the Indian subcontinent, in part because of Hindu and Muslim moralizing, and it symbolized western modernity for those who wished to challenge traditional culture. South Asian preferences often focused more on alcohol content than on the taste of malt or hops. The Japanese became Asia's most avid consumers of beer, adapting German lagers to local tastes. Chinese beer drinking has been limited to cities, and local brands are also bland, which reflects the place of beer within Chinese meals as a neutral grain. More broadly, I suggest that beer became a subject for nation-building efforts in Asia precisely because of its cosmopolitanism, which provided status to nationalist ideologues and supported their program of transcending regional rivalries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a special issue on "Rescuing Taste from the Nation: Oceans, Borders, and Culinary Flows." It examines culinary linkages and sensory geographies across national boundaries, and highlights alternative spatial configurations of taste. From the politics of tea to the transnational pathways of turtle soup, papers attend to culinary cultures, systems of preparation, and forms of knowledge that escape or challenge a strictly national circumscription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the Indigenous Sagada Igorots of upland Cordillera in northern Philippines, domesticated pigs and etag (salted and smoked pork slices) continue to play an important role for rituals and as gastronomic vehicles for constituting and performing social relatedness, reciprocity, and redistributive functions through feasting and sharing. These deep historical practices are largely mediated by the elders of Sagada in the face of various kinds of entanglements with the state and markets over time. I characterize this mixed bundle of communal socio-affective and gastronomic ingredients as "Indigenous taste." This essay discusses recent substantive socioeconomic changes in Sagada due largely to mass tourism and the impacts they have set in motion for the aforementioned practices, and on how Sagada Igorots negotiate with the outside world under these new historical conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor's classic text Vibration Cooking beyond its initial use as a culinary handbook, reading deeply into its many references to improvisation and liberation. Through countless allusions to friends and colleagues in free jazz, Black Arts, and other crucial 1960s Black artistic and political circles, Smart-Grosvenor's text uses recipes to both cover and convey the work of everyday liberationist praxis in the Black Arts Movement circles of which she was a crucial member. In this article, I review Smart-Grosvenor's longstanding relationships with key musicians, activists, writers, and performers for whom improvisation across many modes engendered processes of Black liberation. For Smart-Grosvenor, the liberatory capacities of improvisation also existed in cooking, where ritual, inherited food cultures, ad hoc executions, and commensality worked together to create space for and feed a movement for Black freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article documents and discusses the special bond between women and one particular street food item: golgappa (also known as pani puri). The study relies on two sets of data collected in Purnea, a small city of North India. First, a survey (n = 530) provides evidence that snacking patterns are highly gendered, as women display a disproportionate penchant for golgappa, while men have more diverse eating preferences. Second, quantified ethnographic observations (n = 120 food stands) confirm that golgappa stalls represent key spaces of socialization for female urban dwellers. The article proposes several hypotheses to explain the popularity of golgappa among women. Moving beyond patriarchally engineered biological explanations, it focuses on issues of access to the public space. In a context of restricted mobility, golgappa serves as a convenient pretext for women to venture onto the streets. Designed for rapid consumption, golgappa allows women to conform to societal norms by minimizing the time spent in public, thereby reducing the disruption of gendered expectations. Additionally, the (imagined) association of golgappa with femininity—particularly in pop culture—increases its social legitimacy for women. The concluding section offers a reflection on the nature and texture of socialization practices among men and women in small Indian cities. Overall, the article contends that eating out represents a critical feminist issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gastrofeminism traces the centrality of food within diverse feminist narratives of agency and resistance. This manifesto introduces the theoretical, pedagogical, and methodological scope of Gastrofeminism to rethink feminist genealogies, legacies, and new embodiments of a radical future. It calls for a reckoning of both established and emerging feminist engagements with food, consumption, and culinary practices. This introduction underscores conjunctures where feminist methodology and pedagogy intersect in variegated social, cultural, and historical settings to engender dialogues on food, eating, and culinary practices. It emphasizes everyday acts of negotiating feminist boundaries and subverting dominant perceptions of food. Furthermore, it contests the practices whereby food is used to reproduce social norms and hierarchies. Gastrofeminism remaps the boundaries of gendered relations through food practices in sites of conflict as well as everyday resistance to gendered norms of domesticity through technological innovations around cooking, eating, and representation of food. This manifesto assembles feminist scholarship and pedagogies committed to pushing the boundaries of traditional food studies and taking it into new, inclusive directions. Gastrofeminism spans across disciplines and praxis to engage with sensory documentation of food, gendered forms of intimacy, appetites and embodiments, food memories, affects, and nostalgia, new feminist pedagogies, foodways, ecosystems and sustainability, and food access, conflict, and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines issues surrounding the values of farmers, consumers, chefs, and other food activists who are working to expand the production and consumption of pastured pork in central North Carolina (a region known as the Piedmont). What I try to demonstrate in this paper are the ways that an ''ethics of care'' (Heath and Meneley 2010) is often articulated in terms of the cultural categories of ''connection'' and ''authenticity.'' These consciously expressed categories are shown to undergird a range of commitments, from concerns about animal welfare, to support for ''local'' economies, to parental care for children. My discussion considers the relationships among the lives of animals and the meat they yield, as well as the craft that brings about that transformation, and shows how the ethical questions embedded in these relationships and processes depend upon a wider set of cultural practices and values that are pressing concerns in our larger economy and society. I further consider how examining everyday understandings of ''connection'' and ''authenticity,'' as revealed in ethnographic work with farmers, consumers, restaurateurs, and other food activists in the Piedmont, can highlight certain tensions within this ''ethics of care''—such as tensions about food taboos and certification processes—that speak to the politics of food activism in the region and elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Banana ketchup is an iconic marker of Filipino cultural identity. Across the homeland/diaspora divide, the Filipino public celebrates the memory of Maria Y. Orosa, the food scientist, early immigrant to the American West Coast, and anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter, for her creation of the country's favorite sauce or sawsawan. The history of this beloved food item is often recounted as a narrative of scientific innovation, anticolonial resistance, and sovereignty. This essay explores the work that such narratives do, noting not only how they are invoked as frames for Filipinos and Filipino Americans' critiques of gustatory coloniality but also how they can themselves veil other political realities deserving of attention. At banana ketchup manufacturing plants in the Philippines, laborers and allies reimagine the condiment not as a proud symbol of identity but rather as a vessel of labor exploitation, union busting, and police brutality. This alternative narrative is often eclipsed by modes of storytelling that elevate Orosa's ingenious substitution of a native fruit like bananas for an imported product like tomatoes as an emblem of gustatory independence. Documenting an essential piece of Filipino food history yet to receive much scholarly attention, this essay ultimately asks how ways of remembering food history can themselves become ways of forgetting. Its aim is to offer an intervention toward bringing cultural memory and contemporary labor struggles between the Filipino homeland and diaspora into political relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the displaced Syrian population's changing relationship with food in urban Turkey, focusing on the gendered politics of food and reproduction and relying on an urban ethnography in Istanbul. The study aims to examine the transformation of Syrian women's reproductive foodwork with a particular focus on their coping mechanisms toward bridging resources and needs to secure access to healthy, nutritious, and sufficient food for their households, on the one hand, and maintaining Syrian ethnic identity, on the other. The study also investigates whether reproductive foodwork signifies only gendered oppression or acquires new meanings such as empowerment in a displacement context. This article argues that although Syrian women's increasing responsibility in reproductive foodwork in displacement imposes on them a more significant pressure to ensure their households access to both sufficient and ethnic food, it hints at increasing autonomy and power of the women within the family with a particular focus on food acquisition and food budget. The dynamics of food acquisition in the displacement transforms the patriarchal gender norms that restrain Syrian women's engagement with public space. Thus, the change in gender relations within Syrian households suggests that patriarchal oppression and gendered empowerment are simultaneously entangled in Syrian women's reproductive foodwork in displacement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on how discourses of food have shaped understandings of what is at stake in the Greek crisis. Drawing from Karl Polanyi's concept of "embeddedness," I argue that food is central to Greek interpretations of neoliberal policies and processes because of its centrality to Greek culture and identity. Food has also been a site of contested practices of "solidarity" and "charity" by which new social experiments are emerging in the wake of the breakdown of the welfare state. In arguing for food's centrality in the reshaping of Greek sociability, I will suggest that food be thought of not simply as a "topic" for anthropological investigation, but as a master-concept on the level of "kinship," "ritual," or "exchange" in any anthropological analysis of contemporary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men have never been absent from the arena of food preparation, although their participation has been primarily in the public sphere rather than the private domestic space. Men have also been involved in the preparation of traditional sweets and snacks in sweet shops and street stalls. On the other hand, women’s association with food preparation, especially traditional food preparation inside the household, still dominates the popular imagination in regions like South Asia. In Assam (India), pithas are an emblematic food item in the ‘‘Assamese’’ cultural landscape that is popularly perceived to be prepared by women. However, my ethnographic experience suggests that pitha preparation and sale can be studied in relation to performance of masculinities when it comes to the public urban space of Guwahati (Assam). As men have entered the public spaces as pitha sellers and to a large extent prepare it themselves, it was observed that bishakh (trust) is a crucial part of the diverse performance of masculinities and ‘‘Assameseness.’’ The perceptions, negotiations, and enactment with the concept of trust is a pivotal aspect of men entering an otherwise popularly imagined feminized zone of pitha preparation. It is important to attract buyers, wherein the ideal image remains that of a woman preparing traditional food using her manual labor. Further, this article argues that bishakh, which is significant in infusing ‘‘Assameseness’’ in buying and selling pithas, can also be understood at the cusp of contemporary regional politics in Assam, class markers, caste hierarchy, and religious indicators along with gender performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on four months that I spent working as a chef at an Israeli restaurant in London. I first explore how restaurants craft nationalist narratives through food and then interrogate the political consequences of those narratives. My argument unfolds over the course of a meal, in which each dish comes to represent different aspects of Israeli identity. Each section begins with the ‘‘script’’ that chefs and waiters recite as they present dishes to diners. This article explores the curiosities and silences embedded in the restaurant’s de-politicized version of Israeli identity based on a fantasy of the country that erases war and the occupation of the Palestinian people from the narrative. I argue that there is a harm by omission to this recasting of Israeli history and current reality on the ground, and expose how food, specifically in highly stylized restaurants, can be used to create national narratives, particularly in diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugar holds a special place in both public policy and scientific debate, each of which frequently attributes to it a unique, intrinsic power. A rather deterministic view of sugar is asserted in a range of scholarly fields, including findings of parallels between the brain's response to sugar and opiates, widespread suggestions of a hardwired human attraction to sweetness, and public health claims that increased access to affordable sugar inevitably leads to epidemic increases in rates of obesity around the globe. Japan poses an important counterpoint to such approaches because--despite high wealth levels and affordable access to sugary foods--it is a striking outlier to global obesity trends. Yet, surprisingly, while Japan's per capita consumption of sugar is much lower than other wealthy nations, the intensity of interest and cultural elaboration around sweet foods is arguably far greater than in the United States and Europe. Through an examination of attitudes, experiences, and patterns of use concerning sweet foods in Japan, this paper considers the conundrum of how and why Japanese tend to love sweet foods more but consume them less, furthering our understanding of the interplay of materiality and meaning in food and eating, while also addressing key questions regarding sugar and sweetness that have implications for issues of public health and nutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the historical antecedents and influences on modern Chinese tea arts. What is now commonly known as gongfucha, which has become the standard Chinese tea ceremony, was originally a regional custom from the Chaozhou area of China. Through the twentieth century this custom was first taken up by Taiwanese pioneers, repackaged as an element of quintessential Chinese culture, and then exported back to mainland China since the 1980s. During this process of the reimagination of the Chaozhou practice of gongfucha, foreign elements of the Japanese tea ceremony, especially influences from senchadō, were included. As it becomes adopted throughout China as a new national custom, however, this foreign contribution is obscured and forgotten, and replaced with a national narrative that emphasizes links to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at gastronomic identity in the age of global labor migrations. Focusing on the nineteenth-century indentured labor voyages from northern India to the sugar colonies in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific regions, it highlights the sea voyage as both a social setting and a mirror back onto colonial society. The space of the indentured labor ship serves as an innovative site for understanding the political, cultural, and economic dimensions of historical labor movements, through which colonial politics and gustemic identities were negotiated. An analysis of the food provisions and other culinary items that British colonial officials provided to indentured workers during their journeys situates the "taste" of laborers in colonial feedings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the post--World War II "discovery" of global malnutrition and the concomitant rise of the development apparatus, various "miracle foods" have been proposed by international development organizations as solutions to chronic undernourishment in developing countries. This article draws on media analysis, development literature, and interviews to explore the "miracle food narrative" (MFN) in three cases: high-lysine corn, Golden Rice, and quinoa, which as the incumbent miracle food is the focus of the paper. The essay contends that miracle food narratives depoliticize hunger through a "curative metaphor." This trope bolsters a paternal logic that blames malnutrition on the undernourished, and blurs problems of access and dispossession, locating "the solution" in Western philanthropy or economic development. The essay argues that quinoa's interpellation as a global miracle food is directly related to the rise of "multicultural" and "sustainable" development paradigms, and corresponding changes in the roles of "culture/tradition" and "environment" in development discourse. While quinoa's insertion in the MFN departs in some ways from the fable of the Western scientist designing the hunger antidote by representationally displacing authority in science with authority in "traditional ways," this recasting of the actors leaves the broader narrative and underlying curative metaphor in place. As malnutrition alleviation programs integrate cultural difference, critical food scholars must pay close attention to the ways in which tradition and culture are invoked. To conclude, I draw attention to the fraught interaction of the politics of indigeneity and the politics of global malnutrition that arises with the shifting roles of science and tradition in quinoa's adaptation of the miracle food narrative, as well as scale disjunctures between simple miracle food stories and complicated realities, a dynamic that underscores the need for agrifood and food policy scholars to pay close attention to complex interactions of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationship between social science and the food industry, and it suggests that collaboration can be intellectually productive and morally rewarding. It explores the middle ground that exists between paid consultancy models of collaboration on the one hand and a principled stance of nonengagement on the other. Drawing on recent experiences of researching with a major food retailer in the UK, I discuss the ways in which collaborating with retailers can open up opportunities for accessing data that might not otherwise be available to social scientists. Additionally, I put forward the argument that researchers with an interest in the sustainability--ecological or otherwise--of food systems, especially those of a critical persuasion, ought to be empirically engaging with food businesses. I suggest that this is important in terms of generating better understandings of the objectionable arrangements that they seek to critique, and in terms of opening up conduits through which to affect positive changes. Cutting across these points is the claim that while resistance to commercial engagement might be misguided, it is nevertheless important to acknowledge the power-geometries of collaboration and to find ways of leveling and/or leveraging them. To conclude, I suggest that universities have an important institutional role to play in defining the terms of engagement as well as maintaining the boundaries between scholarship and consultancy--a line that can otherwise become quite fuzzy when the worlds of commerce and academic research collide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the commercial success of Western-style confectionery (yōgashi) of the Japanese Empire was largely built on the capital and resources of colonial Taiwan. Building on existing studies that acknowledge the importance of Taiwan’s colonization in Japan’s sugar industry, this article explores the tension between sweetness and power in the Japanese Empire through the lens of Western-style confectionery, a product regarded as a symbol of progress and modernity. Through the examination of the activities of two confectionery companies—Niitaka Confectionery and Morinaga Confectionery—in Taiwan, this article addresses how the making of Western-style confectionery required raw materials other than sugar, such as bananas and cocoa, that were obtained through the means of colonialism. By expanding the studies on sweetness and colonialism from sugar to confectionery, the article shows that the sugar industry, confectionery manufacturers, and the Japanese state wove together a complicated network that formed the foundation of Japan’s rising empire of sweetness. It also highlights the significance of the colonization of Taiwan in the rise of Japan’s Western-style confectionery industry that has long been obscured in people’s memories of sweetness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premodern Japanese kashi were an important part of courtier food culture, and the broad kashi category encompassed fruits, nuts, and confections, which alongside mochi were offered up to monarchs, children, and deities alike. This article explores the types of Heian-period (794–1185) kashi and mochi through their inclusion in an elite banquet celebrating a baby reaching their fiftieth day of life. The monarch, queen consort, and the powerful nobility of the Heian court converged on the residential palace to celebrate and were feted with food and drink, including mochi purchased in the city marketplace and a particular array of sweets. This makes the fiftieth-day banquet a useful lens through which to understand not only one aspect of premodern Japanese celebration but also how the nobility used food to demonstrate power and new status through conspicuous consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mold kōji (Aspergillus oryzae) contributes to the sweetness of sake and plays a vital role in alcoholic fermentation and in the creation of Japanese foodstuffs like miso and soy sauce. While scientists are uncovering kōji’s genetic past, the mold’s history is also told in the records of early modern (1600–1868) sake brewers, who may not have understood they were using microorganisms but managed to develop sophisticated means of cultivating the filamentous fungus and comprehended well its impact on the taste of their beverages. A section from The Idiot’s Guide to Sake Brewing (Dōmō shuzōki), completed in 1688 and translated here, offers the oldest discussion of how brewers worked with kōji in Japan. When viewed in the context of earlier references, it shows that kōji’s role as a sweetener was historically secondary to its primary function to facilitate alcoholic fermentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is love sweet? In contemporary English, that may often be the case, but in classical Japanese poetry (waka), love had no flavor. In fact, foods, eating, and drinking hardly appear in waka of the tenth and eleventh centuries. This essay examines a number of poems featuring food by Oe no Masahira and Akazome Emon, two esteemed writers of the Heian period (794–1185 CE). First scrutinizing the unusual poems from their courtship, the essay then examines all of Akazome’s verses featuring food. Taking these eighteen poems from her poetry collection, I assert that in Heian poetry, foods appear only sporadically, but when they do, their gustatory tastes are disregarded in favor of cultivating aesthetic taste tied to their appearances, anecdotal associations, and verbal play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As popular interest in food and agriculture has grown, so have an array of social movements intent on improving the ways we grow, raise, process, sell, and consume our sustenance. While scholars tend to agree with activists' critical assessments of the failures of the industrial, corporate, chemically intensive food system, they often wonder whether the sustainable, local alternatives that activists recommend are sufficient for broad social transformation. Two scholarly critiques of US alternative food systems revolve around issues of food justice, meaning the ways that race, class, and gender affect who can produce and consume what kinds of foods, and neoliberalism, which refers to activists' privileging of voluntary, market-centric strategies over those that appeal to the regulatory power of the state. This paper lays out three strategies through which the work of US food justice activists can address both critiques. These include cooperative ownership, organizing labor, and pushing to outlaw risky technologies. However, rather than being at odds with the alternative foods market, each strategy makes use of it as a venue from which to draw targeted support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's view on the folklore of Kitchen God, a Chinese deity assigned to report the activities of families to the Supreme Being and ensure blessings. The author states that he was worshipped as one of the five minor gods during mid-Han dynasty and only took the role of reporting the family's behavior around the fourth century. The author mentions that he is worshipped almost nowhere but in the home of a family with exceptions such as temples dedicated to him.