In our present moment, where food prices have risen sharply around the world and global companies are changing how we eat, we see a myriad of cultural groups reckoning with a range of questions. Individuals and families are questioning what they can afford at supermarkets, and how they can eat the foods they most desire. Such experiences are causing people to change their diet and reflect on their eating habits, thereby exploring new recipes, and sampling new sources of nutrition. These developments are being articulated in a range of cultural materials, where writers and media-makers are leading us to reflect on how our desires and distastes for food are connected to experiences of pleasure and struggle.

Addressing these connections in three distinct yet related ways, this panel aims to expand the scholarly dialogues of Food Studies by speaking to the ways that new representations of eating are pointing to current issues involving class, ethnicity, gender, race, and sexuality. As the panelists examine these relations, they bring into focus recent perspectives on equity and inclusion. This panel will speak to how food culture is addressing social issues such as food insecurity, exclusion, societal change, stereotypes, and problems in food systems. To begin, Professor Rebecca Mazumdar will deliver a presentation titled “Discovering/Desiring/Devouring the Other: The Outsider Storyteller and Ethnographic Cookbooks.”

Dr. Mazumdar’s paper examines three recent cookbooks: Romy Gill’s 2022 On the Himalayan Trail, Caroline Eden’s 2020 Red Sands, and Austin Bush’s 2018 The Food of Northern Thailand. In studying these texts, Mazumdar examines the roles of identity and narrative in these books, theorizing how they are written by someone not native to the region they describe. She likewise considers the books’ spectacular photography, substantial non-instructive (i.e., not overtly recipe-related) narrative, and detailed contextual or educational sections. Written by outsiders for outsiders, these books could fall into distasteful food writing tropes like oversimplification, exploitation, and exoticization. Instead, the books invite a desire for discovery through the sensuality of learning techniques and creating new dishes. The desire that is curiosity mingles with the desire that is hunger, rewarding readers with feelings of access, albeit an access granted by a storyteller who is, like the reader, an outsider.

Moving on to the medium of television, Professor Edward Chamberlain will deliver a project titled “Queering the Family Meal: Culinary Otherness in the Televisual Narratives of Pose and Schitt’s Creek.” This study examines how the trope of the family meal often is imagined as a way of bringing families together, however in the past decade this traditional element has been reimagined in televisual storytelling. Pose and Schitt’s Creek portray the family meal in an innovative fashion, creating more inclusive familial meals. By rewriting the creation of the family meal, these programs foster a more egalitarian commensality that is welcoming to people who identify as queer and transgender. Further, this presentation examines how the family meals and other moments of eating in Schitt’s Creek and Pose move beyond an existence marked by distaste and otherness. Working with theories of how food relates to class, race, and sexuality, this paper expands upon the scholarly interventions of notable researchers such as Kyla Wazana Tompkins and Anita Mannur.

Bethany Swann, who holds an M.F.A. in creative writing, will present her study of poetry titled “Sampling the Ambient: Playing with Taste in Poetics.” In this paper, Swann examines how “sampling” can name both a critical method and practice for data collection and analysis of ingredients used in food production and consumption. Examining how Tan Lin’s poetry exhibits sampling, Swann names the affective and atmospheric conditions that loom, surround, and press in—influencing the taste receptors that comprise one’s palate. By studying Lin’s eclectic poetry collection Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. [Airport Novel Musical Poem Painting Theory Film Photo Landscape] The Joy of Cooking (2010), Swann teases out an approach involving an uninhibited experimentation with sampling. Swann interprets Lin’s poetry as interrogating literary taste such as the lyric tradition’s historical preference for Anglo-European poetry and disentangles what is flavorful from what is known. Swann elucidates how Lin’s poetry subversively instrumentalizes techniques of sampling to highlight underserved flavor profiles.

To ensure the presenters will adhere to the pre-established time limits, the panel organizer will closely monitor the time of each presentation and use cue cards to announce the time remaining. By carefully monitoring time, the panel will ensure that there will be opportunities for the audience to engage in dialogue with the presenters and generate new thinking on the session’s subject matter.