Book Review
This book review was published in the journal Food, Culture, and Society. My original manuscript is here; the published version is behind a paywall at Taylor & Francis.
Conversations with food, edited by Dorothy Chansky & Sarah W. Tracy, Wilmington, Vernon Press, 2020, 254 pp., $39.00, ISBN 978-1-64889-076-5.
I recently reorganized my food studies books yet again, shelving and reshelving books that explore food technologies in the context of contemporary life, ethnographies that are also philosophical meditations, and tomes that use a single ingredient to explore politics, history, culture, and social justice. I have never been able to commit to one system of organization—and what better field than food in which to appreciate how difficult it is to carve nature at its joints?
In their 13-essay anthology Conversations with Food, Dorothy Chansky and Sarah W. Tracy acknowledge that very problem and turn it to an advantage. At first glance the essay topics are indeed disconnected. All save one originate in papers from a 2018 open-ended food conference, and like Drs. Chansky and Tracy, who respectively study theater and the history of the relationship between food and health in the U.S., the authors represent a spectrum of humanities and social sciences. Accordingly, their subjects range from the popular to the esoteric, the historic to the modern, and the critical to the philosophical. One, for example, is on the significance of consumption in a postwar German radio drama (Chapter 9); another, on the way that humans center themselves in their relationships with microbes (Chapter 11). The only through line is that the subjects have been touched by food in some way.
Chansky and Tracy choose to lean into the Conversation: conversation with food itself, conversation using food as a mediator, conversation among authors and among disciplines, and conversation with readers. Instead of filing chapters into reductive sections, they have created a choose-your own adventure book with the spirit of a tagging system, and wrapped it all up for your academic book club.
The real gem is the “connections” section at the end of almost every essay, where authors find broader categories for their topics in order to identify overlap with other essays in the book. The reader can follow along by moving from Seth S. Tannenbaum’s reflection on hot dogs at the Houston Astrodome (Chapter 3), an edible bridge between diverse classes of baseball fans, to Jessica Romney’s analysis of shared feasts that “fail” in ancient Greek literature (Chapter 4). Both contemplate successful and unsuccessful attempts at relating through common food, one crafted through literary symbolism, the other through the architecture of the cheap seats and the skyboxes. The reader might then shift to Lauren Miller Griffith’s observations of tourists at a Belize hotel who prefer familiar foods (Chapter 12), because both Romney’s ancient Greeks and Persians and Griffith’s salad-loving tourists crave a taste of home while abroad and out of their element.
Having the authors themselves remind readers of these connections maintains the feeling of active conversation, and even outside the “connections” sections, many authors clearly relate mid-essay conclusions to other issues or cultures rather than getting bogged down in the details of their fields of study.
That said, some essays blend into the “conversation” better than others, either because their subjects are more easily relatable or because the authors do a more thorough job of translating their nitty gritty to other topics. It falls to authors with more obscure interests, esoteric terminology, or necessary background to do more translating, and they vary in this regard. Aside from a difference in convenience for the reader, this also might help explain why two essays are referred to by four other authors each and another two essays only once. And as a minor quibble, the final essay, which discusses other essays in-text rather than as a separate section, could have used a slight restructuring to bring its format into line with the rest of the book’s layout.
Conversations with Food is about food, but it is also about making connections among a web of issues, weaving in and out of philosophy, history, sociology, literature, politics, science, and popular culture. While lay readers and undergraduates should be able to understand the role of authenticity in Anthony Bourdain’s television programs (Chapter 13) or a sociological analysis of single-serving processed foods (Chapter 2), some might feel left behind by the more academic language on “performative food acts” (165) or the tenets of posthumanism (102). The ideal audience is whoever wants to delve deep into the connections: undergraduate and graduate seminars in the above fields, food studies students, and anyone else who wants to exercise their interdisciplinary muscles using food as a gathering point.
