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Four times it happened, in one year, when I lived in Italy. They said I looked like Mick Jagger,which I think they meant as flattery.Hovering then in my late 30s,I found it was not so—complimentary.Later on, I understood that they meant: moved like.I eventually allowed it to be (to me)a complement. During 2005–06 in Colorno,…Read more

A good friend of mine told me recently that she felt she needed to “step up her cooking game” a bit, having been awed by some other friends working in restauration. I was impressed, because I think of her as being pretty far up the culinary ladder already—both in terms of food knowledge and practice,…Read more

Well, that was a bit of a pause. My pencil broke. Over the past six months, I’ve spent a fair bit of time splitting wood. It’s an amazingly satisfying process. You start out with a haphazard mound of logs, relatively disordered and occupying part of the driveway, and you end up with a lot of…Read more

Over the course of this so-called sabbatical, I have been trying to figure out some of the sense of loss I am feeling, now that I am both moving towards and not moving towards having my next academic job. There are many possible relationships, linkages, and agencies among my choices and these feelings, so it’s…Read more

A week in Spain (and some transit on both ends): Part I 1a. One of the things I love about traveling is eating up all the food in my fridge before I go away. I like calculating the Leftover Arc. How many things I need to eat during the three days, then two days, then…Read more

Lately, it seems that a lot of people who are doing (or have completed) a PhD in food want to go and open a yoga studio instead. By “a lot” I mean three. And by “three” I mostly mean me. (Actually, there have been two others who mentioned something similar to me at one point…Read more

“The thing about translation is that something is always added, and something is always taken away.” So said the great documentarian Liz Miller, when talking about the ways that screen-based media operate. Translation is not transparent; it transforms. My ex-partner and I used to have a great time talking about differences and similarities in the…Read more

Nine years ago, I was at a food studies conference in New Orleans, and during a post-paper question period, one of the presenters was asked if she thought there could be such a thing as “gay food.” (She had done a bit of discourse analysis on The Gay Cookbook, a fantastically bizarre thing from the…Read more

Sitting through a one-day FOODSAFE Level I course while being part way through Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble produces an exquisite type of mental agony. It’s like gastronomic matter and antimatter coming together over coffee. They meet up for a little chat about food practices, and one’s cortex is the café table across which…Read more