The introduction of pizzas to the Australian public in the twentieth century offers an opportunity to study the growth of meanings of a new word for a relatively novel type of food in the Australian setting. Through the recipes and fictional stories published in the iconic magazine of the time, The Australian Women's Weekly, it is possible to trace the early history of both referential and cultural meanings of pizza. Recipes elaborated the referential meanings, revealing, for example, preferences for anchovies as a topping and the acceptance of both yeast and no yeast in the base. Cultural meanings of pizza centered on Italianness, which in turn could be associated with pleasurable, often romantic, experiences. In some cases, however, the Italianness was viewed as an otherness leading to awkward, intercultural tensions. It is noteworthy that the earliest pieces of fiction in the magazine making reference to pizza were written in the 1940s by American authors, not Australian authors. It is noteworthy, too, that the cultural meanings of pizza were being introduced through the fictional stories well before any elaboration of referential meanings through recipes.
This article explores the negotiation of authenticity in Korean restaurants in Ankara, T & uuml;rkiye, against the backdrop of the growing influence of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) and the increasing cosmopolitan aspirations of T & uuml;rkiye's young urban middle classes. By focusing on these restaurants, the study explores how cultural, social and market dynamics shape perceptions of authenticity in a non-Western context. The research adopts a qualitative approach, utilizing semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and social media analysis, and reveals the negotiated nature of authenticity among owners, staff, and customers. We argue that authenticity is a dynamic construct in Korean restaurants in Ankara, reflecting adaptations to local context, such as halalization, within broader global cultural and economic processes, such as the Korean Wave and cosmopolitan aspirations. These insights invite further research into cultural exchanges and culinary connections in understudied non-Western contexts, enriching discourses on authenticity, identity, and globalization.
This article explores how the UAE - and the emirate of Dubai in particular - regulate food and drink with the aim of governing Islam. It lays out how a series of food-related initiatives have left a profound impact on religion and society in the UAE since the early 2000s, focusing on the 1) decriminalization of alcohol 2) deregulation of public eating during Ramadan and 3) granting of liquor licenses to new kinds of establishments. Drawing on ethnographic accounts and interviews with Muslim women living in the superdiverse city of Dubai, I show how encounters with others in sites of work and leisure encourage women to reflect and experiment both in their culinary habits and religious practices. I thus analyze how legal changes around food impact not only how Muslims eat (and drink), but also what it means to be Muslim in the first instance, foregrounding the role of secular power and the state in this process.
Cashew feni, a distilled drink made from cashew apple, is a local spirit mostly associated with the Indian state of Goa. While narratives around the spirit and its Geographic Indicator (GI) protections emphasize the spirit's uniqueness to Goa, archival sources indicate that the spirit was not always exclusively found there. Cashew feni stems from a long tradition of distillation in South Asia which predated European arrival. Indian distillers across the western coast of India began to use cashew apples in already well-established distillation traditions and even the name "feni" was used by distillers outside of Goa at the end of the nineteenth century. The gradual concentration of cashew spirit and feni production in Goa can be traced to the late nineteenth century when taxation regimes undercut alcohol production in British India. Narratives emphasizing the exclusivity of feni to Goa often suggest that the spirit has been greatly influenced or invented by the Portuguese, overlooking the ways that Goan spirits are part of a larger South Asian tradition that has significant diversity within itself. Although these narratives are useful to market the spirits to an ever-widening circle of consumers they do not engage with the spirits' broader geographic spread in the past.
The concept of food pedagogy has been considerably expanded over the last decade. The teaching and learning about food has three principle dimensions: formal, informal, and incidental (Flowers and Swan 2015). These dimensions are transferable to the context of primary school with its two worlds; the formal adult-controlled world and the informal child world (Valentine 2000). Within the informal world, there is space for incidental food pedagogies where children demonstrate gendered facets of food practices in their social interactions with their peers. These occur in the space of lunchtime, where the packed lunch is the main means of sustenance in primary schools in Ireland. This food event occurs in a short timeframe and it sees a regulated delivery through an adult mediator (teacher). Leahy and Wright (2016) have noted that pleasure is a focus for children in their food choices and sociality, marking a point where learning can occur (Rich and Evans 2015). This article explores how children use pleasure and play to explore food and share its meaning in their group interactions. There is significant potential for children to lead on pedagogies in relation to food, through demonstration and there is also a place for adults in facilitating this.
This study examines symbolic hunger in upward social dining among youth in urban China. Upward social dining refers to work- and career-adjacent meals in which juniors orient interaction toward seniors with evaluative or reputational authority and pursue recognition through ritualized conviviality and deference. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between September 2023 and May 2024 across 45 dining events in four settings (governmental, academic, corporate, and private), I show how elite dining rituals convert food into a symbolic commodity and allocate emotional labor downward. Juniors manage tone, attentiveness, humility, and repair work to stabilize interaction, yet these performances rarely yield stable belonging or attributable recognition. Symbolic hunger names this recurring post-meal residue: a durable mismatch between intensive emotional performance and deferred inclusion. While a new elite (first-generation upwardly mobile gatekeepers) often intensifies extraction under meritocratic narratives, ordinary commensal spaces enable limited micro-resistances that protect inner autonomy without dismantling hierarchy. The article thus theorizes commensality as an interactional infrastructure that routinizes recognition and inequality.
The conversation around sustainable food in Canada's Arctic today is inherently connected to the logistics of transportation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022-2025), this research examines how control over Nunavut's transport systems shapes food sovereignty and Nunavut's sustainable foodways, asking whose interests current infrastructures serve and how to strengthen culturally appropriate access to food. Based primarily on participant observation, semi-structured interviews and focus groups, this article foregrounds community perspectives on hunting, sharing, and logistics. While country food remains central to wellbeing, identity, and daily practice, grocery stores are stocked with foods shipped up from the "South." The article proposes reorienting transport toward inter-community connectivity, raising country food cargo priority, investing in year-round freezers, and long-term support for paid harvester programs as infrastructure for sustainable foodways. Ultimately, achieving food sovereignty in Nunavut requires infrastructure sovereignty and collaborative decision-making led by Nunavummiut.
This paper uses the falafel as a methodological anchor to explore how recipes operate as informal pedagogies among Arabic-speaking migrants and diaspora communities. Drawing on examples from Germany and England, it examines how everyday practices of cooking and recipe transmission become sites through which gendered responsibilities, sensory memories of home, and forms of embodied knowledge are reproduced, adapted, or contested. The analysis also considers how the falafel circulates within racialized urban food spaces and how its commercialization as an "ethnic" or vegan-friendly dish shapes public narratives surrounding Arabic-speaking communities. By tracing the movements of a single dish across domestic kitchens, migrant neighborhoods, and alternative food cultures, the paper highlights how recipes participate in broader struggles over belonging, representation, and the politics of migration. The falafel, in this sense, becomes a lens through which to understand the tensions and possibilities that structure diasporic identification in post-migration contexts.
In recent decades we have witnessed, from numerous academic fields, an exponential growth in studies on sustainable food practices, focusing on aspects as diverse as the organization of community initiatives, new agricultural techniques, food security and sovereignty, emerging dietary patterns and change-promoting social movements, among others. Within the cultural aspects that intersect in these practices, the ethical-moral components - i.e. the core values that underlie their participation and development-remain largely unexplored, demanding greater attention from disciplines, such as anthropology. Values play a fundamental role in shaping sustainable food practices, influencing individual choices, community behaviors, policy decisions and the expansion of new ways of understanding supply chains. The different actors involved in these emerging food cultures hold and exercise several types of values, according to their needs, backgrounds and contexts of participation. This article presents an ethnographic exploration of the value-sets identified within Alternative Food Networks, more precisely the drivers and narratives of farmers, producers and suppliers involved in sustainable initiatives in the region of Castile and Le & oacute;n, Spain. The findings will examine the social, environmental/ecological and economic/political dimensions present in their experiences, with special attention to the possible hierarchies, overlaps and conflicts that may exist between the different identified attributes.
This article describes Columbus, Ohio, as a stage of interaction between local consumers and ethnic restaurateurs. We, one of us having completed an MA thesis on Mediterranean food in Columbus, and the other whose dissertation fieldwork examined Mexican food in Columbus, detail how restaurateurs adapt to local conditions and meet the tastes of their diners. We examine how restaurateurs structure their eateries, decide the foods and flavors to serve, and strive for their specific goals alongside the genuineness and authenticity of the food they serve that sell in Columbus. Ethnic restaurants can succeed in the city, but we show their operators must be hyper-aware of these dynamics as they interact with the dining public. Though many of the interventions and decisions by Mediterranean and Mexican restaurateurs overlap, the preconceived notions brought by customers about these distinct cuisines shape how they make decisions about what to serve in their Columbus eateries.
This essay argues that the Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga's 1988 debut novel, Nervous Conditions stages the twinned tropes of food and motherhood as important material and psychoaffective sites on which colonized subjects navigate questions of desire, identity, and resistance. Employing food regimes theory, "Mealies, Mothers, and Meats" shows that different maternal figures appear in the novel as stewardesses of foodways which are the corporeal basis for distinct native and colonial lifeways. The black, female protagonist's coming-of-age is mediated by two opposed mother figures - her impoverished, unlettered birth mother who represents the abject, colonized motherland and her wealthy, British-educated aunt by marriage who represents the imperial mother country. The latter penetrates the former's agroecological food sovereignty with the full force of an imperially inflected food system replete with items drawn from colonial resource-extraction and fossil-fuel driven industrial processes. The young protagonist is drawn away from native foodways and into imperially inflected cultures of eating when, for the sake of a colonial education, she moves from her rural homestead to her aunt's home on a mission. Dangarembga thus demonstrates that deep in the folds of everyday food experiences helmed by mother figures are the shifting configurations of geopolitical power.
Women from urban backgrounds are increasingly taking up agricultural work in the UK. Lacking the cultural and material inheritances of family farming, their journeys are instead shaped through involvement with food activism. This paper draws on data from participant observation in agroecology movement spaces, interviewing with women farmers and food activists, and documentary analysis. It uses the lens of food pedagogies to examine the extent to which agroecology - as an activist food pedagogy - shapes resistance to and/or reproduction of gendered, classed and racialized food identities. The analysis shows how new entrants learn to become farmers and food-growers within a pedagogical regime organized around the ideal of "setting up on the land," a regime that reproduces middle-class heteropatriarchal subjectivities and whiteness while also creating openings for their contestation. In this context, I introduce the concept of pedagogical labour to capture the self-regulating and disciplinary work through which first-generation entrants both perform farming identities and foster more inclusive agroecological spaces. The paper also raises empirical questions concerning the risks of reproducing entrenched inequalities, alongside the potential for activist pedagogies to cultivate safer and more connected intersectional spaces.
