The American restaurant was saved by the United States government through the COVID-19 pandemic. That is rarely acknowledged by those who want to focus on the disproportionate aid siphoned off by corporate chains and those on the neoliberal right who do not want to give credit where it is due. As a result, one of the biggest lessons of the pandemic—that good governance makes a difference in the lives and livelihoods of poor people— is lost.

Abstract Ethnic food is a slippery concept, used in various anglophone publications by the 1960s, peaking in the 1980s, and no longer used in major US metropolitan newspapers by the 2020s. It came into play in other parts of the world about a generation later and continues to be used unevenly. It is typically used to identify cuisines that are not considered mainstream or archetypical of a region or a nation. Inferiority (or lack of class), cheapness, spiciness, and authenticity are the typical tropes used to judge such cuisines. It has always had the stench of primitivism and Orientalism attached to it and is increasingly considered outdated, such as terms like “Negro” or “Oriental.” The term was historically used to describe a cuisine that is different horizontally, such as Thai, Indian, or Chinese, but it also carried a hierarchical connotation, where French or Nordic cuisines were hardly ever named as ethnic anywhere in the world. New York City offers a case study in examining the history and hierarchy between food and ethnicity.

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dispersed but connected world. What can be held and what fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into consciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreography of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture, gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how the same hands that can heal, can also hurt.

Food in the Indian Ocean World: Mobility, Materiality, and Cultural Exchange Krishnendu Ray (bio), Kathleen Burke (bio), and Stephanie Jolly (bio) the indian ocean world has emerged as a major area of research over the last half century, although compared to the Atlantic, it is less visible to nonspecialists (Pearson 2012). Historiographically, the writings of Annales historians on the Mediterranean and the subsequent work of Atlantic historians have vivified oceanic histories (Hofmeyr 2007). With the rise of East Asian economies in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Indian Ocean region's strategic importance has reemerged, connecting the rising economies in the East to the established ones in the West via the densest networks of shipping lanes for container ships and energy supplies. Further underlining the importance of this region is the deployment of various kinds of hard and soft power between emerging and declining superpowers, such as China and the United States. Soft power is deployed in part by naturalizing epistemic frameworks to study these regions, such as within the dominant frame of area studies and nation-states under postwar American hegemony or as Belt and Road Initiatives within the reemergent Sinosphere. Approaching the Indian Ocean world as a unit of analysis is one way to account for the reorienting world economy, connecting it to the long history before the rise of the West, while sidestepping a wholly Sinocentric view, as we will show. Scholarly attention toward the Indian Ocean region has already provided a number of insights, some of which appear obvious in retrospect: (1) history does not happen only within the landed territories of nation-states; (2) much of that connected and contested history is borne by contact, including conflict across oceans; (3) natural forces, such as the monsoons, play a crucial role in shaping everyday lives and livelihoods; and [End Page 2] (4) understudied domains of Afro-Asian-Austronesian worlds illustrate connected techniques and everyday technologies, including boat building and sailing, domestication and dispersal of food crops, provisioning, and even elite notions of gustatory style, which we will develop in the last section. Food studies tends to be Euro-American-centric owing to its genealogy in certain disciplines within nation-states such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Italy. This essay intervenes in that narrow discourse that assumes that transnational connections are modern and Western (see the editors' introduction to this issue). Connections across the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean world go back to antiquity. The spice trade is, of course, ancient; so, too, is the circulation of stimulants like betel leaf and areca nut, qat, coffee, and tea; the dispersal of staples like rice and millet; and the supply of specialty comestibles, such as sea cucumber and swallow's nests. In paying attention to circulating biota, and to conceptions of what is edible and what is not, what is tasteful and what is not, what is good to eat and what is not, we reconfigure the story in the following pages to highlight what has been made invisible by our contemporary presumptions and epistemologies of the North. The Indian Ocean world was the domain for robust forms of capital exchange and commerce, commodities and gifts, dominating claims and counterhegemonic moves in the taste for currencies, foods, and textiles. Here we pay particular attention to the period before European hegemony and to things beyond its reach as we synthesize the secondary literature on the connected histories of food in the Indian Ocean world, keeping in mind a multidisciplinary, primarily nonhistorian Global Asias audience, to articulate the theoretical stakes of the study of material culture, especially food. We begin by discussing the formation of a discontiguous region, connected through trade and trade winds of the monsoon, driven by the shape and size of the continents, drawing both from the archaeological and the historical records to establish the presence of shared staple ingredients and aromatic botanicals. In the next section, we provide historiographical evidence for aesthetic practices and trade connections across the Arabian Sea, underlining both its antiquity and its pulsating ebb and flow. The third section reexamines coffee's and qishr's dispersals, looking East rather than West, illustrating what is missed...

Hispanics in the USA, particularly those of Caribbean descent, experience high levels of diet-related diseases and dietary risk factors. Restaurants are an increasingly important yet understudied source of food and may present opportunities to positively influence urban food environments. We sought to explore food environments further, by examining the association between neighborhood characteristics and restaurant consumer nutrition environments within New York City’s Hispanic Caribbean (HC) restaurant environments. We applied an adapted version of the Nutrition Environment Measurements Survey for Restaurants (NEMS-R) to evaluate a random sample of HC restaurants (n=89). NEMS-HCR scores (continuous and categorized as low, medium, and high based on data distribution) were examined against area sociodemographic characteristics using bivariate and logistic regression analysis. HC restaurants located in Hispanic geographic enclaves had a higher proportion of fried menu items (p<0.01) but presented fewer environmental barriers to healthy eating, compared with those in areas with lower Hispanic concentrations. No significant differences in NEMS-R scores were found by other neighborhood characteristics. Size was the only significant factor predicting high NEMS-HCR scores, where small restaurants were less likely to have scores in the high category (NEMS-HCR score>6), compared with their medium (aOR: 6.6, 95% CI: 1.8–24.6) and large counterparts (aOR: 5.6, 95% CI: 1.5–21.4). This research is the first to examine the association between restaurant location and consumer nutrition environments, providing information to contribute to future interventions and policies seeking to improve urban food environments in communities disproportionately affected by diet-related conditions, as in the case of HC communities in New York City.

Editorial| August 01 2021 Gastropolitics: Speaking in Tongues Krishnendu Ray Krishnendu Ray Gastronomica Editorial Collective, New York, May 2021 Krishnendu Ray is associate professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and The Migrant’s Table (Temple University Press, 2004). He co-edited Curried Cultures (University of California Press, 2012). He was a faculty member and associate dean at the Culinary Institute of America (1996–2005). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2021) 21 (3): iv–viii. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2021.21.3.iv Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Krishnendu Ray; Gastropolitics: Speaking in Tongues. Gastronomica 1 August 2021; 21 (3): iv–viii. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2021.21.3.iv Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search This issue of Gastronomica brings together new and exciting empirical material and conceptual contributions from elsewhere under the rubric of gastropolitics. By “elsewhere” I mean places, cases, palates, and languages not dominated by what can best be characterized as North Atlantic theoretical orientations (NATO). The latter are perspectives that have emerged from modern universities, built over the last century-and-a-half on both sides of the Atlantic, primarily in English, French, and German and secondarily in Italian and Spanish (see Santos 2018). This is not the first transregional, language-based cosmopolis in history: those built around Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Mandarin played similar roles in other regions during other eras (e.g., see Pollock 2006; Eaton 2019; Kia 2020). Today, North Atlantic languages and locations are the prime ecology of modern theorizations in the social sciences and the humanities. As a result, predictably, the field of food studies exhibits the... You do not currently have access to this content.

Restaurants are understudied yet increasingly important food environment institutions for tackling diet-related diseases. This scoping review analyzes research and gray literature (n = 171 records) to assess which healthy eating promotion strategies have been implemented in restaurants and the associated motivations, barriers, and outcomes, compared by restaurant type (corporate/chain vs. independently owned restaurants) and initiator (restaurant-initiated vs. investigator-initiated). We found that the most commonly reported strategy was the increase of generally healthy offerings and the promotion of such offerings. Changes in food availability were more common among corporate restaurants and initiated by restaurants, while environmental facilitators were more commonly initiated by investigators and associated with independently owned restaurants. Aside from those associated with revenue, motivations and barriers for healthy eating promoting strategies varied by restaurant type. While corporate restaurants were also motivated by public health criticism, independently owned restaurants were motivated by interests to improve community health. Revenue concerns were followed by food sourcing issues in corporate restaurants and lack of interest among independently owned restaurants. Among reporting sources, most outcomes were revenue positive. This study shows the need for practice-based evidence and accounting for restaurant business models to tailor interventions and policies for sustained positive changes in these establishments.

all shape shifters? And what are the parameters for others? I would have liked to see more attention given to the slight, though important, differences between culture, ethnicity, and race. In some chapters, there is slippage between what counts as ethnicity, what counts as race, and the processes by which racialization take place. Notwithstanding this and the difficult task of ordering chapters, the compilation certainly creates more room for academics to explore the limits of shape shifting, and this thoughtprovoking scholarship pushes and points us further in the right direction.

Objectives Examine the acceptability and potential barriers for the implementation of healthy eating promoting (HEP) strategies in independently-owned Latin American restaurants (LAR), including the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods LAR owners and staff were recruited via social media and community networks across the US. Potential participants completed an online survey (n = 20) on demographic and restaurant characteristics and current HEP strategies. Subsequently, we conducted semi-structured, online interviews with LAR owners and staff (n = 13) to examine attitudes of and barriers to the implementation of HEP strategies. Each verbatim transcript was analyzed by two coders using Dedoose, following an iterative process. Excerpts were rated according to how open respondents were to implement potential strategies (1 = opposed, 2 = neutral, 3 = open). Results The survey revealed that the most common HEP strategies already in place were offering vegetarian options (80%) and seafood (75%). The interviews asked about additional, potential HEP strategies, showing that the highest rated was the provision of nutrition information, with all excerpts rated as “open” (rate = 3). This was followed by increasing healthy options, notably vegetarian dishes (Mean excerpt rate = 2.9 ± 0.3); menu highlights (2.6 ± 0.9); and promotion of healthier options (2.5 ± 0.7). Portion size changes were rated the lowest (1.1 ± 0.3). The results included barriers identified for each strategy, the influence of COVID-19, and alternative strategies identified. Conclusions Latin communities present higher dietary risk factors for chronic disease, compared to non-Hispanic Whites. LARs are a significant source of dietary intake and have the potential to positively influence eating behaviors but are seldom engaged by public health. This research aimed to bridge this gap, finding common grounds for potential collaborations benefiting both community health and the wellbeing of these important community institutions. Funding Sources National Institutes of Health/NHLBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a special issue on food vending in the city. It contextualizes a collection of papers on street food and markets across time and global space that authors submitted before the 2020 pandemic. Focusing specifically on the mobilization of urban space for food provisioning and microenterprise, we theorize markets beyond the singular narrative of capital accumulation. Given the particular moment of its publication – which comes almost one year after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic in March 2020 – our introduction probes the impact of COVID-19 on food vendors as well as on the cities that sustain them. Drawing on examples from cities such as New Delhi, New York City, Los Angeles and beyond, we comment on how the pandemic has unleashed threats to livelihoods and liveliness, and we also draw attention to the possibility of new social and economic opportunities in this moment of crisis, including innovative uses of urban space.

The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons proposes a normative view of what food ought to be, in the process highlighting instances where and when that potential has been actualized. Food currently is an object to sell and extract private value rather than social sustenance. This book proposes that food be reconceptualized against its long liberal and recent neoliberal history as property, making a persistent argument about decommodifying food in 24 detailed chapters. It is in re-commoning that the more than two dozen authors of the book--many of them leaders in their field--find better, alternative ideas about the right to food, global public good, food justice, and food sovereignty. They highlight how food as a commodity is currently characterized by its tradable features (appearance, calorie, price, packaging, purchasing power, taste, etc.), thereby denying its non-economic values. It asks two central questions: what would good policies look like if we build on the assumption that food should be the commons, and how do we get there?