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Food and Landscape
Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2017
Edited by Mark McWilliams
Prospect Books
2018
First published in Great Britain in by Prospect Books, Parke Road, London
.
© as a collection Prospect Books.
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Front cover photo credit: © Sharon Hudgins.
Back cover and title page photo credit: © Charity Robey.
Design and typesetting in Gill Sans and Adobe Garamond by Catheryn Kilgarri and
Brendan King.
Printed and bound in Great Britain.
5
Contents
Foreword
Mark McWilliams
P P
A Challenging Landscape: Scotland’s Food and Drink Assets
Catherine Brown
Microbial Landscapes
Joshua Evans
e Future Belongs to the Gourmet
Colin Tudge
Exploring Aeroir, or the Atmospheric Taste of Place
Nicola Twilley
S P
‘Practically only an English grazing farm’: e Irish Landscape and English Beef
Juliana Adelman
Eating into the Countryside: e Case of Hamburg
Volker Carlton Bach
Singapore: Landscape of Loss, Cuisine of Comfort
Lucey Bowen
Landscaping Food and Identity: Rice Paddy Art in Japan
Voltaire Cang
Stories of Rice Lake – Stewards, Settlers, and Storytellers
Nathalie Cooke
From Nature’s Garden: Reimagining North African Landscapes through Food in
Female French Colonial Literature
Edwige Crucix
Food and Landscape
6
Coming in to Graze: e Fall and Rise of Hill-Reared Mutton
Jessica Fagin
Dining Outdoors in Renaissance Art
Allison Fisher
Global Warming and the Changing Global Food Landscape: e Need to Preserve
Diversity
Len Fisher
e Landscape of Food and Memory: Cuisine and Cultural Identity in the Sephardic
Jewish Diaspora
Sara Gardner
‘Bigger Was Better?’ e Interplay of New Technologies, Field Size, and Basic Commodity
Production in the Roman Occupation of Britain, c. BCE – CE
Christopher Grocock
Maple Moon: Landscapes of the Sugar Maple in a Time of Climate Change
Naomi Guttman
Agriculture without Fences
Hilary Heslop
Imaginary Landscapes and Virtual Terroir
Ben Houge
From Kaluga to Chak-Chak: Eating Locally Along the Trans-Siberian Tracks
Sharon Hudgins
Nice Day in the Driftless
Tom Hunter
‘A way of seeing which we learn’: Food as Resistance
Fozia Ismail
e Terraces of Kea: Producing Food for Subsistence Shaped the Cycladic Landscape
Aglaia Kremezi
Ghost in the Cane Fields
Michael Krondl
Food and Landscape
7
Pasture and Pastoralism: e Inextricable Links between Food, Culture, and
Landscape in Samburu District, Northern Kenya
Jane Levi and William Rubel
Steps Toward an Ecology of the Cookbook: Landscape in the Cookbook and the
Cookbook in Its Landscape
Don Lindgren
Terraced Landscapes: Farming and Performing on Balconies
Morna Livingston
Cuscuz Paulista: How an African Staple Became the Gastronomical Symbol of São Paulo
Sandra Mian
e Contested Origins of the Presniz between Myth and Reality
Giulia Nicolini
Mapping Food in France under the First Empire
Guillaume Nicoud
Moveable Terroir: From Liquid Stability to Rock-Solid Ephemerality
omas Parker
Climbing Butter Mountain: How Food Law Has Aected the British Landscape,
In and Out of the EU
Olivia Potts
A Creature of Salty Estuaries and Glacial Till: e History, Remarkable Qualities,
and Incomparable Flavour of the Wild Peconic Bay Scallop
Charity Robey
Americans and the Landscape of Wine
Laura Shapiro
‘Le mariage entre mets et vins’: On the Geographical and Historical Origins of Pairing
a Food with a Particular Wine in France
Richard Warren Shepro
Lines in the Landscape: How the Olive-Line, the Date-line, and the Vine-line
Have Dened Mediterranean Culture
David C. Sutton
Food and Landscape
8
Turkish Tea for Liberty: Changing the Landscape of a Region and the Drinkscape
of a Nation through Political Choice
Aylin Öney Tan
Brandenburg-Prussia’s Cultivated Natural Food Landscape
Molly Taylor-Poleskey
Minnesota’s Hearty Plums: e Story of a Fruit and Its Ties to Rural and Urban
Landscapes
Emily S. Tepe
Reading the English Countryside: A ousand Years of English Agriculture
Etched on the Surface of the Land
Malcolm ick
Tejate, Tejateras, and the Taste of Place: A Sensory Excavation
Amy B. Trubek
Fratelli Ingegnoli: Reshaping the Landscape of Italian Cooking in the Late
Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Anne Urbancic
Food in the Context of First-Century Galilee: e Mishnah and the So-Called
‘Jesus Diet’
Susan Weingarten
Feasting Is the Finest Prayer: Dreams of the Holy Land in the Pots of the Ashkenaz
Michael Yashinsky
Contributors
26
Microbial Landscapes
Joshua Evans
I remember, as a child, wanting to move through landscapes dierent from my own. In
the park I heaped mounds of wet sand, stuck them with shoots of pine, bored holes and
tunnels through them with my ngers, and let my mind wander over these mountains
as a bird would, or a moose, or a wandering child, much like me, but smaller. On frigid
beaches I shifted rocks and smoothed sand again, making new lagoons for hermit crabs
who would, I thought, be glad for shelter. Gliding in my father’s canoe I imagined
myself a speck, a plankton, swirling in the eddy of his paddle, my world a spinning
hyperbolic plane; riding on the ferry (growing up on an island), I played a similar game,
much larger this time, in its churning, lurid wake. Peering out the window of my rst
aeroplane, the game expanded yet again, oering up new mounds of particularly uy
sand to hike and dance and leap across.
e game was perhaps at its best in the garden. I would stare at a patch of spongy
soil for an hour, rst following the critters I could see, and gradually the ones I couldn’t.
Cauliower oered potential hours of involuted walks across its surfaces, the dew held
in its leaves containing whole worlds into which I had been given sole privilege to look.
Raspberry canes in the summer were, I learned, best entered from below, their drupes more
clearly visible – enormous fruits in a tangled jungle, bumpy planets trembling in a leafy sky.
I imagine you might also have played or play a version of this game.
Most recently I nd myself playing it in the kitchen, now with companion species I
do not have to conjure.1 What is it like, I wonder, to be a yeast budding and bubbling in
the dough expanding atop the boiler? What is it like to be a bacterial colony inhabiting
the sour, slippery walls of my kombucha mother? And what of kōji spores, responding
to humid heat on the bumpy landscape of boiled grains, extending mycelia and
exploding into a starburst of fruiting bodies, creating a new landscape of uy white,
new clouds of coconut and guava to dance across with my nose?
Our theme this year is Food and Landscape – a rich one. e breadth of topics, and
the various literatures they build on, readily demonstrates how ‘landscape’ is not a self-
evident concept. Sometimes it refers to physical features of the land ‘out there’, seen
from nowhere in particular; other times it refers to perception of one’s surroundings
from a particular point of view. Sometimes it assumes a ‘wild’ environment, untouched
by human activities; other times it brings human agency in shaping the land to the
fore. Sometimes it refers to actual land; other times to representations of land.2 Yet
Microbial Landscapes
27
most often, across these variations in meaning, invoking ‘landscape’ tends to assume
the primacy of the visual, and, even more deeply, the primacy of the human subject to
whom the landscape is relevant and revelatory.
I wonder, as another version of this same game, what might happen when we
open up the possibility that landscape might make sense not just for humans, at the
human scale and with human priorities of moving through and experiencing the world.
Microbes, so dierent from us, are particularly good for thinking with here. With this
short paper I hope to oer an account of some things microbes do that make them
particularly good at helping us to understand landscape in a more general, ‘more-than-
human’ way – and why perhaps we should.3
Drawing from examples of contemporary scientic and culinary research on
fermentation, I shall set out to investigate what ‘landscape’ might mean for microbes,
how we can come to know these landscapes, and what we might learn about landscape
in general when we explore them in microbial worlds.
What Might ‘Landscape’ Mean for Microbes?
You and I are on a hill, overlooking a lake. It is evening, in summer. Terraced vines
slope down to the water, clusters plumping up but not yet ripe. e air cools; a breeze
sweeps up from the far shore. Dry grasses rustle. A tongue of woodsmoke whips briey
into us from somewhere else.
Each grape on each cluster that surrounds us is its own world, neither the same nor
unique. ere are yeasts, sensing sugars developing, waiting to digest them into alcohol.
ere are bacteria, wondering whether they will get the chance, with this batch, to
convert malic acid to lactic, or even the yeasts’ alcohol to acetic. ere are fungi, hoping
the autumn is humid and long, to let them sprout their fuzzy noble magic, puncturing
skins and letting berries shrivel. ey may not see the water of the lake, but they would
notice – the breeze, diurnal temperatures, would change – if it were not there. Some
signals of landscape we share with these critters, yet many are each to their own.
ere is a delightful yet powerful concept that lends rigour to this intuition. Jakob
von Uexküll was a biologist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his work
on how non-human organisms sense their environments helped establish the eld of
biosemiotics. His notion of umwelt (literally, ‘around-world’) describes the world specic
to an organism delimited and shaped by its own particular modes of sensory-perception.4
You and I are in a sort of shared umwelt standing on the hill. e yeasts and
bacteria and other fungi have similarly distinct, yet somewhat overlapping umwelten,
participating in similar environments where the same chemicals and physical forces
carry, to a certain extent, shared meanings.
Some parts of these worlds signify more than others. e moon rising mauvely
over the hills is beautiful, but it does not, like the grapes hanging there, promise wine.
e hints of woodsmoke playing about our noses is calming, beckoning with Maillard
smells; a dierent smoke of wildly singeing grass might alarm us more. Similarly, sugars
Food and Landscape
28
signify more for some microbes
than others, as do alcohols,
acids, other molecules that signal
ripeness, metabolism, rot. ere
are priorities, interests, desires at
play that structure umwelten in
dierent and dierential ways. e
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s
notion of desire bolsters our ability
to understand these interests as
dierent in degree and orientation,
though not in kind. is desire is
a positive force, not about lack but
generativity, a force prior to mind or will that draws agents to one another and to other
things in the world.5 Needs stem from it and not vice versa. is is desire rendered
more-than-human.
‘Landscape’, then, without assuming visual primacy or human appropriateness,
might be understood as a space, a section of an umwelt, structured by certain desires.
is move also reveals how landscapes are often nested within each other, at dierent
scales and in dierent orientations and co-produced by many interlocking agencies.
Humans planted these vines; dierent vines grew here and there in dierent ways,
changing the soil, creating niches for other animals and plants and other smaller critters,
all the way down; dierent microbes have contributed to dierent soils here and there,
structuring how dierent vines and other plants and other critters that live together
with them may take root.
is kind of landscape need not only be ‘out there’. I have also encountered them
inside, in denitively human spaces. At Nordic Food Lab, a non-prot in Copenhagen
where I worked that investigates the gastronomic potential of the Nordic region, we
would often – though we did not
necessarily think about it this way
at the time – propose potential
landscapes to our microbial
collaborators and see which ones
co-responded most with their
desires.6
Once, in the autumn of 2012,
a colleague and I began twelve
experimental trials of salt-rich,
umami-oriented fermented sauces,
modelled after soy sauces but
containing various congurations
Figure 2. Fermenting ‘soy’ sauces at Nordic Food Lab
(reproduced under a Creative Commons licence).
Figure 1. A window of experiments at Nordic Food
Lab (reproduced under a Creative Commons licence).
Microbial Landscapes
29
of grains, legumes, and other avourful additions like mushrooms, berries, leaves, or
wood (Figure 2). We combined these ingredients in a semi-structured way, ensuring
that each had similar ratios of starchy, proteinous, and aromatic ingredients, similar
levels of salt and moisture, and fermented together on a similar schedule under the
same conditions. e results, naturally, varied widely. Some rapidly became inedible;
others persisted but did not signicantly improve, hovering between the tasty and the
rotten; a handful became certainly avourful; and one in particular blew us away, with
its remarkable resemblance to a liquid essence of foie gras. is sauce, being entirely
vegan, we named ‘faux foie’ (Figure 3):
Original Faux Foie
500g kōji (grown on quinoa)
250g kōji (grown on 4 parts nøgen byg #43 : 1 part sunower seeds)
750g cooked butterbeans
30g dry morels
500g bean stock
1L 20% brine (6.2% salt in total mixture)
Combine in a sterilized container. Cover the surface of the mixture with plastic
wrap, and let ferment at ambient temperature for three months.7
We wanted to make more. We tried to replicate the recipe, but it never quite worked in
the same way. We had (and still have) yet to fully understand the desires of the microbes
that structure the kinds of transformations happening in the pot. Understanding
the faux foie as a landscape, a material-semiotic space structured by desires both
microbial and human, might help us listen better, notice signs we might otherwise have
overlooked. Understanding landscape more broadly might help us pay attention.
How Can We Know These More-Than-Human Landscapes?
At this point, you may very well be thinking, ‘What a nice idea, but it is all very
wilful.’ Naïve, even – or, worse,
a simplistic anthropomorphism,
whose goal to explore beyond the
human is proven disingenuous by
implicitly reifying it. Desire and
umwelt are useful tools for making
theoretical incisions here; there are
other tools for laying open these
cuts more empirically.
When it comes to microbes,
rapid developments in DNA
sequencing are expanding the
empirical possibilities of getting
Figure 3. e ‘faux foie’ at Nordic Food Lab
(reproduced under a Creative Commons licence).
Food and Landscape
30
to know which microbes favour and produce which kinds of landscape. Up until
the advent of DNA sequencing, microbiology relied on culturing techniques and
microscopy to get to know the microbes living in dierent environments. e problem
with culturing is that only a fraction of microbes can be goaded into growing on
plates, requiring dierent substates and conditions to grow. Sequencing DNA allows
the possibility of gaining a fuller picture of the microbial ecology of a sample. It comes
with its own methodological challenges, as, for example, we cannot assume that just
because there is some DNA in a sample that its corresponding organism was living and
metabolizing there (and indeed, samples may be easily contaminated with other things).
Nonetheless, these techniques have opened up whole new areas of the eld.
e work of microbiologists Rachel Dutton and Ben Wolfe is exemplary here, and
set a precedent in the food world for scientists and chefs working together to better
understand the complex contributions of microbial ecology to avour. A few years
back Rachel and Ben were working together at Harvard University on the microbial
ecology of cheese rinds. ey sampled the rinds of more than a hundred cheeses from
ten dierent countries and sequenced all the DNA in the samples – a method known as
metagenomics (the genome is the collection of all an organism’s genes; the metagenome
is the collection of all genomes in a sample).
eir research revealed some fascinating ndings, one of which was that the primary
factor shaping similarity across cheese rind ecologies was not geographical location,
but the treatment, the manipulation of environmental variables such as temperature
and humidity, and other practices such as washing and turning used to direct the
course of the cheese’s ripening.8 In other words, it was about human craft. e craggy,
Figure 4. ‘Distribution of Abundant Genera across Cheese Rind Communities’ (reproduced
by permission of Benjamin E. Wolfe).
Microbial Landscapes
31
otherworldly landscapes on the surface of a cheese are shaped by humans and microbes
together – and understanding them as emerging through active practices of desire do
more to help us understand the resulting cheese and its microbes than does a simpler,
narrower notion of ‘landscape’ as merely a passive, scenic backdrop to the actual
activities of interest (Figure 4).
Other researchers have used similar techniques for studying all sorts of more-than-
human landscapes that emerge in fermentation. e lab of David Mills at University of
California, Davis, specializes in this approach, and has produced a range of fascinating
papers investigating the microbiomes of dierent built spaces of fermentative activity –
wineries, breweries, and more. Analyzing this data for both species diversity and relative
abundance has allowed Mills and his colleagues to generate ‘heat maps’ of these spaces,
such as that below (Figure 5), that visually depict how dierent microbes cluster around
dierent areas of the fermentation space.9
ese maps help us begin to understand how ‘landscape’ is something that happens
and is done not just ‘out there’, sotto cielo, but also within our built spaces, our
domus, our hearths, our innermost and most intimate spaces of cultural and culinary
transformation. Even the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ itself, at the microbial
scale, starts to make less sense. Wine yeasts, for example, are constantly owing between
the vineyard and the winery, to the extent that it is dicult to tell where they ‘originally’
come from.10 For these microbes, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are less important categories than
the nutrients and growth conditions – the desires and landscapes – they pursue, and
the human behaviours that help their growth. Across these diverse spaces and practices
of fermentation, humans shape microbes and microbes shape humans, body to body,
lineage to lineage, in a loopy dance of becoming that is never truly ‘done’.11
ese techniques have more recently been extended to even more quotidian, familiar
spaces. Jamie Lorimer, a cultural geographer at Oxford University, has just wrapped up a
project in which he and his colleagues investigated what happened when they brought this
Figure 5. ‘Mapping microbial contamination sources inside a brewery’ (reproduced by
permission of Nicholas A. Bokulich).
Food and Landscape
32
sequencing technology
into people’s homes.
Designing experiments
with them to learn
more about their
domestic microbiome,
Lorimer’s team hoped
to see in what ways
this participatory
process might change
how people interacted
with their home’s
microbes and how they
engaged with these
emerging technologies.
ey visualized their
domestic data using similar heat maps as above (Figure 6), and many of the ndings
were rather surprising.
For example, certain locations, like sinks and cutting boards, were much less
microbially diverse than participants had expected. Other spaces, like sponges, were
shown to be overwhelmingly diverse, and gained participants’ newfound antipathy. Yet
perhaps the most interesting ndings had to do with the experiments’ social dimensions:
how dierent spaces and expertises shaped who could know these landscapes and how,
how popular understandings of ‘species’ came to constrain the researchers’ ability to
communicate more nuanced facets of the ecological data, and how in many cases the
methods themselves do not yet allow the desirable degree of certainty.12
Rob Dunn, an evolutionary ecologist at the North Carolina State University, has been
conducting similar participatory experiments, and on a much larger scale. One of his current
projects is about sourdough bread starters, in which his lab has metagenomically sequenced
over a thousand starters sent in by bakers from all over the world, to compare them and see
what patterns emerge. At the time of writing they have yet to publish their ndings, but we
can expect that new insights will emerge into how dierent relationships between microbes
and humans structure, and are structured by, dierent landscapes at dierent nested scales
in the production of fermented foods. One tantalizing preliminary nding was that the
hands of some of the professional bakers whose starters they sampled exhibited populations
of many of the same microbes living in their starters, compared to non-professional bakers.13
e microbiomes of human and starter are shaping each other in turn.
In these ways and more, trying to extend our umwelt into those of microbes opens
up the possibility of thinking about microbial landscapes as being not only composed
of microbes, but also composed by and for them. Humans can be – and, when it comes
to fermentation, often are – involved, but not as some prime mover.
Figure 6. Kitchen heat map from participatory sequencing
experiment (reproduced from a forthcoming article with
permission from J. Lorimer).
Microbial Landscapes
33
What Do We Learn about Landscapes in General when Exploring Them in
Microbial Worlds?
A couple of answers to this question have already emerged. I would like to collect them
here, and propose a few more.
We have ‘seen’ how, when we attend to umwelten other than our own, landscapes
emerge at dierent scales of space. ey also emerge at dierent scales of time.
Compared to humans, most microbes move fast. rough time that is – they reproduce
rather quickly, evolve rather quickly, and in many fermented foods, especially more
complex ones like miso or traditional kimoto sake brewing, where yeasts, bacteria, and
multicellular fungi are all involved, their populations change quite signicantly over the
course of the fermentation process (Figure 7).
Take kimoto sake brewing, a traditional method of preparing sake involving the
cultivation of a highly yeast-and-bacteria-active starter before adding it to a mash of rice
saccharied by the kōji fungus, Aspergillus oryzae. Certain bacteria and wild yeasts begin
the fermentation, but are quickly outpaced by lactic acid bacteria, which consume some
of the sugars and produce lactic acid, lowering the pH of the mixture and changing the
conditions of growth, allowing certain populations to subside and others to ourish.
e yeasts cultivated in the starter then take over, slowly fermenting the sugar to
alcohol, while the lactic acid bacteria then subside. Towards the end of the process,
the yeast will stop multiplying and metabolizing, as the alcohol, if left unchecked,
will eventually become high enough to suppress the yeasts’ activity. is landscape in
kimoto sake brewing undergoes observable changes as its chemistry and microbiome,
its avours and desires, shape each other in tandem.14
ese changes, which
are observable to us at our
own spatio-temporal scale
of experience, suggest that
similar changes may be
happening in landscapes
in umwelten of all kinds,
including our own. It is
often tempting, when
struck by a landscape of
some kind, to imagine it as
timeless, existing unchanged
‘since time immemorial’.
This understanding of
landscape is then often used
variously, for example, to
empty the landscape of
history and human agency,
Figure 7. ‘Changes in microbial population over time’
in kimoto sake brewing (from Daishichi Sake Brewery
<http://english.daishichi.com/theme_park/glaph2.html>).
Food and Landscape
34
a particularly political move when it concerns indigenous peoples, or to naturalize
the landscape as the foundation of certain political projects.15 inking about
landscape with microbes reminds us that change is a part of landscapes at all scales,
and so the question thus becomes not whether landscapes change, but how.
e work of the Mills lab in particular, as we have seen, dissolves certain distinctions,
such as that between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, often invoked in discussions of landscape – a
boundary that often serves as a key hinge in longstanding debates in agricultural history,
domestication, and nothing less than the histories of human civilizations.16 Attending
to microbes, and the agencies of non-humans in general, recongures other deep-
seated distinctions, such as that particularly tough walnut: ‘found’ vs. ‘made’, ‘natural’
vs. ‘cultural’, and all its other guises. Once we concede that landscapes are always
more-than-human, multispecies achievements, intersected with and emerging out of
entangled umwelts all the way down, the question of whether a landscape is ‘found’ (i.e.
‘natural’, ‘wild’, raw, pristine, untouched by human hands) or ‘made’ (i.e. ‘cultural’,
‘domesticated’, realized or sullied by human presence) becomes much less thinkable,
and certainly much less interesting, than the question of who made what and how.
Microbes are excellent companions for thinking landscape dierently. ey help us
to see how humans are not necessarily always involved in making landscape, and that
when they are, their agency is always involuted with the agencies of many others, living
and non-living. is vision of the earth, in which humans are entangled with many
other creatures and forces, indivisible from them yet never master of them, is one whose
time is come, whose potential and potency in the time of the Anthropocene, when
multiple possible futures for life on Earth present themselves with increasing urgency,
we must feel as keenly and convivially and deliciously as possible.17
Notes
1. D.J. Haraway, e Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Signicant Otherness (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
2. J. Dubow, ‘Landscape’, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. by Rob Kitchin and
Nigel rift (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), pp. 124-31.
3. J. Lorimer, ‘Multinatural Geographies for the Anthropocene’, Progress in Human Geography, 36.5
(2012), 593-612 <doi:10.1177/0309132511435352>.
4. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With a eory of Meaning
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A ousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987) <doi:10.1017/CCO9780511753657.008>; Jihai Gao, ‘Deleuze’s
Conception of Desire’, Deleuze Studies, 7.3 (2013), 406-20 <doi:10.3366/dls.2013.0120>.
6. Benedict Reade, Justine de Valicourt, and Josh Evans, ‘Fermentation Art and Science at the Nordic
Food Lab’, in e Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Food and Gastronomy, ed. by Philip Sloan, Willy
Legrand, and Clare Hindley (London: Routledge, 2015), pp. 228-42 <doi:10.4324/9780203795699>.
7. Josh Evans, ‘Faux Foie’, Nordic Food Lab, 2016 <http://nordicfoodlab.org/blog/2016/3/14/faux-foie>
[accessed 15 June 2017].
Microbial Landscapes
35
8. Benjamin E. Wolfe and others, ‘Cheese Rind Communities Provide Tractable Systems for in Situ and
in Vitro Studies of Microbial Diversity’, Cell, 158.2 (2014), 422-33 <doi:10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.041>.
9. Nicholas A. Bokulich and others, ‘A New Perspective on Microbial Landscapes within Food
Production’, Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 37 (2016), 182-89 <doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2015.12.008>.
10. R. Mortimer and M. Polsinelli, ‘On the Origins of Wine Yeast’, Research in Microbiology 150.3 (1999),
199-204 <doi:10.1016/S0923-2508(99)80036-9>.
11. D.J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); D.J. Haraway,
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
12. J. Lorimer and others, ‘Making the Microbiome Public: Participatory Experiments with DNA
Sequencing in Domestic Kitchens’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, forthcoming 2018.
13. Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, ‘Secrets of Sourdough’, Gastropod, 18 December 2017 <https://
gastropod.com/secrets-of-sourdough/> [accessed 20 March 2018].
14. ’e Denitive Kimoto Brewing Compendium’, Daishichi Sake Brewey <http://www.daishichi.com/
english/theme_park/glaph2.html> [accessed 15 June 2017].
15. Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) <doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195142433.001.0001>; Nancy
J. Turner, ‘“Time to Burn”: Traditional Use of Fire to Enhance Resource Production by Aboriginal
Peoples in British Columbia’, in Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacic Northwest, ed. by Robert
Boyd (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1999), pp. 185-218; Brenda Beckwith, ‘“e Queen
Root of is Clime”: Ethnoecological Investigations of Blue Camas and Its Landscapes on Southern
Vancover Island, British Columbia’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Victoria, 2004);
D. Deur and N.J. Turner, Keeping It Living: Traditions of Plant Use and Cultivation on the Northwest
Coast of North America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); Bill Gammage, e Biggest
Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2011); Joshua
Evans, ‘Found Land or Made Land? Indigenous Cultivation and the Politics of Conservation in
the Pacic Northwest of North America, 1778–2017’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of
Cambridge, 2017).
16. I. Hodder, e Domestication of Europe (New York: Wiley, 1991); Helen M. Leach, ‘Human
Domestication Reconsidered’, Current Anthropology 44.3 (2003), 349-68 <doi:10.1086/368119>; Where
the Wild ings Are Now: Domestication Reconsidered, ed. by Rebecca Cassidy and Molly Mullin
(Oxford: Berg, 2007).
17. On the Anthropocene, the proposed new geologic epoch, justied by human traces in the strati-
graphic record, in which humanity has become a planetary force, see: Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F.
Stoermer, ‘e Anthropocene’, Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17-18 <http://www.igbp.net/pub-
lications/globalchangemagazine/globalchangemagazine/globalchangenewslettersno4159.5.5831d9ad1327
5d51c098000309.html> [accessed 15 June 2017]; Lorimer, ‘Multinatural Geographies’; D.J. Haraway,
‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities
6 (2015), 159-65; Lorimer, ‘e Anthropo-Scene: A Guide for the Perplexed’, Social Studies of Science,
47.1 (2016), 117-42 <doi:10.1177/0306312716671039>). For further development of this idea, what Kelly
Donati calls ‘multispecies gastronomy’, see her ‘e Convivial Table: Imaginging Ethical Relations
through Multispecies Gastronomy’, e Aristologist 4 (2014), 127-43 and ‘Towards a Multispecies
Gastronomy: Stories of More-than-Human Entanglements on Small Farms in Victoria, Australia’
(unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Melbourne, 2016).
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Contributors
Lecturer in History and Geography at Dublin City University, Juliana Adelman writes
about the history of Ireland during the nineteenth century.
Volker Bach is a freelance translator, English teacher at a private language school in
Hamburg, freelance historical cooking instructor at Hamburg University English
Department, and the author of e Kitchen, Food, and Cooking in Reformation Germany.
When she’s not travelling, Lucey Bowen lives near San Francisco, where she’s a docent
at the Asian Art Museum and writes about culinary and family history.
Catherine Brown, a Scot who lives on West Coast Isle of Arran, writes about the
nation’s food and drink culture, past and present. She is the author of several books
including a fourth edition of Scottish Cookery, recently revised and updated.
Voltaire Cang is an academic researcher based in Tokyo. He researches and writes about
Japan’s ‘intangible’ heritage, including food and other cultural practices and traditions.
A professor of English and associate dean of McGill University Library’s rare and special
collections, Nathalie Cooke writes about Canadian literature and food history. She is
co-editor of Catharine Parr Traill’s Female Emigrant’s Guide: Cooking with a Canadian
Classic (2017).
A PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University, Edwige Crucifix
explores the intertwining of individual experiences and feminist discourse in nineteenth-
and twentieth-century French and Francophone ction. In her spare time, she travels,
cooks and takes care of her orchid collection.
Joshua Evans is a DPhil student at Oxford, researching the microbiogeography of
translated fermentation practices. Formerly he was lead researcher at Nordic Food Lab
in Copenhagen, where with colleagues he published On Eating Insects.
Jessica Fagin is a PhD researcher in Anthropology at Exeter University. Her research
focuses on foodways in meat through the intersections of craft, manual and rural labour
practices.
Allison Fisher completed an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD at Queen’s
University (Canada). Now an independent scholar based in Ontario, she explores food,
art, and the classical tradition in the Italian Renaissance.
Len Fisher is a scientist, author and broadcaster, whose books range from How to Dunk
a Doughnut to Crashes, Crises and Calamities: How We Can Use Science to Read the Early-
Warning Signs. He won a spoof Ig Nobel prize for using physics to work out the best
way to dunk a biscuit.
Food and Landscape
446
A 2016 Fulbright grantee, Sara Gardner writes about Sephardic culinary heritage and
cultural identity. She received her BA in International Literary and Visual Studies from
Tufts University and currently works for the Hebrew College in Newton, MA.
Christopher Grocock is author of Apicius (with Sally Grainger) and of numerous
studies of the Roman world and early medieval Europe. He is Head of Classics at
Bedales School in England.
Naomi Guttman is the author of three books of poems, most recently, e Banquet
of Donny & Ari: Scenes from the Opera. She teaches literature and creative writing at
Hamilton College, in Clinton, NY.
Hilary Heslop writes about the tensions between food ethics, sustainability, and
consumerism. She lives in Melbourne, Australia.
Ben Houge is a composer and digital artist working at the intersection of music,
technology, and gastronomy. He is an Associate Professor in the Electronic Production
and Design department at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Former professor Sharon Hudgins has logged more than 40,000 miles on the Trans-
Siberian Railroad. She is the author of e Other Side of Russia: A Slice of Life in Siberia
and the Russian Far East, and a new cookbook, T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks:
Cooking with Two Texans in Siberia and the Russian Far East.
Tom Hunter raises grassfed Shorthorn beef cattle and Icelandic sheep on his certied
organic farm in the Driftless Area of southeast Minnesota.
Fozia Ismail is the founder of Arawelo Eats, a platform for exploring East African food
from what’s being served at her supper club to what it means for our understanding of
belonging in a post-Brexit world.
A journalist and author, Aglaia Kremezi introduced Greek cooking to the American
audience with her Julia Child Award-winning e Foods of Greece; her latest book is
Mediterranean Vegetarian Feasts. She and her husband live on Kea, Cyclades, where they
garden, cook, write, and teach cooking to travellers.
Michael Krondl is an artist and author who writes about the history of food, with a special
interest in the cultural role of sugar. Among others, his books include Sweet Invention: A
History of Dessert and e Donut: History, Recipes, and Lore from Boston to Berlin.
Jane Levi, a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, is currently writing about
food and utopias, in particular food for space travel, but her food-related interests are wide
and often historical, including a recent project on foundling food from 1740 to 1960.
Don Lindgren is an antiquarian bookseller and co-owner of Rabelais: Fine Books
on Food & Drink. He is especially interested in evidence of use and the history and
evolution of the cookbook as a physical object.
Contributors
447
Morna Livingston travels the world with cameras, studying cultural landscapes and the
architecture of water. She is Professor Emerita in the School of Architecture and the
Built Environment of Jeerson University.
Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, Mark McWilliams writes
about food and American culture. He has served as Editor of the Oxford Symposium
on Food and Cookery since 2011.
Sandra Mian is a food engineer who works as a consultant for the food industry and
home appliance manufacturers. She lives and works in Canada, Brazil, and Mexico.
Giulia Nicolini holds a Masters in Anthropology of Food from SOAS, London, and a
Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Cambridge.
A French art historian currently working at the University of Italian Switzerland,
Guillaume Nicoud writes about the culinary history of France around 1800.
An Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Vassar College, omas
Parker specializes in early modern literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. His
newest project examines foods that have been marginalized and reappropriated by
dierent cultures throughout history.
Olivia Potts is a food writer and cook. She practised as a criminal barrister in London
before retraining in patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu.
Charity Robey is feature writer for the Shelter Island Reporter, specializing in the
food, culture, and history of Eastern Long Island. A programming chair for Culinary
Historians of New York, she lives in New York City and Shelter Island, New York.
William Rubel writes about traditional food and foodways. e author of e Magic
of Fire, about hearth cooking, and an introductory history of bread, Bread: A Global
History, he is currently writing a history of bread for the University of California Press.
Laura Shapiro is a culinary historian whose books include Perfection Salad: Women and
Cooking at the Turn of the Century and, most recently, What She Ate: Six Remarkable
Women and the Food at Tells eir Stories.
Richard Shepro is an international lawyer who teaches at the University of Chicago. A
scholar of French food history, he has written for the Symposium about seafood, foie
gras, and regulations relating to the threat of mad cow disease.
David Sutton is a literary and archival researcher, Director of Research Projects in the
University of Reading Library, member of the governing body of the International
Council on Archives, and Treasurer of the Oxford Symposium. His books include Figs
and Rich Food, Poor Food.
Aylin Öney Tan is an architect and conservator, writing food columns for Hürriyet
Food and Landscape
448
Daily News and Al-Monitor. She is a winner of the Sophie Coe Award for Food History,
and the author of A Taste of Sun & Fire: Gaziantep Cookery.
Molly Taylor-Poleskey is Assistant Professor of Digital History at Middle Tennessee
State University. She is working on her rst book on food and the rise of Prussia in the
seventeenth century.
Emily Tepe researches and teaches about cold climate horticultural crop production at
the University of Minnesota. She is the author of e Edible Landscape.
Malcolm ick writes on food history, agricultural history, and also dabbles in the
history of science. In 2010 he published Sir Hugh Plat: e Search for Useful Knowledge
in Early Modern London, and he has also written about market gardening around early
modern London.
Amy B. Trubek is the author of e Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir and
Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today. She is the Faculty Director for the
Food Systems Graduate Program at the University of Vermont.
Colin Tudge is the author of Six Steps Back to the Land and co-founder of the College
for Real Farming and Food Culture.
Nicola Twilley is a co-host of Gastropod, an award-winning podcast that looks at food
through the lens of science and history. A frequent contributor to e New Yorker and
e New York Times Magazine, she is currently working on a book exploring the cold
chain and, with co-author Geo Manaugh, another about the past, present, and future
of quarantine.
Anne Urbancic, the Mary Rowell Jackman Professor in the Humanities at Victoria
College, University of Toronto, specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian
literature, which has led her to research the food and foodways of the time.
Susan Weingarten is a food historian and archaeologist living in Jerusalem.
Michael Yashinsky teaches Yiddish language, literature, and culture at the University
of Michigan. He is the co-author of In eynem, a forthcoming multimedia language
textbook, and also writes, directs, and acts in plays and operas.
