As my final semester, I am taking an Anthropology Fieldwork Lab on food waste on campus. This class has encouraged me to critically examine the root causes of food waste.Our reflective assignment could be anything from an essay to a piece of art. Here is my work!
As the title of my piece of art suggests, there was a lot to digest about this course. It all starts with entering the field at the top of the small intestine, where I had to contemplate reflexivity and as Anthropologist Ashanté Reese spoke to, what “elsewheres” I brought with me; which included growing up in an Italian household and science background.
As my final semester, I am taking an Anthropology Fieldwork Lab on food waste on campus. This class has encouraged me to critically examine the root causes of food waste.
Throughout our exploration of food consumption behaviors, one of the prevailing themes that surfaces is food as a relationship. People engage with food in a deeply intimate way, investing emotions, socialness, time, and money in planning, expecting, cultivating, provisioning, cooking, eating, and ultimately dispensing it, in one form or another. It is simultaneously an extremely personal, yet sometimes taken-for-granted, relationship. My memory harkens back to Prof. Stanton’s imagining the personification of the refrigerator, crying for attention. Pieces by Evans, Martínez, and Larkin have been guiding forces in this relational framing of food and individuals in the broader context of agribusiness agendas. After stewing over these anthropologists’ arguments and the transcripts and discussions of my classmates, I radically integrate this relationship as a cycle of abuse, sometimes unbeknownst to the victim themself.
Figure 1. A work in progress: my attempt at blending Evans and Martinez’s perspectives of food as a relationship with the stages and characteristics of the cycle of abuse.
My figure attempts to visualize this relationship in the three stages of an abusive relationship: honeymoon, tension building, and acute explosion. When creating this schematic, it was difficult to discern who is the victim and perpetrator. In general, I associate the victim with consumers, inspired by how Martínez argues that people’s conception of waste is synonymous with failure and disrespect, writing that “when people and places become associated with waste, they may be seen as waste themselves, disposable and superfluous, reduced to zero value” (346). This is helpful in paralleling how in being associated with waste or abuse, victims are zeroed and therefore de-humanized. While not the central focus of my memo, it is worth noting that the Earth is a victim of this abuse as well. At times, however, the consumer can also be a perpetrator. Most glaringly, I think of how my faculty interviewee said, “I tend to abuse prepared foods to be honest with you [due to convenience and ease].” The perpetrator can be food as a singular ingredient, as memorialized by my eggplant field notes, or as one of Chung’s interviewees said: “I found a, like, a molding zucchini—like it was turning *black*. Um, I didn’t know that that could happen. I was a little scared.” This demonstrates an Acute Explosion of an ingredient going bad, with the victim feeling understandably “scared” by the transformation of a once-seemingly-innocent zucchini. Expanding beyond a singular ingredient as an “abuser”, it is important to zoom out to identify other potential “perpetrators”. As Princess Diana said about her impending divorce in her notorious BBC interview, “There were three of us in this marriage.” The third entity in this marriage is infrastructural agribusinesses – corporations so humongous and omnipresent, to the point that we as consumers oftentimes do not even recognize them. In fact, many times, victims do not even identify the perpetrator as an abuser, unconscious of their coercive behavior.
Is it just me or is the world entering a new renaissance once again? Luckily Firenze is known as the jewel of the Renaissance, and was the city my brother and I reveled in over the summer.
During our three day stay, we rounded up several restaurants, but perhaps more importantly, gelaterie. Off we go!
As mentioned in my post of Milano, I love seafood and pasta. Burro e Acchiuge (translating to butter and anchovies) has a fanciful way of interweaving seafood into classic pasta dishes. Take for example my dish: spaghetti with anchovies, pine nuts, and black bread breadcrumbs (15€). It doesn’t sound like it would work, but the earthly sweetness of the pine nuts is surprisingly magnificent with the salty anchovies. The breadcrumbs added the crunch I didn’t know I needed. My brother’s dish was linguine with cooked and raw shrimp and lime (18€). For a rather unadventurous eater, he loved his dish so much he considered getting a second. In a joint conclusion, we believe Burro e Acchiuge had the best calamari (15€) we had ever tasted.
As a “from scratch” person, one of my passions is meeting and supporting other “from scratch” communities. The beauty of Italy is that there are many of them. In my recent trip to Italy, I visited the two basic ingredients of a proper salad: olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Andiamo!
After three years, I have finally returned to the Motherland: Italy. My 10 days in Italy were filled with family – including meeting the newest addition and my love, Noah (above) – and naturally, many many delicious eats. Throughout my time away, I’ve been recreating Italian dishes, from my go-to dinner of spaghetti aglio e olio to sweeter creations like my creamy tiramisu cups (gf + v). As always, I meticulously planned several restaurants to hit during my time in Milan, where my grandparents live.
I’ll admit this: I’ve been craving spaghetti alle vongole for months now. So getting this dish right was a top priority for me on Day One. Since we arrived to Milan during Fer Agosto – a time when most of Italy is on vacation – only a limited number of restaurants were open. Luckily, the Fisherman Pasta was one of them.
This summer, I had the most incredible experience. After blind calling the Cleveland Clinic’s Integrative Medicine department back in January, I was lucky enough to experience an internship with them, and through that, explore Cleveland. Admittedly, I used to hold a limited attitude on the Midwest, particularly Ohio. While joyous over the Cleveland Clinic, I didn’t have any expectations for the Cleveland food scene … Well I was severely mistaken. Not only is Cleveland bountiful in creative bites, but it is also home to – dare I say – one of the best Neapolitan pizzas in the country.
The way I approach my restaurant selection is alarmingly similar to that of a research essay. I confer multiple sources – Google, Yelp, Instagram – and observe the comments, before landing on where to go.
At my storage unit facility in New Jersey, there’s a Neopolitan pizza truck, Jim Coponi. Oddly enough, in scouring through Vero’s tagged instagram, Jim Coponi proclaimed this as the best dough in the United States. That was enough to convince me to go.
This semester, I took a class called “Cities and Food” as part of my Nutrition minor. An anthropological class at heart,one of our readings was about Food Not Bombs (FNB), an organization that shares free vegan meals as a protest to war and poverty. For this assignment, we were tasked to focus on one aspect of David Giles’ work.
Fueled by his ethnographic observations in the Food Not Bombs (FNB) organization, in A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People (2021), David Giles’ framework targets ideas of abject capital, strategies of municipal governance, and emergent forms of resistance in an urban context. In the introduction, Giles shares how global cities, which are aspirationally global and performative by nature, are transformed by a spatial division of labor, further fueling precarious relationships between the haves and the have nots – the very people FNB is trying to feed. His work’s pathos speaks to the buoyancy and solidarity of such agents of change. Giles frames the “ingredients” of the FNB community as forces of representing and publicly mobilizing insurgent citizenship, in an attempt to ultimately heal the collective relationship between city governments and their communities of need.
What are the ingredients for such change and why are they opposed by public officials? FNB is a collection of both human and culinary ingredients that would, in posh terms, not be considered the cover models of a “global city”. Instead, as Giles explains, many FNB collaborators are affected by drift and displacement, including migrant service workers, formerly homeless people, young students, and more (16). Therefore, part of the threat of FNB’s collaborators is that they are unconventional in their humanity; at the end of the day, they represent everyday people, who cook healthy vegetarian food for the homeless, in shared, public spaces. For cities that seek fashionable hegemony and sleek landscapes, these globalized urban ideals are challenged by people who acknowledge, give, and need help, as signs of powerlessness are to be sequestered out of sight; efforts to help people in need highlight an inequity and therefore exposes a weakness of the global city complex, ultimately compounding existing tensions between local governments and the homeless. FNB’s perhaps “undesirable” ingredients contribute to what Giles calls “antifragility”: “They grow larger and more robust under pressure, even as specific individuals and instantiations are neutralized” (176). Interestingly, FNB’s “antifragility” which is strengthened by a web of diverse, enthusiastic, and compassionate people, fundamentally contrasts the otherwise fragile capitalist structure of current global cities that struggles to otherwise feed its people, even during non-crisis times.
This semester, I took a class called “Cities and Food” as part of my Nutrition minor. An anthropological class at heart, one of our assignments wasto write field notes on a food provisioning experience. Luckily, I had a reservation at one of my favorite restaurants (possibly ever).Enjoy!
A friend’s birthday called for a special celebration – and ethnographic adventure – at the restaurant Sarma. I was going to be not just a consumer, but a diligent observer of the dynamics and atmosphere of what is considered to be one of Boston’s hottest restaurants. Again, the line between Boston and Somerville is rather fuzzy. The first thing that hits you about Sarma is the juxtaposition of its unassuming location and bustling indoor nature; “Despite the fact that Sarma is hidden behind Somerville High School in a nondescript part of Winter Hill, the colorful dining room is packed every night and perpetually booked a week or two in advance,” The Infatuation writes in a review. In fact, my friend Sam’s first remark is: “It’s behind Somerville high school?”. Sarma’s location lends itself to have an under-the-radar, uptown-goes-downtown quality. In fact, due to limited parking, most people seem to have Uber’ed or Lyft’ed there, as recommended by the restaurant’s push notifications. The mere location is an example of urbanization and globalization: behind a high school of a town that used to be known as “Slumville” by locals, exists a high-end restaurant that cooks Middle Eastern inspired dishes. It sounds contradictory. Eater magazine also reveals the Somerville area’s urbanization, stating: “The Oleana [restaurant] empire has expanded to Somerville’s Winter Hill.” As for cuisine, the restaurant’s website highlights how the Head Chef, Cassie Piuma, wanted to cook her version of modern Middle Eastern mezze in a casual, upbeat, neighborhood setting. Sarma does not claim to be explicitly Middle Eastern, as the menu’s complexity (including Italian, Japanese, and Greek ingredients) reveals. Furthermore, while this layered international cuisine is being brought to an unlikely location, it is essentially only for the elite to experience. Despite “casual” being one of the restaurant’s aspirations, the menu’s pricing ends up resembling those of a steakhouse.
The restaurant is packed, even thought it’s 7:45PM on a weekday. The average Sarma-goer is a middle aged professional accompanied by either their significant other or group of friends; Sam and I are certainly the youngest, but everyone is so entranced by the menu and food, so we don’t stick out. While Sarma is a rather expensive restaurant, most people are dressed casually, with men sporting zip up sweatshirts, and women wearing jeans and a simple blouse. Donning jeans, a satin shirt, and a velour blazer, I feel a bit overdressed. Pre-pandemic, certain restaurants would outline a dress code, and I wonder if Sarma ever had one; at the same time, Boston, in comparison to other cities, is more cerebral. After all, millionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s trademark zip up sweatshirt look was debuted in Cambridge. This is quiet wealth, I suppose.
This semester, I took a class called “Cities and Food” as part of my Nutrition minor. An anthropological class at heart, one of our assignments was to do a “thick description” of Boston’s Public Market and Haymarket. This included taking field notes, talking to vendors, and soaking up the scene. Read below for my theatrical take of the two markets!
To an outsider, the neighboring Boston Public Market (BPM) and the Haymarket almost appear to be synonymous. Despite their proximity, the markets are rather different. In the following analysis, I will delve into how the markets emulate a theatrical experience in their own ways to expose the evolving identity of Boston. Considering my habitual food provisioning joint is Stop & Shop, upon entering these different markets, I immediately feel like an actor shapeshifting into two divergent characters. This temporary metamorphosis, along with Jennifer Clapp’s framing of individuals as “actors” in the food system (2014), prompted the questions: how are consumers and vendors passive or active actors in this system? In particular, are there scripts one is expected to follow, which ones are said, and what happens if you don’t follow it?
By virtue of the theater analogy, the Haymarket can be likened to an immersive theater experience, where the audience (customers) become actors, and scripts mesh with improv.
Kayla steps into the market and is jostled into the spiralized jungle of sensory overload.
Vendor A yells (left stage): “2 (cartons) strawberries for $5! $10 at stores!”
Seconds later, the Vendor B bellows (right stage): “3 (cartons) strawberries for $5!”
Kayla’s head darts left to right.
Both on the vendor and consumer side, this is what the market does: bring out your Darwinian avatar for a chance to win at the survival of the fittest. As such, there is a multi-level competition at play. Firstly, part of the adrenaline rush is navigating swarms of people, whilst maintaining an eagle eye and mental tab of stalls with the best looking and best pricing of each produce. None of the stalls are labeled, so one must condition for the mental acuity of a memory map and precise facial recognition. Secondly, it’s a gritty experience that instigates a desire to score and earn the best deal that intersects a fine balance of freshness with cheapness. As a consumer, I flock to the cheaper priced produce, quickly assess and snatch the best looking of the bunch, and pay with cash without fumbling my physical money; I want to play “the efficient consumer” that vendors expect. Thirdly, the vendors not only compete with themselves, but also supermarkets – perhaps the “Radio City” equivalents of this theater parallel – which reveals an interesting stratification of individual vendors versus corporate ones. Flipping through a town newspaper or even Youtube, consumers can find coupons for the supermarket and even videos of new international imports (like Biscoff). The Haymarket vendors must prove not only to each other, but to the consumers of their uniqueness – all without the formal advertisements, labeled structure, and big bucks that supermarkets have. Intangibly, the words they choose sell.
