Editorial

I am grateful to the Food, Culture & Society community for welcoming me into your fold as the incoming editor-in-chief. Megan Elias and Stephanie Borkowsky have established an incredible legacy of a global ethos in their time, and we hope to build on that in the best ways possible.

My first issue as EIC is eclectic yet indicative of emerging and ongoing issues in food studies, and its intersections with identity, culture, and the economy. Gvion’s article examines how Tel Aviv’s vegan restaurants enact individualised good citizenship, while Reiher looks at Berlin’s Japanese restaurant entrepreneurs and how they negotiate with authenticity and the demand for vegan food items. Onorati and d’Ovidio elaborate on a study that considers sustainable food consumption in Italy during COVID-19, and Peeters et al report on another insightful study into the gendered aspects of meat consumption. Gender and food are further seen to come into play in Nabeesa and Prasanna’s work that shows the changes in the gendering of food production in the home and related links to consumerism in Kerala, India, and in Barnes’s article which detail how ‘digital foodscpaes’ in Japan entail the precarious labour of mothers and maintains problematic ideas of good mothering.

Themes of food and tradition are brought to the fore in Azhari et al.’s article on how cultural identity is represented in four Melaka Portuguese cookbooks in the Malaysian context, and in Tran’s work which draws on ethnographic observations and local literary works to unpack how Hanoi in Vietnam has come to represent taste and tradition. Class differences are the focus of Goszczyński and Śpiewak’s study of an alternative food network in Poland, and of Paredes’s article on food delivery services in Japan and how particular cooperative models offer social connection for women.

Also packed into this issue are articles on colonization, and on the use of land. In the case of the first theme, Carney writes on the settler colonial logics at play in the Pacific Northwest beer industry, and VanWinkle explores how ‘good food’ trends like kale displace indigenous food knowledge and techniques. For the second theme, we see Castello et al. draw on narrative approaches to understand foodstuffs as commons in Catalonia and Sweden, and Reedy unpacks a complex ‘fusion’ food culture in Alaska that must be made visible in order to be protected.

Book reviews in this issue similarly explore interconnected themes of globality, consumption and cultural connection in Sameness in diversity: food and globalization in modern America, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, Globalizing Organic: Nationalism, Neoliberalism, and Alternative Food in Israel, and Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?. Finally, documented traditions are re-visited in reviews of Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue and Tea in Australia: A History, 1788 – 2000.