If the term anniversary is meant to commemorate a significant occurring X number of years ago, then this Gastronomica issue, 25.4, sums up a year-long celebration of our inaugural annum. Twenty-five years ago, a professor then known foremost for her work in Russian literary studies and Georgian foodways, launched a new journal devoted to all things food. There were extant cookery magazines aplenty in the mainstream, a handful of academic journals investigating the human cultures and behaviors circulating around food, and at least one publication includ ing memoirs and scholarly musings along with recipes. Gastronomica would be all those things, be it via borborygmi, punning on stomach growlings, musings on what food has wrought, or ruminations on an immigrant’s first contact with their new homeland’s dishes, poems on pantry staples, photographs of vanished markets, and thickly researched essays on small producers, historical matters, or individuals. For many years, then, Gastronomica has functioned as a cornucopia, if not literally a horn-shaped vessel brimming with delectable items. Within its hold, the journal nonetheless brings together a veritable collation of meals, if in textual guise.
This issue thus references and celebrates a quarter century of an idiosyncratic—the word used by Darra Goldstein in her first editor’s letter—and unique journal. Gastronomica was, and remains, a provocative miscellany—a collation of academic essays, poetry, compelling visuals (whether photographic or painterly), memoirs, book reviews, and some pieces that might yet be described as unclassifiable. Currently edited by a collective, nearly all employed in academia, we meet virtually, with members joining in from multiple continents. Some things about our journal may have changed over time but our intent—to showcase intellectually engaged writing and images about food, its production, and eating, and of course the cultural byways around them—has not. Concerns about processed and fast food persist, as do reflections on what it means to be commensal, various musings on one ingredient or many, the challenges and achievements of the people who raise the food we all eat, and the local and global spaces in which all of these colliding and complementary stories take place. Our cornucopia is a kaleidoscope with shifting visions mixed up and recombining familiar elements in new ways. Quarterly, Gastronomica brings together complex collaborations, quite powerfully in this our anniversary year.
Anniversaries look backwards as well as forward, of course: we perform our editorial sankofas—an Akan word meaning to go back so that one can move ahead—so we may make sense of where we are now, a move nearly impossible without knowing where we have been. Therefore, we begin this issue with commensality, a keyword in food studies, one whose valences shift with the cultural moment, the historical period, and the geographical place. “At the Table’s Edge: Returning to Commensality after 25 Years of Gastronomica” is a transcript of an event that took place in December 2024 at the University of Toronto that brought together many members of Gastronomica‘s Collective: Daniel E. Bender, James Farrer, Lisa Haushofer, Eric C. Rath, Jaclyn Rohel, Signe Rousseau, H. Rosi Song, Robert T. Valgenti, Janita Van Dyk, and Rafia Zafar. With a group so diverse in academic training—not to mention riding our individual hobbyhorses—we ranged widely, with commensality in dining seen as a marker of racial attitudes; as revelatory of fifteenth-century Japanese attitudes about social behavior when drinking; as consideration of how eating alone might signal dominant social attitudes; or thinking how much recipes leave to our imagination (or ethics). And those reflections were but a few of the ways we saw commensality shaping our societies. Humanity prevented and yet persistent is explored in Signe Rousseau’s photo-essay “Each One, Teach One.” Poignantly, the incarcerated of South Africa’s Robben Island could be said to face an impossibility of commensality, until their determination to create new bonds, within a system doing everything it could to make their world inhumane, reshaped our conceptions of the word.
Not every story about food turns on the table or consumption. Two essays herein contemplate history divergently. Historian of wine Daniel E. Bender presents us with a sobering (couldn’t resist) dilemma: how might we taste wine in fifty years if we have already seen in the last two decades how the practice of judging terroir has shifted significantly in a world where climate has become a known unknown. Environmental changes have already noticeably impacted not only the cultivation and growing of grapes but also their literal aging: What will we mean when we judge a wine’s character in half a century? Smithsonian curator Paula L. Johnson pulls the curtain back on Gastronomica‘s visual front door: how do we settle on the images—arresting, melancholic, intriguing—that set the issue’s tone before the reader has even scanned the first block of text? Her discerning eye provides the first taste of the readings that follow, a visual sense that has made the writing emblematic issue after issue.
Irina D. Mihalache reconstructs her pre-Communist homeland not through archives or first-person accounts, but through perusing the editions of a nearly century-old cookbook. By reflecting successive historical moments, Carte de Bucate provides a culinary window into successive iterations of Romanian identity, whether in its richness or its scarcity. On another continent, Samantha L. Martin looks at another locus of culinary identity, the corn palaces of the Midwest and West. Taking seriously what have too often been viewed as amusing Americana, Martin, an architectural historian, sees more than a simple celebration of a North American staple: corn and its imagery stand in for New World classicism (see this issue’s striking cover), American expansionism, or consumer boosterism. The truism that food defines identity—we who eat corn, we who eat Romanian dishes—can also be contested: what appears self-evident in one arena can be rejected in another. Anita Mannur’s journey through the ivory tower—whether in food studies or Asian American studies—shows that the realm of the gustatory can be contentious at the same time academia demands new interpretations and fresh insights. Why, she queries, are we still questioning the culinary in literary studies, or the literary in foodways?
This issue also underscores that what’s old is always new again, as when Garrett M. Broad revisits the debates around “good” and “bad” nutritional guidelines, a discourse he first limned with Adele Hite in Gastronomica 14.3 (2014). If a dozen years ago, those seeking to promote the parameters of a healthy diet—while US obesity skyrocketed following the introduction of the Healthy Eating Pyramid—we’re no closer today to agreed-upon recommendations. NOVA, a newer set of nutritional parameters, targets ultra-processed foods, yet nuance still awaits, to the detriment of the public. Lisa Haushofer takes on a different aspect of the nutrition discussions by invoking the commonly held belief that close attention to nutritional building blocks—say a vitamin or an ingredient—makes or breaks dietary wellness. Crucially, she cautions that future nutritional wisdom should incorporate multiple disciplines and forms of knowledge, be they scientific, humanistic, or social scientific. As an African American studies professor venturing into dietary education, I discovered some of the pitfalls Broad and Haushofer offer; my medical school colleagues and I deployed scientific and cultural knowledge together to reach regular folks. And in an evocative essay on “sense-memory” in Unani, one of the oldest systems of medical practice, Ishita Dey calls for an intersection of approaches as well. By joining with artist Seema Kohli, Dey enacts a critical crossroads, capturing how sense memory, botanic ingredients, and gender roles allow a deeper understanding of therapeutic practices in India and the larger world.
Because food encompasses more than vitamins, fats, protein and carbohydrates, we include essays on what dining and procurement means. James Farrer’s rumination on cosmopolitan meals, past and present, in the so-called West and the so-called East, takes as its fulcrum a dish of lemon chicken and its disappearance to mull over shifting geopolitics. Presidents Trump and Xi may turn away from internationalism and toward national pride, but culinary adherents to cosmopolitanism persist. Krishnendu Ray makes the surprising case that government intervention during the COVID-19 pandemic saved dining out in New York City (and elsewhere). An unprecedented injection of federal support, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, while certainly misused by some large actors, as per concerns on the left, brought the government into the business of saving small businesses, to the ire of some on the right: Why not have it both ways? Jackie Rohel charges us to count co-creation as an aspect of commensality, observing that the bringing together of various actors and agents over and about food expands our notions of coming together. To that end, community-engaged research exemplifies this broader notion of meals acquired and taken together, with that most twenty-first century venue, the podcast, standing out as an appealing source for commensal ponderings of farmer’s markets, entrepreneurs, and civic planning.
At some moments, academic language and institutional communication falter and new concepts must be initiated. Caribbeanist Alyssa A. L. James was driven to create new methods of making her ethnographic practice evocative of a fraught history. Water, fire, air, earth compose her Black Atlantic anthropology of Martinique’s colonial and present-day coffee industry, a decolonial narrative in verse form. Eric C. Rath’s view of another island nation contemplates what happens when beverages like sake or specific social practices are designated as unique to Japan’s cultural heritage. Can one measure a dish or production method’s authenticity, when chefs travel internationally and “traditional” items start to appear thousands of miles from their origins? Perhaps on a globe with increasingly porous borders, our ideas of thinking about what and how a nation’s food is constituted needs to expand.
By now dear reader, you have noticed that this issue proposes much in the way of gastronomic reflections. Helpfully, H. Rosi Song, Daniel E. Bender, and Janita Van Dyk offer a few road maps on how we in food studies can proceed. With an opportunity to bring together faculty and students who come from institutions where food studies as such has no presence, these colleagues built a workshop that offered models for creating and recreating this polyglot discipline of ours—one writing prompt at a time.
Whether as members of Gastronomica‘s Editorial Collective, current or past, returning scholars or both, the writers of this issue engage with food cultures, history, and commensality. The contributions herein are a horn of plenty, with the various disciplinary perspectives standing in for the fruit, flowers, and nuts in the traditional vessel. And, as always, a tasty array of book reviews rounds out the issue—our usual lagniappe. Ably and aptly, the contributions singly and together present a look for ward to Gastronomica‘s next quarter century. With two and a half decades of perceptive writing and images behind us, we look to the encounters, experiments, and achievements ahead of our next, big, fiftieth anniversary. To cornucopias past, pres ent, and future!
—Rafia Zafar, New York City, August 2025