Simona Stano starts us out at Food for Thought thinking through the conference’s symbolic image: as a rubik’s cube, a puzzle to figure out together. 
This image is also an attempt to conceal food’s materiality (flavor, texture, substances) and meanings under a common “form,” which is impossible given food’s breadth and diversity.
This slide summarizes who we all are presenting at this conference and our topics and goals for the two days to come.
In this morning’s plenary, Ugo Volli examines the semiotics of alimentation, asserting that the social rules that seek to civilize food and eating (manners, eating times/spaces/company, tools/cutlery, recipes, menus, etc.) serve to mask the inherent violence of food and eating.
Lisa Jacobson explores how whiskey circulated as cultural currency in the 1950s and 1960s, drawing from Ernest Dichter’s motivational research conducted for distillers and liquor distributors.
Jacobson shares with us Calvert’s taste test from 1953, which sought to elevate and redefine post-war whiskey from its harsh (and untasty) wartime sensory memories.
Dichter’s consumer interviews reveal ideas about whiskey and bourbon linked to prestige, pleasure, taste, and quality; race (whiteness); age and ritual; class and personality; moderation, control, respectability, and excess—all part of proving and performing masculinity.
Raffaella Scelzi presents on “gastrophonia,” which synthesizes sensory experiences and data (e.g. the vibrations of plants which can be translated as musical major/minor tones) with bioscience, taste, perception, semiotics, and communication.
Now we have a plenary lecture from @FParasecoli, who @ABentleyNYC introduced as like Dos Equis’ “the Most Interesting Man in the World” to much laughter and agreement.
In Poland, @FParasecoli explores food traditions old, new, and invented within the context of a relatively new consumer society where older food culture is both desired and disdained in the forging and negotiation of a newer “foodie” culture and its media landscape.
To explore this @FParasecoli considers theories of (1) revaluation, from ecomomic sociology and (2) design, in terms of producing future attitudes (future of food and Poland) more so than simply designing material objects.
Poland has a very complicated national history and identity, @FParasecoli shares, which shapes its current food culture and ideas about was is traditional and what isn’t.
Revaluation and design make us consider the thingness of things, especially with mediated foods; how they affect us; how we co-produce meaning and feeling together on product labels, in reclaimed ag spaces like barns/farms, on the plate, on Instagram, etc.
- @FParasecoli
- @FParasecoli
Francisu Sedda presents our after-lunch plenary on what “su porceddu” (roasted suckling pig, a dish with a very long history in Sardinia) teaches us about food’s symbolic value and meaning through a series of five relations:
Sedda sets out a framework for studying an object’s meaning in the present and across not just decades or centuries, but thousands of years. (He also shows us these fascinating skulls, how *much smaller* piglets are in Sardinia due to the “islandness” of the place.)
Cristina Greco examined if Saudi Arabia's cosmopolitan & multicultural food is really Saudi food, w/in the context of national goals/plans for growth. Henry Peck examined sweets in Tripoli, Lebanon. These traditional, craft food makers embrace history as they change to survive.
Dafna Hirsch examined increasing chicken consumption in Israel & if/when it counts as meat, while Bonnie Miller shared how rice become a dietary staple in the US in the postwar period as a food to express consumers' worldliness, but not within racist implications, e.g. Uncle Ben.
In our last panel, Laura Prosperi presented from her historiography of food waste, focusing on food loss (the food that is wasted during production & distribution) in the 17th and 18th centuries. The majority of food waste, now and then, is food loss & not b/c of "bad" consumers.
Next @suzannecope_phd presented from her preliminary research on the revolutionary feeding practices of the Black Panther Party and how they shape today's ideas about food as political discourse.
Daniel Thoennessen, an @NYU_NFS MA student, presented on astounding early 20th C chicken theft laws in the U.S. south. These included chicken stealing alongside murder and rape as a conviction worthy of sterilization, or worse—an expression of racialized political violence.
Looking forward to day two of the @NYU_NFS Food for Thought Conference today! At almost the exact time I normally teach #foodxmedia, I'll present a taste from chapter three in my book, Diners, Dudes and Diets: Gender and Power in U.S. Food Culture and Media.
