Gastronomica

In this episode, Gastronomica’s Alyshia Gálvez hosts historian Camille Bégin in a discussion on a family food archive. Drawing on her recent piece, Bégin stitches together a collage of memories from the 1948-49 letters of her great-grandfather, who traveled through Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as an inspector of the French lycées. Bégin explains how she came to spin a narrative of food, family, and the French colonial empire through her great-grandfather's ephemera and three subsequent generations of family cooks.

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What do eel, pie, and mash shops reveal about London's past, and what role do they play in the current moment? In this episode, Stuart Freedman talks with Signe Rousseau about his research on forgotten foods and changing urban spaces, forthcoming in Gastronomica’s newest issue (Summer 2023). Combining sensory ethnography with the concepts of nostalgia and resistance, Freedman explores working class identity through the social worlds of London's disappearing eel, pie, and mash shops.

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How do online restaurant reviews affect foodways in an emerging migrant destination? In this episode, rhetorician Consuelo Carr Salas and geographer Colleen Hammelman unpack the intersection of digital and physical culinary contact zones. In conversation with Gastronomica Editorial Collective member Jaclyn Rohel, Consuelo and Colleen share insights on tastemaking from their new research on Latin American and Caribbean food businesses in Charlotte, North Carolina, one the America’s fastest growing cities. Drawing attention to the many ways in which customers and restaurateurs use notions of authenticity, they shed light on how people give meaning to new culinary spaces.

HRN is home to transformative exchanges about food. Our 35+ member-supported food podcasts empower eaters to cultivate a radically better world. This month, we’re asking you to join us. Become a monthly sustaining member at heritageradionetwork.org/donate.

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In this episode, Gastronomica’s Irina D. Mihalache talks with Ozoz Sokoh, creator of Kitchen Butterfly and author of the forthcoming book, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025). Ozoz reflects on how movement and mobility have shaped her work, recounting her journey from Nigeria to Canada and from the field of geology to food, and the life stations she’s encountered along the way. The conversation centers the process of creative and curatorial work in food history and storytelling, with a focus on how food connects us. This episode concludes with a preview of Ozoz’s debut cookbook. She shares the joys of living in a diverse city while developing recipes, being able to source ingredients not only from Nigerian grocers but from a wide range of multicultural stores, with similar items, and one of the dishes she's most excited about in the book.

This episode also highlights the 2024 HRN Audience Survey (now open) and the publication of Gastronomica's Fall 2024 issue (24.3): The “Care Work” of Food is now available online.

Photo by Oluwapelumi Bamidele of Ovia Reflex Photography.

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In this episode, Gastronomica’s James Farrer talks with sociologist Pooja Kalita about gender and the labor of food provisioning in Assam, India. Taking the case of pithas – the steamed or fried rice cakes and roasted rice flour rolls that have been traditionally prepared by women – Pooja explores how men became involved in making and selling this everyday food item in the urban marketplace. Drawing on her new Gastronomica article, Pooja sheds light on how care work, trust, and authenticity came to be at the center of these efforts to preserve Assamese culture.

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