My favourite Dumpster is locked.

I’ve been coming here for a few years, but now the lid is closed, and there’s a cable lock threaded through it to keep scavengers out. Scavengers like me.

The author researches the Burrito Dumpster, 2011.

Until now, I’ve poked happily about in the soggy detritus without obstacle. Hiding in plain sight at the end of a gravel driveway, outside the chain-link fence of a warehouse in Seattle’s industrial district, the Dumpster always promised at least a few unopened bottles of top-dollar organic fruit smoothies to the intrepid Dumpster-diver. Mango Madness. Orange Carrot. Hermetically sealed and conserved by Seattle’s frigid night air, they were nonetheless too close to their sell-by dates to be worth shipping, so they ended up here. On the right night, there were hundreds of them. There probably still are.

So why lock them up? My research with Dumpster-divers and grocers in Seattle and other cities around the US, Canada, and Australasia, explores the politics and the cultural economy of waste—particularly food waste. It echoes John Steinbeck’s dry observation of depression-era surplus and scarcity in The Grapes of Wrath: “The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price.” According to the USDA, for example, 5.4 billion pounds of unspoiled food are discarded by US merchants each year. A simple thought experiment and some rudimentary economics suggest that, if these edible surpluses were given away indiscriminately, the principles of supply and demand would undercut food prices. To paraphrase Steinbeck: Who would pay five dollars for a smoothie when they could pull ten of them out of the trash for nothing? In other words, what we throw away remains significant in its absence.

Of course, Dumpsters are not locked out of sheer Machiavellian cunning. Nor is food discarded with a calculating twirl of the capitalist’s moustache. Rather, food is wasted because it circulates according to its exchange value rather than its use value. Eleven perfectly good eggs and one cracked one are no longer legible in the way an intact dozen is, for example. And a bruised apple merely takes up space on a shelf next to another perfect one. A thing’s exchange value is, by definition, reckoned through comparisons. The apple that won’t sell, or won’t sell quickly enough, disappears from the shelves to make room for newer stock. So right up until the point of sale (or disposal), its value is virtual. Like Schrodinger’s cat, its fate waits upon one decisive moment.

Of course, what makes that moment decisive is the finality of the Dumpster—the “point of no return” in the social life of a thing. In other words, most people are averse to digging through the trash. And for this reason, businesses often don’t see a need to lock up their waste. Increasingly, however, Dumpster-divers are showing up on their radar. For many of Seattle’s Dumpster-divers, for example, the aforementioned “Juice Dumpster” had become as much a household name as the company’s brand name itself. (Along with the “Chocolate Dumpster,” the “Burrito Dumpster,” etc.) Until now, they didn’t trouble the distributor enough to lock it up. I’ve known Dumpster-divers to openly clamber into it in front of the employees—I even once met a sanitation worker who saved some bottles for himself before emptying the rest into his garbage truck. However the popularity of this Dumpster has grown over the four years in which I’ve been conducting this research. And recently, a threshold has been crossed. Dumpster-divers I have interviewed in other cities have told me similar stories—of certain Dumpsters’ high profile and their consequent enclosure.

The proliferation of locked Dumpsters, then, may be proportional to the growing public profile of Dumpster-divers’ cultural and political activities in general. From the appearance of subcultures like freeganism which embrace Dumpster-diving, squatting, and other modes of surplus living, to movements like Food Not Bombs and Occupy Wall Street which depend on free access to food, space, and other resources to take direct political action, urban scavengers represent an ongoing effort to turn commercial waste into new kinds of food sovereignty, non-market value, and political influence.

This raises a variety of questions about the ways in which businesses, governments, and the scavengers will respond to each other. It seems likely that more Dumpsters will be locked up, for one thing. In turn, Dumpster-divers have always been creative about gaining entry. They’re bound to become more creative. I’m left wondering what will become of my favourite Dumpster.

A few days ago I provided a shout-out about Food Stamped to several listserves (including SAFN). In that email I wrote:

“I’d like to provide a big shout-out for the recent documentary “Food Stamped.”

It’s a movie made by a couple in Berkeley about trying to live on a food stamp budget. She teaches food education and healthy eating in elementary schools. In the movie they interview quite a lot of folks about food stamp use, from people reliant upon them to members of congress. It’s 1 hour long, which makes it do-able for many classrooms.

I particularly liked their relatively non-judgmental attitude about food choice, especially since they live in Berkeley (epicenter of foodie-ism) and were shopping at the Berkeley Bowl and Adronico’s, my old stomping grounds. In other words, they come from an area that in my experience is very, very judgmental about food choice, yet much of that is left out or reflected upon in a meaningful manner by the filmmakers. They discussed the issues of ‘healthy choice’ within the context of budget constraints in a way that was very accessible and allows for a great deal of classroom discussion, especially since they lay out their own biases verbally so that the viewer can understand how they are thinking through the issues.

A particularly strong scene involved trying to feed a Shabbat guest on a budget, since they made the comment that all people like to have guests and be social, and so it’s important to think about how food poverty affects social opportunities.”

The responses to my post have been interesting, from emails from people who have seen the film (and like it) to a spirited discussion initiated by a fellow who, having seen the short trailer (and only the short trailer), wrote a couple of long emails about how the filmmakers had essentially gotten it all wrong, although bully for the effort. This prompted a civil response from the filmmakers (delivered by an intermediary) to which our fellow responded yet again, with the same basic message. He did mean well, but his response demonstrated just how contentious food issues can be, even for people who more-or-less agree with each other.

The bottom line? This film uses the idea of a low budget (in this case, one derived from food stamp benefits) to explore eating healthy on a small and fixed income. The filmmakers use themselves as guinea pigs and rely on realistic cinema techniques to demonstrate to the viewer how they think through and act upon trying to eat on a restricted budget. They discuss the process with people from the community, lawmakers, and those reliant on food stamps.  Of particular interest to them is how people can eat a healthy diet and remain healthy on such a restricted budget, and they focus on the ugly fact that cheap food is often unhealthy, yet within the budgets of the poor. With this frame they examine school food and the decisions made by school administrators about how to feed children. They are refreshingly free of anger, judgmental attitudes, and smugness throughout the film which is yet another reason that I think it’s an effective teaching tool.

A few of the discussion points that I intend to raise in class after showing this film include:

• What is a healthy diet? Is their ‘healthy diet’ your ‘healthy diet’?
• How much do we each spend on food weekly/monthly?
• How and why is healthy food more expensive than unhealthy food, according to the movie?
• Do you find that to be the case when you shop?
• What are the aims of the Food Stamp program?
• Are families meant to survive on a Food Stamp budget, or are there assumptions built into the calculations that posit other food income as well?
• Do we as a society, acting through our government, have an ethical responsibility to make sure people can eat? Why or why not?
• If you were a nutritionist and were advising a diabetic client on Food Stamps what would you suggest he/she eat and why? How would you work out a budget with that client?
• Do you have the skills to shop and cook as wisely and carefully as Shira and Yoav did?
• Do you know enough about food and cooking to live on a diet of beans and rice?
• What kind of knowledge do you need to acquire in order to feel comfortable about planning meals on a small budget?

Obviously, these are just my first thoughts and jottings about how to use the film in teaching. But part of the reason that I think it’s such a valuable film is that I realized that I have NO IDEA what I spend on a weekly or monthly basis for food for my husband and myself. I have a big freezer and tend to plan and buy so that my larder (protein and grains/beans) can feed us for several weeks without shopping; only vegetables and dairy are purchased on a weekly basis (and at a pretty reasonable farmers’ market). My meat is all pastured, as are eggs and dairy, so I know I spend more per pound than most Americans. However, we also eat less meat/dairy than most carnivores so I figure it evens out. And I like rice and beans, and eat that way by preference, while I know that most Americans prefer meat to beans and prepared carbs to simple grains. I do know how to budget, I do know how to cook and I never waste food (because I am really, really cheap), but I am quite sure that eating on a food stamp budget would be difficult indeed.

The other discussion point – and I’m not yet sure how to frame these questions – is tied to the assumptions and contentions about food choice, knowledge and capacities. I am often gobsmacked by the tendency of food people to insist that their way – and only their way – is the good way to eat. Obviously, I like this movie because the filmmakers don’t do that… but the Listserve response has had a wee tinge of that sentiment. Food is so personal and intimate, and choice so tied to identity (especially in our capitalistic society) that people are naturally heavily invested in justifying their choices as ‘good better BEST!’ to themselves and others. But seriously, the vehemence that many bring to this issue baffles me. Somehow, I suspect that this film – and the student response to it – will allow us to discuss this difficult issue in the classroom. And I hope by doing so the students are able to begin to glimpse how their biases channel their beliefs about food and nutriture.

An excerpt from the upcoming January 2012 SAFN column for Anthropology News

Photo credit: David Shankbone

By now most readers are likely familiar with the Occupy Wall Street movement. What few are aware of, however, is the central (yet contested) role that food has come to play in the identity of this protest movement.

Anthropologists and other social researchers have long understood that the relationships between food identity, and politics are complicated. Such is the case with the Occupy movement as well. As Carey Polis points out in her Huffington Post piece on food, politics, and Occupy Wall Street, “like the sometimes nebulous demands of the protesters themselves, there is not a consensus in regards to how food should be eaten, prepared, or even protested against.” (www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/occupy-wall-street-food_n_1007172.html)

With companies like Ben and Jerry’s and Katz’s Deli among the companies providing food to support the protests, the movement is increasingly becoming known for the quality and quantity of food available. For example, in an October New York Times article the author stated, “The makeshift kitchen has fed thousands of protesters each day. Along the way, it has developed a cuisine not unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement itself: free-form, eclectic, improvisatory and contradictory.”

Discussions about Occupy Wall Street’s food consumption are often highly politicized, however. While supporters of the movement say that the availability of locally grown organic produce, and the movement’s ability to create diverse meals out of donated food represents a response to genetically modified and processed foods (see www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/10/occupy-wall-street-zuccotti-food-activist_n_1085111.html); detractors highlight the hypocrisy of anti-corporate protesters who gorge on pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, eat at McDonalds, and use the free bathroom at Starbucks. In the midst of this debate, the multinational companies marketing fair trade and social responsibility have an opportunity to bolster their public relations campaigns by affiliating with the Occupy Wall Street movement, and may benefit from the lack of an organized response to their affiliation by protestors.

The relationships between food, identity and the Occupy movement will surely evolve quite rapidly over the coming months. What are your perspectives on the role of food and consumption among the various Occupy movements? Do you think that multinational corporations are using the Occupy movement to market their products?

Photo by David Beriss

Should the slaughter of horses for food be permitted in the United States?  This question was raised recently when the U.S. Congress passed legislation that would permit horse slaughter in the U.S. for the first time since 2007. Back in 2006, Congress passed a bill that prohibited the USDA from inspecting horse slaughterhouses, which effectively stopped all horse slaughter in the country. This November legislators passed a measure to allow inspections to restart.  President Obama signed the bill and inspections (and thus slaughter) are again legal.  So far, no horse slaughterhouses have opened.  But it could happen and if it does, it will be controversial.

The first thing Americans often ask when they hear about horse slaughter is whether or not horse is actually good to eat. At the risk of being called horrid names, let me confess that I have eaten horse—in France, where they serve horse and have specialized “boucheries chevalines”—and I don’t remember anything special about it.  It was much like beef.  Horse is consumed in many countries in both Europe and Asia.  Anthropologists who visited Montreal in November might have tried the steak tartare at the “Frites Alors!” Belgian-style French fry chain there, which is offered in both beef and horse versions. According to the 1988 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique, steak tartare is prepared with horse “according to the purists” and in Belgium is known as “filet américain.”

This seems quite ironic since Americans generally do not eat horse. In fact, horse meat has not been consumed in the U.S. in any regular way for a very long time.  At the end of the Second World War, when beef was scarce, Americans resorted to horsemeat and Republicans ran against “Horsemeat Harry” Truman.  Again in the early 1970s, when beef prices skyrocketed under the Nixon administration, people tried horsemeat, a trend illustrated on an episode of “All in the Family.”

Today eating horsemeat  is very controversial, to the point that activists object to any law that would allow slaughter, even for consumption in other countries.  But with plenty of affordable meat in the U.S., the debate now is not really about food.  It is about a series of other issues, ranging from how Americans classify and treat animals, to how they evaluate the social and political organization of society.

There have been many controversies regarding the humane treatment of animals in the past several years.  Foie gras is one such item, condemned because of the manner in which ducks and geese are raised to produce very fat livers.  Similarly, veal is often reviled because of the treatment of calves prior to slaughter.  I suspect, however, that most opponents of these foods do not object in principle to the consumption of these animals.  If it were possible to obtain foie gras or veal without inhumane treatment, they would probably cease to object to consumption (read here about humane veal and here about humane foie gras).  Ducks, geese, sheep, and cows are all seen as livestock, raised to become food.

People have, of course, long raised objections to animal slaughter in general.  Watch, if you dare, this short 1949 documentary by French filmmaker Georges Franju, “Le Sang des Bêtes.”

It starts out like a surreal film of life on the edges of Paris, but quickly becomes a meditation on the slaughter of animals, including a horse. It is graphic, bloody and full of death.  It is worth considering, along with the conditions in which cows, sheep and poultry are raised for mass consumption in the U.S. today.  Why do horses stand out amidst the larger problems of our industrialized meat production system?

Horses are not seen as livestock.  At least not by anti-slaughter activists.  One might invoke the history of horses in the American imagination, associated as they are with everything from Paul Revere’s ride to the Wild West.  The terrible fate that awaited unwanted, lame or old horses was always the glue factory, not the slaughterhouse.  That was bad enough.  Click here to view an early Popeye cartoon about a rescued glue factory reject. Eating horses has not been central to the American equine imagination in quite a while.

Yet horses are not exactly pets either, at least not like cats and dogs.  They are still working animals, racing, pulling tourists, herding cattle, etc.  We name our horses, cats and dogs and tend to see them as having a closer relationship to us than livestock.  Horses seem to fit somewhere in between pets and livestock, neither edible nor entirely part of the family.

American horses become food when something else breaks down in their relationship to humans. They are unable to continue their other roles, due to age or infirmity. Or their humans are unable to continue to support them.  One of the motivations behind lifting the ban on horse slaughter inspections was a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office arguing that the same number of horses that had been slaughtered prior to the ban were now being shipped, often in difficult conditions, to Canada and Mexico for slaughter there.  In addition, with the recession, the number of cases of neglect or even abuse of horses has increased significantly in the U.S.  Horse rescue organizations are overwhelmed and unable to meet the need.

The GAO report recommended, among other things, re-establishing slaughter inspections as a way of addressing this problem.  This suggests that we think differently about horses, even if we do name them.  When people abandon dogs and cats, we do not slaughter them for human consumption.

It is worth noting that the debate around horse slaughter has taken on some of the same terms and concepts used in other political debates in the U.S.  For example, a video on the United Horsemen web site, a pro-slaughter group, asserts that “saying that the slaughter of horses for human consumption is wrong because we do not eat it ourselves…shows how far this country has fallen.”  They go on to claim that suppressing slaughter is the same thing as suppressing freedom.  This is, if I am not mistaken, Tea Party language.

Similarly, opponents of horse slaughter draw on the language of the left to make their points.  The Humane Society recently issued a call to action that could have come from those denouncing the banking industry, arguing that “the predatory horse slaughter industry has cash signs in its eyes, and it’s unrestrained by any compassion for these creatures. Its profiteers treat the horses like commodities on the hoof.”

Freedom horses. Horses as commodities. Somewhere between livestock and companions, horses may not be food for the American table, but they certainly show us a thing or two about how Americans think.

picture by Elizabeth Danforth

The average hunter is white, rural and male.  His father hunted, and he likely hunts close to home.  This description perfectly describes my husband, although he also tracks the mileage of his meals, knows more about local microbrew seasonals than field dressing a deer, and is married to a nutritional anthropologist.  This weekend, for the first time ever, he’s joining his dad and uncles in Iowa’s early shotgun deer season.  My husband is part of a slowly growing segment of the local food movement which has begun to explore hunting as part of the larger local food movement.  As of yet however, this movement has been reticent to embrace hunting as an integral part of sustainable eating.  Authors such as Michael Pollan have ventured into hunting to provide anecdotal examples in popular media, but the concept has been largely ignored elsewhere, most notably by anthropologists.  A quick search of recent anthropological articles related to hunting supplies a multitude of articles related to Inuit groups, Amazonian small land holders, and indigenous Nicaraguan communities. However, anthropologists have provided virtually nothing related to the 12.5 million people who currently hunt in the United States (US Fish and Wildlife Service. 2006. National Survey of Fishing, Hunting, and Wildlife-Associated Recreation).  In one of the few ethnographies of American hunting culture, Marc Boglioli highlights the traditional anthropological division between the ‘noble savage’ and the ‘ignoble Westerner’.  Researchers and the public-at-large celebrate animist spirituality of indigenous hunting and traditional subsistence patterns in the ethnographic other, but run from the modern American hunting industry and “you might be a redneck if…..” jokes.  (You might be a redneck if…..you’ve even been involved in a custody battle over a hunting dog.)

Despite the lack of anthropological interest in modern American deer hunting, it has the potential to be an important and powerful part of the local food movement and sustainable food systems.  The white-tailed deer population in the United States was decimated by the beginning of the 20th century.  In the intervening 110 years, this population has grown exponentially.  According to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, left unchecked, which it largely would be without hunters, deer populations can double about every three years.  Human management of deer is essential to modern herds.  More than 300,000 deer live in my home state of Iowa before one third are culled every hunting season.  The vast food resources and essential ecological management provide important opportunities to address the pillars of the local food movement.

While deer hunting has been largely ignored by anthropologists and sustainable food system advocates, several interesting ventures do exist.  These include Deer Hunting for Locavores, a class tailored to urbanites who grew up outside of traditional American hunting culture and who are searching for local food options.  Another is the Bull Moose Hunting Society.  This group aims to expose urban foodies to wild game food resources, reconnect urban eaters to nature and recenter hunting as an essential part of local sustainable food systems.  Deer hunting is also an important contributor to local food security through venison donation programs, which exist in all 50 states as well as several areas in Canada.  These programs provide existing hunters with the opportunity to hunt more and reduce waste.  They can have a powerful impact on food security.  For example, 1.1 million meals were donated through the Iowa DNR’s Help Us Stop Hunger (HUSH) program.

Within the local food movement, there is the need to explore the many logistical and cultural issues surrounding deer hunting.  These include the cultural acceptability of venison as a food resource among food aid recipients, safety concerns of lead shot, and the cost and training required to hunt, as well as cultural constructions such as gender and ethnicity in relationship to hunting.  Additionally, the cultural divide between traditional American hunters and the more cosmopolitan local food movement locavores is important to understand in order to combine the two in a sustainable marriage that highlights and celebrates both as valid cultural traditions worthy of anthropological inquiry.  Maybe then my husband and I won’t have to answer our foodie friends’ inevitable questions, “he’s doing what?” and “are you OK with this?”

•    The ASFS Book Award recognizes an outstanding book about food published within the last two years.
•    The Belasco Prize for Scholarly Excellence recognizes a peer-reviewed article published in the last two years, which exhibits superior research, a unique perspective and methodological approach as well as novel insights for the study of food.
•    The ASFS Award for Food Studies Pedagogy is given to the teacher of food studies in any discipline who presents a course that uses innovative and successful pedagogical techniques to reach students.
•    The Alex McIntosh Graduate Prize recognizes a student’s contributions to the fields of food studies.
•    The Bill Whit Undergraduate Prize recognizes a student’s contributions to the field of food studies.

In addition to the prestige, there are cash prizes for all of the winners.

The deadline for all award submissions is February 1, 2012.

For submission information, please visit: www.food-culture.org/awards.php

If you have any questions about the awards or the submission process, please contact the awards coordinators:

Book, Article, Pedagogy: Beth Forrest

Student Papers: Riki Saltzman

Schwartz's in 2008, photo by Alan Nash

“What should I eat in Montreal?”

As if answering your question, Calvin Trillin, in a November 2009 column in The New Yorker, acknowledged the reply that most Montrealers would likely give when he remarked “smoked meat was probably Montreal’s best-known food…”.

Similar august endorsements will answer your obvious follow-up question, “where’s the best place to eat smoked meat?”

“When you’re in Montreal, you must go to Schwartz’s” opines The New York Times (a headline that I have been unable to track back to the original – but come from a poster on the wall of the restaurant itself).

Small wonder, perhaps, that Schwartz’s restaurant has recently been the subject of a stage musical (called – yes, you’ve guessed it — Schwartz: The Musical) that ran in Montreal’s Centaur Theatre to packed houses in early 2011.  I have the t-shirt.

As the place for the food, the epicenter of smoked meat in the city, there is no doubt in the minds of many that Schwartz’s is Montreal. Certainly, it fits the bill of an “iconic food” – to borrow Jennifer Berg’s helpful term – and, as an iconic food becomes one that we do not have to eat (or like) before we will recommend it to others. Like the newspaper headline, smoked meat has passed into legend and becomes a marketer’s dream.

If, after a visit to Schwartz’s cramped 61-seater diner-style restaurant on St Laurent Boulevard, you still have the stomach for further questions, they are almost certainly going to be “What exactly is Montreal smoked meat?” “What’s the difference between Montreal smoked meat and New York pastrami?” and “Which is best?”

Photo by Alan Nash

I won’t answer that last one — on the grounds of personal safety — but as to the historical background of this story, I can turn to Eiran Harris, perhaps the authority on Montreal smoked meat.

In an interview in Cuizine, he ascribes smoked meat’s origins to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who, in the late nineteenth century, brought with them a familiarity with the meat known as pastrami in Yiddish. Once in Montreal, he notes, two ways of making smoked meat developed. The ‘dry cure’ used the brisket, a cut of meat taken from a steer’s forequarters, which was then rubbed with salt and spices and left to soak for between 12-20 days, before being smoked for six hours. A subsequent development, the ‘wet cure’ reduced the soaking period to about four days to speed things up, and one final innovation, “steaming” the meat for three hours, replaced volume that the brisket had lost through curing. For the record, Schwartz’s (established in 1928) uses the traditional “dry cure” with a final steaming before slicing and serving.

Oh – and how is it different from pastrami? Let me turn to Montreal food writer and Montreal Gazette columnist, Bill Brownstein, who is brave enough to record a view on this contentious matter. He writes that Montreal smoked meat “can be differentiated from pastrami or corned beef by its higher ratio of fat and spice, which connoisseurs will attest accounts for its superior taste’ (2006, 17). Be that as it may, just for the record, there are some basic differences between the two. “New York” style pastrami, according to Bacon’s entry on the subject in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, uses plate rather than brisket – a superior cut of beef  and one usually dry-rubbed with a mixture of spices and then refrigerated for up to ten days before smoking.

Debates about smoked meat in Montreal are always hard to settle, but no one doubts that the secret of Schwartz’s success must lie in a heady combination of its ability to serve top-quality smoked meat, and the publicity that has come to surround both the food and the place.

You should try some.

Reading/References:

Bacon, J. ‘Pastrami’, in Smith, A.F. (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. New York: Oxford University Press, vol. 2, 2004, 240-241.

Berg, J. ‘Iconic Foods’, in Katz, Solomon H. (ed.), Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. New York: Scribner, vol. 2, 2003, 243-244.

_____. ‘From the Big Bagel to the Big Roti? The Evolution of New York City’s Jewish Food Icons’, in Hauck-Lawson, A. and J. Deutsch (eds.), Gastropolis: Food and New York City. New York: Columbia Press, 2009, 252-273.

Brownstein, B. Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen: The Story. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 2006.

Harris, E. ‘Montreal-Style Smoked Meat: An interview with Eiran Harris conducted by Lara Rabinovitch, with the cooperation of the Jewish Public Library’, Cuizine: The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures vol.1 no. 2, no pagination [e-journal article accessed on 2 March and 8 April 2010 at www.erudit.org/revue/cuizine/2009/v1/n2/037859ar.html] .

Trillin, C. ‘Canadian Journal: Funny Food’, The New Yorker (23 November), 2009, 68-69.

Fairmount Bagel Bakery

Forget about the rivalry between the New York Rangers and the Montreal Canadians, or between the Cortland apple and the McIntosh apple, or between the Met orchestra and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. All these do not matter! What really matters is the rivalry between New York bagels and Montreal Bagels. Now, that is a serious thing to argue about! You did not know Montreal had bagels? We may be Canadians, Eh! but we have bagels too!

These bagels are symbolic. To start with, Montreal bagels have big holes. Not ordinary holes but holes with meaning. You see, we like big holes in Montreal: be it the city finances, or the Big O (the O shaped Olympic stadium that looks like the big hole of a urinal), or the island of Montreal, itself a hole in the St-Lawrence river, or the pot holes we have in our streets all year long, holes matter here. Good bagel holes have got to be big too! Then of course, there is the matter of the chewy dough. We have plenty of things to chew on: the corruption in the construction industry; the highest income tax in all the Americas; the Plan Nord that is selling our wood away; and of course, the winter that lasts forever. No wonder our national animal is the beaver! Chew is what we do! But then of course Montreal bagels are sweeter, boiled in honey-sweetened water and always cooked in wood-fired ovens. And there are plenty of things we are sweet on: the green spaces in the city; the majestic beauty of the St Lawrence river; bilingualism and the exhilaration it brings to some of us; the café-terrasse culture; the safety of the streets; the walkability of this city; the friendliness of people, and of course, the McIntosh apple, the Canadians and the MSO!

St-Viateur Bagel

Montreal bagel aficionados know their bagels and the true amateurs are divided between two groups of faithful bagel eaters: Those who prefer the Fairmount Street Bagels  and those who prefer the St-Viateur Street Bagels. All others are pale copies and do not measure up in quality. Some enlightened New Yorkers have come to their senses and affirm a preference for Montreal Bagels. Some even developed an expertise in these matters. For instance, my New York friend Bambi prefers the St-Viateur version while my New York friend Kate prefers the Fairmount version. Be they from Fairmount or from St Viateur, nothing beats fresh bagels bought in the middle of the night, after a party or a late movie, from a tiny shop with a roaring fire oven, when the stomach reminds the mind that food is needed, or when the mind reminds the stomach that food is wanted. Like a proud Montrealer, I truly prefer Montreal Bagels, complete with big holes, piping hot, right out of the wood oven, covered with roasted Sesame Seeds, chewy and sweet.

SAFN is sponsoring or co-sponsoring the following sessions this year:

• Breaking Bread with the State: Exploring Food, Diet, Economy, Politics, Identity and Citizenship (3-0865)
• Changing Contexts and Responses to Food Insecurity (4-0935)
• Feeding and Food among Babies, Children, and Adolescents (5-0135)
• Before the Baby Comes: Dietary Provisioning During Pregnancy (5-0725)
• The Working Animal Body: Recovering and Suppressing Visceral Traces (5-0990)
• Taste the Difference: Food Futures and the Politics of Eating (and Writing) Food (6-0120)
• Anthropology of Wine: Ethnography from the Vineyard to the Glass (6-0570)
• Food and Identity: Are We What We Eat? (6-0575).

We have two invited sessions:

• Traces of Resilience: Food Security and Wellbeing over the Life Course (5-0430; Saturday, November 19)
• Ethnographic Approaches to Food Activism: Agency, Democracy, and Economy (5-0805; Saturday, November 19)

There will also be a panel discussion on the “Immense New Challenges to the Future of Food: Reports from the AAA Task Force on World Food Problems,” led by Sol Katz (2-0590).

Please check the AAA website: (http://aaa.confex.com/aaa/2011/webprogrampreliminary/start.html) or meeting guide for up to date information on the times and locations of these sessions. As always, check out our blog: http://foodanthro.wordpress.com/ and feel free to send us blog contributions. We love to highlight members’ work, ideas, thoughts, etc.

The Food Studies Program and the Institute for Advanced Study at Indiana University are pleased to announce a one-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in Food Studies sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through their Sawyer Seminar program.  One Fellow will be selected on the basis of accomplishment, promise of excellence, and relevance of their research and interests to the 2012-13 seminar theme: Food Choice, Freedom, and Politics.  (Follow the link for more information on the seminar theme and plans.)

The postdoctoral fellow will assist the seminar organizers in planning, and will then participate in, a year-long seminar on food choice, decisions, and diet, which will involve scholars from a wide variety of disciplines.  The seminar is aimed at provoking new thinking about how “choice” is conceptualized in different scholarly traditions and how these different perspectives can promote understanding about food behavior. The fields will include economics and psychology where the focus is the individual, cultural anthropology, and sociology, which embed choice in cultural, social, and ethnic collectivities, and biological anthropology and evolutionary psychology, which seek an underlying adaptive basis for food preferences. The postdoctoral fellow will also assist in planning two conferences associated with the seminar, one on emerging models for interdisciplinary food studies, and the other on translating food choice research into public policy. Both will include experts in food studies from around the world. The fellow will also have time to pursue his or her own research and writing projects, and should describe these research goals and how they connect with the rich community of food scholars at IU in the letter of application.

Fellowship begins 1 July 2012.
Eligibility: Ph.D. between 1 July 2007 and 30 May 2012.
Compensation: $46,000 plus full benefits
Application Deadline: January 31, 2012

To apply, please email the following items to Ivona Hedin, Academic Specialist, Institute for Advanced Study:

1.  2-3 page letter of application explaining the link(s) between your research and the 2012-2013 theme, outlining the research to be undertaken during the fellowship

2.  full curriculum vitae

3.  names and email addresses of three referees.

4.  graduate school transcript

If you prefer, you may mail the above items to the Institute for Advanced Study, Poplars 335, 400 East Seventh Street, Bloomington, IN  47405, Attn: Food Studies Postdoc Search.

For more information, contact seminar organizers:
Richard Wilk, 812-855-3901.
Peter Todd, 812-855-3914.
Website: http://www.indiana.edu/~foodsci/

Indiana University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.  Women and Minorities are Strongly Encouraged to Apply.

Posted by David Beriss