Immigrant Foodways Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

Charlotte Biltekoff in a recent blog entry notes, “The foodworld is abuzz with the promise of transparency.” The premise is that new trends in food marketing better inform consumers about where and how their food is produced. And as Biltekoff considers, transparency creates further complexity. Certainly, “eating local” similarly supports the notion of transparency in the food system. My objective here is to examine how urban branding around “eating local” shapes the urban landscape. I focus on the city of Sacramento, California to illustrate the ways in which the city council and restaurateurs tacitly employ the notion of food transparency to upgrade the urban landscape to accrue capital. In 2013, Mayor Kevin Johnson declared Sacramento “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital.” The marketing…

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The burek – a pastry made of phyllo dough with various fillings, well-known in the Balkans, in Turkey (bürek) and also in the Near East by other names – probably arrived in Slovenia in the 1960s. Industrially, the most ambitious of the Yugoslav republics, Slovenia needed a workforce. And with that workforce – immigrants from the former Yugoslav republics – came the burek. To paraphrase Max Frisch: We called for a workforce and we got bureks! But the burek might have remained unknown to the majority of Slovenes if not, in the 1960s, “foreign” burek stands (run by Albanians from the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia) appeared in various Slovene towns with high concentrations of immigrants or soldiers. Until the…

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Chop suey is unknown to most Chinese other than those from Kwantung Province. However, it was this cheap and simple dish that became the icon of Chinese food in the U.S. before the advent of new Chinese immigration beginning in 1965. But why was it chop suey that became so important out of the rich repertoire of Chinese cuisine? What was the social and cultural context that facilitated the popularity of chop suey? Chop suey first made its presence felt in the U S in the late 19th century. At that time, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese immigrants were expelled from lucrative jobs and forced to enter the service sector. Many Chinese chose to work in the restaurant industry.…

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Until today German-style beers, beer gardens, and festivities such as the Bavarian Oktoberfest enjoy a high reputation overseas. However, according to the Beer World Cup – one of the greatest of its kind taking place every two years since 1996 – the best German-style beers are not brewed in Germany but by US-American breweries. In 2010 the gold medal in the category German-style Pilsner went to the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company in Chico, CA. And while last year the Private Landbrauerei Schönram in Bavaria brewed the best Pilsner its brewmaster Eric Toft is an American. Moreover, the gold medals in the categories Kölsch, Düsseldorfer Altbier, Schwarzbier, Märzen, Münchener Dunkel, and (Mai)Bock all went to US-American firms. It seems that German…

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On March 27, 2015, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) issued a press release about a new campaign against hunger. It announced a partnership with the Tyson Foods Corporation and the Roadrunner Food Bank in Albuquerque, New Mexico to provide more proteins to Native American and Mexican American children. Neglecting commercial interest of the Tyson Food Corporation, the press release describes the campaign as neither an act of charity nor a political protest but as an educational act: eating right as an issue of self-advancement. Why feeding hungry children is also a civil rights issue, the blog of the Roadrunner Food Bank reveals: In the section “Stories from the hungry” we get to read about Michael. Michael (whose…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Immigrant Foodways:

Constructing a Farm-to-Fable

Burek? Nein Danke

Why did Chop Suey become the Icon of Chinese Food in the U.S. before 1965?

German Gemuetlichkeit 2.0

Eating Right and Civil Rights: How Debates of Hunger in America Shifted from Disease and Delinquency to Civil Partaking