Food and Space Archives - Food, Fatness and Fitness

Everybody enjoys ice cream. When spring arrives, sunshine fills a city’s streets. As temperatures rise, summer is in sight. This blog post offers a historical perspective on ice cream. It reflects on an account that observes conditions of living and practices of food consumption in the Hanseatic middle class—while talking about ice cream. In 1801, the medical practitioner Johann Jakob Rambach published the book Versuch einer physisch-medizinischen Beschreibung von Hamburg (trans. Essay on the Physical-medical Description of Hamburg), writing about ice cream consumption as a rather new gastronomical fashion that affluent bourgeois people celebrated: In this blog entry, I use Rambach’s account of the alimentary, physical and socio-topographical urban landscape of the city of Hamburg around 1800 to offer a…

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Underutilized, neglected, orphan, emergency, miracle, or super crops – these are labels and terms one can find in academic debates and marketing campaigns of so-called superfoods. Superfoods are crops that are celebrated for their high nutritional value and “curative properties.” They are often linked to indigenous communities, traditional practices and a unique place-based history. In recent years, the interest and enthusiasm for superfoods increased: A variety of food products such as chia seeds, moringa and quinoa were marketed globally as superfoods, which fundamentally affected and destabilized the local food systems these foods had been embedded in. Superfoods are often imagined as problem solvers; specifically development experts and the tech sector see them as promising solutions in addressing various issues such…

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Like today, in the 1940s and 50s plenty of people in Appalachia—a mountainous region in the eastern United States—enjoyed eating ramps, a pungent wild onion that reaches its prime in April. But that consumption meant something very different in 1950 than it does in 2023. In the mid-twentieth century, foraging for the first wild greens of the season was a sensible, healthy thing to do, even if it meant you smelled like ramps for several days. Yet that lingering scent indicated a lower-class status, since it implied an inability to access and purchase fresh vegetables. Conversely, in 2023, eating ramps signals insider foodie status: they are the height of trendy eating for many Americans, Appalachian or not. This April, University…

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John Egerton writes in Southern Food: On the Road, at Home, and in History that “the [U.S.] South, for better or worse, has all but lost its identity as a separate place.” However, Egerton quickly turns to food as one of the last distinct markers of Southern identity: “But its food survives — diminished, perhaps, in availability and quantity, but intact in its essence and authenticity — and at its best, it may be as good as it ever was” (3). For many folks who identify as Southern, cuisine is all that remains that makes Southern culture unique after cutting out all the problematic elements of an economy and culture built on enslaved labor, a history of racial violence and poverty, and other regressive…

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In the 1970s, Christmas Eve was divided between extremes. First, we had Toast Hawaii, like many other Germans in the Federal Republic: take a slice of sandwich bread, cover it with ham and a wheel of canned pineapple, top it with a slice of gleaming yellow processed cheese, bake it, and stick a bright red maraschino cherry in the resulting crusty indentation. Arranged on bread that, according to ‘low-food biographer’ Carolyn Wyman, was “tamed to be more palatable to a broader range of people from … the small kid to the adult,” Toast Hawaii was the stringy glue that held our nation together. An exotic feast for eyes and palate, it created a sense of belonging against all odds, even for a ten-year-old like myself.…

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Food, Fatness and Fitness

Critical Perspectives

Category Food and Space:

Ice Cream in the Belly: Johann Josef Rambach’s Alimentary Topographies of Hamburg around 1800

Rich People’s Food? Changing Food Landscapes and the Need for a Critical Discourse on Superfoods

Appalachian Food: From Denigration to Veneration

Keep Southern and Cut the Fat: Negotiating Identity and Authenticity in Diet Cookbooks

The Toast Hawaii / Pumpernickel Divide