A Moveable Feast

Darra Goldstein is the Willcox and Harriet Adsit Professor of Russian at Williams College and founding editor of the journal Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture--named 2012 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation.

A cookbook author, a lover of food, a pro at helping others to think about food in intellectual ways, Goldstein is also the Jackman Humanities Institute's Distinguished Visiting Fellow for 2012-2013 at the University of Toronto.

Goldstein has been visiting classes and holding lectures across the university. At the downtown campus, she hosted a masterclass discussion on the nature of cuisine and presented a public lecture on the cultural history of the fork; at the University of Toronto Scarborough she visited a life writing class; and at the University of Toronto Mississauga she is set to speak about Russia, the land, and its food. 

Goldstein spoke with U of T News about her work and what she'll be sharing during her visit at the University of Toronto.

How did you become interested in writing about food?

I’ve always been interested in food, and when I started studying Russian in college and started reading Russian literature I was just amazed at the descriptions of the feasting. It was only afterwards, after many years, that I realized part of that had to do with the censorship in Russia—you couldn’t ever write about sex and so it was all sort of sublimated into different kinds of orality, into these amazing feasts. But I also discovered in my travels to what was then the Soviet Union that one of the most immediate ways to connect with people was through food, which was a common language. Even when the linguistic expression would fail, there was always a way to share what they had in their culture with food. And so there was an amazing immediacy to it and that became very interesting to me: food that’s not just for the pleasure of the meal, which is a big part of why I’m interested in it, but also as a means of cultural transmission.

Were you already open to trying to different kinds of foods?

It’s interesting, I have a sister who’s not much older than I am and she’s just brilliant with a sewing machine. She can take a piece of fabric and just turn it into a gown. If I get close to a sewing machine, I put the needle through my finger, so I was always drawn to the kitchen, and my mother encouraged that. But I grew up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, at a time when there wasn’t a lot of diverse food there. So it’s not that I was exposed to a lot, except that she always loved cookbooks, and I would be drawn to reading them, even when I was fairly young, to learn more about other cultures.

And you do have quite a lot of experience preparing food and writing about preparing food…

I’ve written four cookbooks. I’m not professionally trained, but I love the feel of getting my hands in there. I like baking more than cooking actually. There’s a way in which you really can get your hands into it—working with dough, I just love. Shaping it. Seeing the transformation in the oven. I also think I like the precision of it. There’s something about it that’s a very calming activity. And I love the way it smells.

How has working with food influenced your feelings on writing about food?

It has made me more aware of the importance of good writing. I think one of the problems in academia is that in many cases what is privileged is a kind of writing that is exclusionary, using a lot of jargon and making it difficult to understand, because then it somehow seems smarter. And when you’re talking about something as elemental as food, I think it really needs to be infused with emotion and sensory properties. It’s made me much more aware of the immediacy of language and trying to get to what is essential, as opposed to abstraction, which is the mode of writing we’re often trained in, in graduate school.

I was reading about a project in which you were studying food as an agent for peace. Can you tell me about that?

You know, there was just an article in the Radio Free Europe newsletter about how a “food fight” is raging in the Caucasus among the Turks, Armenians and Azerbaijani because UNESCO has designated a certain dish in Turkey as an item of cultural heritage, and the Armenians are saying, “that’s our dish!” What we were trying to do at the Council of Europe was look at all of the countries that were signatory to the European Cultural Convention, which was celebrating its 50 year anniversary back then in 2005, and look at the way in which they shared certain culinary practices and certain foods. There are all these derogatory terms that have to do with food: for example, in English they used to say “frogs” referring to the French or “krauts” talking about the Germans. The point was, instead of thinking about something that marks the other as a kind of negative, food is a wonderful way to show commonalities and bring people together. If they can understand that there are affinities in the most basic ways that they can break bread together, then there is a greater hope for tolerance.

You’re leading a masterclass at the Jackman Humanities Institute called “You Call That Cuisine?” where graduate students and faculty from a variety of backgrounds will be involved. What’s going to be discussed?

I was trying to figure out what would be interesting for people who are coming from so many different disciplines talking about something that everyone can weigh in on. And I thought, one of the things that interests me in particular is this idea of what constitutes a cuisine—when does it move from being what anthropologists might call “foodways” or “the diet” of a certain group of people, to something that gets this higher term of “cuisine,” which somehow elevates it from just being eating for survival? I thought it would be interesting to explore that from different perspectives. One reading is by the anthropologist Sid Mintz, who argues that there’s no such thing as American cuisine, and you can actually take the word “American” out and substitute “Canadian,” because I think the two countries are very similar in that they have very distinctive regional and, for lack of a better word, “ethnic” traditions, but overall what distinguishes them—is there something you can call American cuisine? Is it what’s been sent out throughout the world via MacDonalds? Whereas there’s another article by a sociologist at Columbia, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, about the building of French national identity precisely through cuisine and that even though everything begins with the local, the regional can only be given meaning when you place it in context of something that subsumes the region.

Tell us about your public lecture, The Progression of the Fork: From Diabolical to Divine.

I worked on an exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum that was shown in 2005, called Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, and it looked at basically knives, forks, and spoons and other serving implements, first, in terms of design and their artistry, as beautiful objects, but they brought me in as a cultural food historian to talk about their uses. When they first asked me to be involved, I was like, “'The fork?' I don’t know…” But it’s fascinating. It really reflects the whole history of the civilizing process and how we distanced ourselves from our food. Now, of course, we’re returning to eating with our hands with tapas and everything else. But for so many centuries, there was a process of becoming ostensibly more refined by learning how to use the implements, which is actually quite difficult if you’ve ever seen a child try to learn how to use the fork. It had to do with a position of power—only the elite used forks in the West, in the beginning. They weren’t used in any widespread way until the second half of the 19^th century in North America. People were just using knives to spear their food. It’s a fascinating social and cultural history through the fork.