Funazushi , a fermented food made with crucian carp, is often described as Japan's most ancient form of sushi. This article evaluates these historical claims and offers some tasting notes, exploring traditional versions of the dish and new interpretations that offer a possible future for sushi. I could never write a global history of sushi without having eaten what has been called the most “ancient form” of sushi, the funazushi found in Shiga Prefecture (Hosking 1996: 43). So on a recent trip to Japan I set aside two days to try to eat as much funazushi as possible. This proved to be challenging for many reasons, not the least of which was the taste of funazushi , which many people find disagreeable. What I learned from the experience was less about sushi's past than a possibility for sushi's future.

The category of superfoods first gained traction in the mid-1980s and has only become more prevalent since. Despite this popularity, contestations exist over the validity of the term, the science behind it, and its utility for consumers. However, systematic and scholarly investigations into the idea of the superfood remain limited. Using content and discourse analyses on global English-speaking news media, this paper examines the breadth of comestibles considered superfoods, the ways in which these foods are being mobilized to address particular health concerns, and the wider socio, political, and environmental contexts surrounding superfoods. Our analysis revealed a total of 217 foods were considered superfoods, and were linked to 71 conditions, that primarily emphasize the ability of individuals to optimize their health by preventing possible future illness. We contend that socio-environmental researchers have much to offer into critical investigations of the superfoods phenomenon.

In recent years, the whiteness of the local food movement has been an increasingly popular topic in both academic and popular discourse. In what ways have those within this movement responded to critiques of exclusionary whiteness and privilege? Drawing on interviews with local food advocates in Kansas City (KC), this article explores the discourses and practices used within the movement in response to questions of equity and racial justice. It argues that in KC, one way that local food movement advocates react to these critiques is by discursively celebrating “diversity”—a response that actually works to further conceal racialized inequality and to maintain systemic white privilege. Within this case study, this “diversity work” took the form of counting and celebrating phenotypic diversity in local food spaces. In KC, this manifests as a celebration of new U.S. immigrants—a form of diversity work that is easier to engage in than calls for deeper, structural changes in the food system. This diversity work, whether intentionally or not, depoliticizes discussions of food systems reform and distances local food advocates from the responsibility to address deeper inequities. Such findings illustrate some of the narratives and practices that help sustain structural racial inequality in local food systems amidst a shifting broader discourse that calls for the dismantling of white privilege within many social movements.

“What is at stake here?” asks Krishnendu Ray urgently, examining the past, present, and future of marketplaces and street vendors. What lessons can be learned from cities in the Global South—from Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, where the desperate actions and activism of a street vendor helped launch the Arab Spring, to Durban, South Africa, where women street vendors forced their way into urban planning by organizing? Ray, a member of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective, posed historical and contemporary questions about liveliness and livelihoods of global cities and what good taste and good food can mean for the very future of democracy when he delivered the 2019 Distinguished Lecture at the annual event co-sponsored by the SOAS University of London and Gastronomica . The recorded talk is available for free at www.soas.ac.uk/about/ . This year, in addition to reprinting the lecture, we extend the London conversation to a global audience, inviting two leading scholars of street vending to respond to Ray's lecture. Sandra C. Mendiola García leads us to Puebla, Mexico, to a marketplace where chiles en nogada become the linchpin of an ebullient flowering of democratic potential. She agrees with Ray that marketplaces are sites not just of capital accumulation but also of critical social infrastructure. Jane Battersby, as well, notes the role of street vending and marketplaces as social infrastructure. Throughout African cities, street vendors, often women, are crucial to urban food security, yet urban planners continue to regard vendors as symptomatic, even causing urban problems. The future of marketplaces and street vending, and with it an element of life in an urban democracy, depends on vendors' abilities to demand collective voices in the planning and governance of cities. Finally, in their epilogue, Noah Allison and Jacklyn Rohel note that these conversations about what they, citing Ray, describe as the “last mile of the food chain” are ongoing. Proposing more expansive definitions of vending, they focus attention on the multiple meanings assigned, globally, to urban street vending and on the ways in which those meanings relate to how cities feed themselves.