This article begins with a parody, a fictitious set of regulations for the production of “traditional” Italian polenta. Through analysis of primary and secondary historical sources we then discuss the various meanings of which polenta has been the bearer through time and space in order to emphasize the mutability of the modes of preparation, ingredients, and the social value of traditional food products. Finally, we situate polenta within its broader cultural, political, and economic contexts, underlining the uses and abuses of rendering foods as traditional—a process always incomplete, often contested, never organic. In stirring up the past and present of polenta and placing it within both the projects of Italian identity creation and the broader scholarly literature on culinary tradition and taste, we emphasize that for so-called traditional foods to be saved, they must be continually reinvented.

Aging farmer demographics and declining agricultural trends provoke policy makers, farmer advocacy groups, and food system scholars to ask, “Who will do the work of farming in the future?” One response to this concern has been the rise of a “beginning farmer” narrative, where the goal of creating new farmers emerges as a key aspirational food systems reform mechanism. In this vision, young and beginning farmers will seize the transitioning lands from retiring farmers and bring with them an alternative system that is ecologically minded, open to new innovations, and socially oriented. Given the flurry of governmental, nonprofit, and private sector activity spurred by this vision, this article asks, what are the ideological drivers of the beginning farmer construct, and what are the consequences for the goals associated with a just food system transition? Invoking the concept of mythology, this article examines the character of the American beginning farmer narrative. The narrative is shown to appeal to a particular land use vision, one based on ideals of individual land ownership, single proprietor farming, neoliberal logics of change, and whiteness. In a sense, the beginning farmer movement embraces a yeoman mythology, a powerful force underwriting the American dream. The consequence of this embrace has problematic outcomes for the transformative potential of a politically engaged beginning farmer constituency. Embracing alternative imaginaries and mythologies may be a first step in forging a new farmer movement that provides equity across socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers.

For more than four decades, a strange story has circulated both inside and outside of the academy concerning a 1970s experiment in which foods dyed strange colors were served under “special” lighting that made them appear normal. When the true colors of the meal were revealed, the experimental subjects became agitated and ill. This article explores the origins of the story and its proliferation in prominent newspapers, magazines, and peer-reviewed journals, and speculates as to the nature of its appeal and endurance.

In the 1970s, Japanese cooks began to appear in the kitchens of nouvelle cuisine chefs in France for further training, with scores more arriving in the next decades. Paul Bocuse, Alain Chapel, Joël Robuchon, and other leading French chefs started visiting Japan to teach, cook, and sample Japanese cuisine, and ten of them eventually opened restaurants there. In the 1980s and 1990s, these chefs' frequent visits to Japan and the steady flow of Japanese stagiaires to French restaurants in Europe and the United States encouraged a series of changes that I am calling the “Japanese turn,” which found chefs at fine-dining establishments in Los Angeles, New York City, and later the San Francisco Bay Area using an ever-widening array of Japanese ingredients, employing Japanese culinary techniques, and adding Japanese dishes to their menus. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the wide acceptance of not only Japanese ingredients and techniques but also concepts like umami (savory tastiness) and shun (seasonality) suggest that Japanese cuisine is now well known to many American chefs.

Worry-nostalgia is a particular iteration of felt anxiety that certain material things and ways of being in the world are slipping away. We suggest that this particular shade of place-based nostalgia, expressed through stress, anxiety, and worry, comes from broader concerns about individual and community health, weight, and well-being, as well as from longing for the relations that made certain foods seem naturally embedded in a particular community and rooted in a specific landscape. We consider and compare three very different ethnographic contexts—suburban parts of Osaka, Japan; peri-urban Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States; and the peri-urban areas around the capital city of Apia, Samoa—to explore the intersection of memory and distress around what people eat and what they think they should eat, in the context of local cuisines that are believed to be fading. This parallel analysis of narratives reveals commonalities in how sense of loss is characterized, highlighting a shared experience of worry-nostalgia generated from the shifting wider global foodscape.

Despite widespread attention to issues of gender and economic exploitation at coffee's agricultural origins, works within coffee scholarship systematically overlook the workers at the final stage of production: baristas, the coffee shop employees who prepare and serve beverages. This article draws from data collected from over four hundred female American specialty coffee baristas to examine how their gender impacts their experiences at coffee competitions. I argue that barista competitions exist in order to legitimize the barista as a type of skilled laborer, but that these attempts rest on highly gendered understandings of skill, professionalism, and performance. Barista competitions attempt to present a unified industry face, but gender remains a salient issue through its unequal presence that renders female baristas as distinct and different from the ideal barista, who is assumed to be male. The conclusions drawn from this case study have broad significance for our understandings of gender and precariousness in the food industry, and the relationship between, and negotiation of, skill and perceived value. The rarefied world of specialty coffee competition magnifies and illuminates extant workplace issues regarding gender, which are characteristic of many forms of low-wage service labor in the United States.

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.