Both tomatoes and recipes are relatively recent British imports to the Indian subcontinent. Neither was commonly used by locals in the region until the late 1940s. Yet in less than a hundred years, the tomato has become an everyday ingredient in the Indian pantry, and Indian cookbook writing and food blogging has become a multimillion dollar industry. This essay explores the rapid incorporation of the tomato as a staple crop in the Indian culinary lexicon and the ready acceptance of the recipe as a modern technology of food preparation in the twentieth century. The two historical examples allow us to examine how taste is produced, and how it endures and shifts in new cultural contexts and geographies. In doing so, the essay expands extant theories of taste beyond the common frameworks of social aesthetics and cultural capital to consider additionally taste’s imbrication with mediation and affect.

Over the past decade in Japan, consumption of raw chicken dishes increased after the government placed restrictions on raw beef and pork. This article explores the lax regulations on raw chicken, a high-risk food with a devoted following, especially among young consumers in Japan. Historically, raw chicken was mostly limited to particular regions and breast meat, but it has recently expanded more broadly throughout Japan and encompasses riskier cuts from internal organs. Drawing on government statistics of food poisoning, I analyze trends in documented incidents, geographic variation, and demographic composition. I then contextualize these trends through interviews with hygiene division officials in Saga Prefecture and Miyazaki Prefecture, two prefectures that employ different strategies to reduce their high rates of food poisoning from raw chicken. This analysis of raw chicken in Japan illustrates the need to go beyond superficial encounters with unfamiliar cuisines to engage with the underlying social and ecological forces that shape situated expressions of risk within culinary practice.

Receiving a Michelin star was once the ultimate culinary reward for the hard work and dedication that chefs have demonstrated in making their restaurants a success. However, for some of them, the stars seem more of a burden than a blessing. In recent years, several chefs have given up their Michelin status, closed the doors on their restaurants, and begun a new professional life away from haute cuisine. Many have opened up about the reasons leading them to neglect Michelin, the most prominent of them being the pressure involved in maintaining the stars, rather than obtaining them. Yet there are less obvious, but not less important, reasons to explain this behavior. In this article, we argue that chefs’ increasing reluctance to Michelin stardom is reflective of the shifts in today’s culinary profession and industry, triggered both by new attitudes in food consumption and media that increasingly influences ideas about what good food should be, mean, and look like. Drawing on the most prominent scholarly literature, writings by food journalists, and analysis of audiovisual materials, we show how the fine-dining industry is redefining itself outside the traditional systems of valuation and judgment.