Because many students of college age arrive at school with limited understanding of where food comes from or even how to prepare food from authentic ingredients, I planted a field of wheat so I could teach, and learn about, what went into baking the staff of life—bread. Raising enough wheat to make a single loaf of bread, and then expending the energy to thresh, winnow, grind, knead, and bake was more costly and difficult than imagined at the outset. In the process of making bread with their own hands students learned agronomy, engineering, history, anthropology, environmental science, and economics. And then they consumed what they had learned.

Using Donald Trump's “Make America Great Again” slogan from last year's U.S. presidential campaign as a framing device, this article considers how nostalgia in food commentary is a critique of present circumstances that also elides unsavory realities of the past. Noting that contemporary food nostalgia for past foodways is ironic given that food commentators of the past also pined for erstwhile foodways, this article examines how early twentieth-century dietary critiques projected anxieties about modernity in their disapprovals of the decline of home cooking and the rising consumption of items like white bread and sugar. While such critiques have much in common with contemporary food nostalgia, this article points to a unique preoccupation of the more recent dietary critiques—the obesity epidemic.

This article explores the relationship between Soviet and pre-Soviet histories in the reinvention of traditional foods in Latvia, with particular attention to how these products are transformed into new commodity forms. It focuses on regional home-baked breads and local wines produced from grapes grown in western Latvia. Both of these revivals of culinary heritage engage in complex and contradictory processes of “authentification” by taking an historical artifact—such as a recipe, a piece of equipment, or an ancient tale—and consciously crafting the missing pieces around it to produce an authentic food product, one that includes seemingly anachronistic elements of different eras. The result is a material and symbolic bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1966) that represents both producers’ and consumers’ innovative efforts to preserve or redefine livelihoods in times of change, and to negotiate complicated cultural memories of various pasts. Rather than dismissing seemingly out-of-place elements as “tampering with tradition,” I show how they are the very foundation of authenticity. I argue that the authenticity of homemade foods, like bread, is based on acknowledging the seemingly misplaced Soviet elements of the processes alongside the “ancient” recipes and modern European infrastructure, while in the case of wine we see an effort to forget the Soviet past and leapfrog to a European future. The fate of such claims, however, depends on the social networks through which the products circulate, as informal networks for home-baked breads become professionalized, and entirely new networks of connoisseurs are created who are interested in following the fate of attempts to grow “real” European wines in Latvia.

The simit, a sesame-covered bread resembling an oversized bagel, is Turkey's unofficial national food. Traditionally sold and eaten on the street, it has been around since at least the Ottoman times. It has been documented in writings and illustrations for centuries; more recently, politicians have used simits as a measure of basic subsistence. Turkey has been cracking down on street food vendors though. And the simit has been facing competition from international snacks like pizza. And companies including Starbucks and the home-grown bakery chain Simit Sarayi have also been making it harder for more traditional simit-bakers and simit-sellers to survive.

Wheat is a crop that has been put into its place. That place is the Wheat Belt, the center of the country. It can grow where most crops don't do well and where there is no economic incentive to grow anything else. At one time, wheat was grown as part of a diverse cropping system in virtually every region of the country. Today, wheat is returning to places such as the hills of North Carolina, Vermont, Maine, Northern California, southwestern Oregon, the Skagit Valley, and San Juan Islands of Washington. These areas are “out of place,” and there is value to wheat grown out of place. That value can be indirect—for example, when used as a rotational crop that reduces diseases and other pests. Its value can also come more directly in unexpected forms, such as flavor and unique functional properties. The new focus on wheat production is helping farmers produce value where before they were bit players in a brutal commodity market geared only toward larger producers.

This essay examines the existential philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in relation to issues of food and eating. I argue that for Levinas, the act of eating is central to founding the ethical self, and that any understanding of Levinas's approach to embodiment must begin with what it means for us to ingest the outside world. Even in Levinas's earliest work, food is already a freighted ontological category. As his ideas mature, eating is transformed from the grounding for an ethical system to the system itself. The act of giving bread to another person takes its place as the ethical gesture par excellence . The story is not that we eat. The story is that we eat and develop a relationship to eating, and that relationship in turn helps determine our sense of ourselves in the world. Eating is the ethical event. The essay ends by asking how Levinas can help us answer the question, what would it mean to imagine every bite I take, or give to another, as a direct engagement with my own and my neighbor's existence?

In ““Bodies Made of Bread”” I theorize eating as an intimate site through which power, in particular, the power that upheld the nineteenth-century United States' investment in imperial rhetoric and action, was both instantiated and undermined. Using the dietetic writings of nineteenth-century reformer and anti-masturbation campaigner Sylvester Graham, I assess the body politics that lurk behind the highly socialized but insistently naturalized act of eating. Eating in Graham's work is a quotidian act through which fictions of racial and gendered embodiment are upheld; through comparison to South Pacific islanders and other European colonists, Graham imagines an ideal American-ness which is founded upon the imperial fantasy of Euro-American indigeneity and regulated through the daily consumption of wheat and other ““farinaceous”” foods.