Following the 2017 postgraduate research workshop hosted by the SOAS Food Studies Centre, in collaboration with University of Warwick Food GRP, this article brings together nine research briefs written by various participants. Inspired by the workshop's provocative theme, “What Is Good Food?”, each author explores how food categories are shaped and negotiated in different contexts and across scales. In this multi-authored article, the question of “good” food is first presented as contingent upon nutritional, economic, political, ritual, or moral conditions. Each author then reveals how globally defined notions of food's goodness are often resisted on the ground by producers and consumers, beyond the notions of ethics or “alternative” food movements that have often been the emphasis of previous literature dealing with the topic of good food. Taken together, this article scrutinizes the effects of various hierarchies of power and invites readers to reassess why and how good food continues to be a contested category.

“The apple pie was more than just ‘nutritious, man.’” Despite frequent critical fixation on the jazz aspects of Jack Kerouac's oeuvre, this reconsideration of the author's canon poses food as a central theme of the Duluoz Legend and analyzes the ways in which Kerouac thought and wrote about food as an object, literary motif, and cultural conduit—modes of thought that, despite previous tracing of contemporary food culture to the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, lead almost directly to many current food issues, practices, and debates. Grounded in Kerouac's attentive engagement with the agricultural overtures of Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West , this article discusses how Kerouac understood, played with, and utilized food as a means of cultural comprehension and then—via jazz—cultural subversion within the “decline” of the West, primarily through his novels The Town and the City (1950), On the Road (1957), and The Dharma Bums (1958).

A product of their time and of the internalized Soviet ideology that to a great extent shaped women's gendered self-fashioning as women and mothers, Soviet manuscript cookbooks became popular among Soviet women in the late 1960s. Based on the semiotic reading of two personal manuscript cookbooks in the author's family, this article explores what these cookbooks, in combination with the author's family history, tell about how Soviet women used and reshaped the gender roles available to them in late Soviet everyday life. The author also asks questions about the cost of emancipation in a society that could not truly support such progress socially or economically.

This essay describes the changes that occurred in the visual landscape of the predominantly Russian neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, from the first-hand perspective of an immigrant. The article merges two central themes of an immigrant's path to assimilation: food and language. The essay begins by analyzing how local culinary demand impacted the food stores of Brighton Beach. The article continues by discussing themes of worldliness regarding the nuanced monikers of some of its establishments. The essay frames how a specific Brighton identity evolved in response to the immigrant's newly discovered comforts. Furthermore, it emphasizes the sense of stasis recursive to the evolution of the immigrant identity. Finally, the essay discusses a hybrid vernacular of the Brighton vocabulary, both verbal and visual. The essay is accompanied by a series of photographs, illustrating the visual elements mentioned.

The displaced of Sudan, due to both decades of civil war and natural disasters, are disproportionately female and many are responsible for dependents. For those settling in the capital, Khartoum, their livelihood depends on carving out ways to earn money in an urban area that is experiencing tremendous growth from the millions of recent arrivals. When confronted with the immediate need to provide for their families, women turn to a skill universally expected of them: cooking. Therefore, Khartoum is home to a thriving micro-economy of food vendors. By selling these dishes in the capital, they broaden the culinary horizons of the city while preserving their own food traditions. Their growing numbers provide an opportunity for regional foodways to gain wider introduction, adaptation, and, finally, adoption. These same vendors also facilitate a nascent sense of a shared Sudanese identity and nationalism. For established Khartoum urbanites, the definition of Sudanese food (and, by extension, what it means to be Sudanese) expands as street-vendor fare moves to restaurants and becomes more widely available throughout the city. As urban Sudanese overcome their preconceptions and discover a taste for regional cuisines, meals function as unofficial diplomacy during this turbulent time in Sudan's history.