Expo Milano, the 2015 World Fair, promised visitors an experience that would change how we imagine feeding the planet in the generations to come. Dozens of nations constructed monumental pavilions and spectacles, creating a Disneyland-like environment of cleverly concealed technologies and mass entertainment. For the 20 million people who came to play at social justice or sample bites of sustainability, what did Expo Milano really offer? What questions were asked, what experiences created, and what did visitors leave with at the end of the day? This article critiques the event for its profit-based design and logics, depicting a theme park simulacrum that gave visitors a high tech but empty-handed role in thinking or doing foodways differently. In addition to examining Expo Milano's shortcomings, I also point to the kinds of innovations and interactions that might allow us to imagine a more dynamic—and challenging—future of food.

Although the history of cheesemaking in the United States tells largely a tale of industrialization, there is a submerged yet continuous history of small-batch, hands-on, artisan cheese manufacture. This tradition, carried on in artisan cheese factories across the country, although concentrated in Wisconsin, is often overlooked by a new generation of artisan cheesemakers. Continuities in fabrication methods shared by preindustrial and post-industrial artisan creameries have been obscured by changes in the organization and significance of artisan production over the last one hundred years. Making cheese by hand has morphed from chore to occupation to vocation; from economic trade to expressive endeavor; from a craft to an art. American artisan cheesemaking tradition was invented and reinvented as a tradition of innovation. Indeed, ideological commitment to innovation as modern, progressive, American——and thus a marketable value——further obscures continuities between past and present, artisan factories, and new farmstead production. The social disconnect between the current artisan movement and American's enduring cheesemaking tradition reproduces class hierarchies even as it reflects growing equity in gendered occupational opportunities.