Editorial Letter

In the early 1990s, my grandmother travelled to Canada to visit her son/my uncle for the first time since the Fall of Communism in Romania in 1989. She took numerous trips back and forth between Romania and Canada over this decade, and these trips resulted in the appearance of some new and unexpected recipes in her culinary repertoire, which historically had been based on staple Romanian-Moldavian dishes and constrained by the limitations of state-imposed rationing. One such recipe is ketchup, which I remember as a core homemade condiment in my early and mid-teens diet, accompanying eggs, potatoes, and kabanos sausages. Her recipe calls for: 10 kilograms of tomatoes, 4 kilograms of peppers, 2 kilograms of celery root, 2 cups of oil, 2 cups of sugar, 2 tablespoons of salt, 4 tablespoons of pepper, 4 tablespoons of thyme, 1 cup of vinegar, and hot pepper (optional). The resulting product was quite distinct in both texture and flavor from what I might identify as ketchup in my contemporary Canadian context. Yet, for my grandmother, this recipe captured her own encounter with this condiment and her interpretation of its taste.The memory of my grandmother’s ketchup recipe kept popping up in my mind as I was reading the six rich and provocative articles featured in this issue of Gastronomica, each layering new meanings onto my grandmother’s decision to create and execute yearly a recipe for an iconic North American condiment she first tried in Toronto, Canada, with ingredients from her own garden in post-communist Romania.The types of border crossings that the authors of the two pieces in this section capture in their articles range from physical to political. Both center their writings on one type of food, ketchup and cheese, and demonstrate the complexities of histories, mobilities, policies, communities, and systems of representation that emerge from a relational analysis of texts—archival and contemporary—and discourses.In “Ketchup: The Transnational Creation of a Global Condiment, c. 1700–1920,” Claudia Kreklau explores the interconnectivities of ingredients, techniques, and humans in the history of ketchup, spanning Asian countries and the Atlantic over two thousand years. Kreklau tells a story of ketchup that pays attention to women and migrants who carried out work in production, preparation, and serving of foods. As well, her history of ketchup escapes linearity yet connects all the geographical and temporal nodes that move this recipe and its ingredients around the globe, and avoids traditional accounts of food mobility, opting instead for the recording of “uncontrollable information flow through word of mouth, printing, and translation across three continents.” The author reads cookbooks and other archival records from as early as the 1750s, where she notes the transformations of recipes for ketchup from their origins in the East Indies to their arrival in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States. This article brings together stories of migration across the Atlantic, ingredients such as fish sauce, mushrooms, salt, and tomatoes, and geographically-specific cooking processes and techniques.Kathryn M. Fisher writes about the very tense “cheese wars”—with a focus on Gruyère and Camembert—that are defined by us/them dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. In “Gruyère and Camembert—An Exploration into Food, Identity, and the Securitization of Cheese,” Fisher untangles the identity configurations that rely on setting boundaries to belonging through systems of representation, policies, international law, and collective memory. The stories and food law-based narratives about what constitutes Gruyère are fueled by long-standing national battles between countries such as the U.S. and Switzerland, who have economic, political, and heritage-related motivations to further amplify distinctions. These tensions in boundary drawing are visible in food labels, protectionist policies, and empirical stories. The article extends the learnings taken from an analysis of “cheese wars” to the larger global political system that navigates similar conflicts related to identity, authenticity, food, and security.While Rosetta Giuliani Caponetto and Geetha Sukumaran write about distinct temporal, geographical, and cultural contexts, both authors analyze the intentional making of communities through the opening of an upscale no-waste network of soup kitchens by celebrity chef Massimo Bottura (Caponetto) and through the biopolitical interventions of Tamil armed groups in post-independence Northern Sri Lanka (Sukumaran).In “Massimo Bottura’s Refettorio Remakes the Future through Stories of Food, People, and Places,” Caponetto inquires about the pathway to global fame of Bottura’s Refettorio (elevated soup kitchens in repurposed buildings) through observations on the key concepts foregrounding this social experiment—the quality of ideas, the power of beauty, and the value of hospitality. The author argues that the success of the Refettorio model is due to the chef’s vision for a sustainable future where reduced waste results from upscale cooking of otherwise discarded ingredients and scraps that result in beautiful meals served with dignity to those in marginalized groups. Caponetto discusses Bottura’s key concepts in relation to the agency that the vulnerable communities invited to dine in the elevated soup kitchens can achieve, concluding that there are tensions between the power of the chef and that of the diners, especially since there is little collaboration or co-creation for the vision of the soup kitchens with community members. Nonetheless, Caponetto leaves readers with a sense of optimism on communal hospitality for sustainable food futures.If for Caponetto the site of imagined communities is the physical place of a soup kitchen, in “‘Are We Going to Participate in the War on Food Production and Succeed?’: The Archives on Rebel Governance in Northern Sri Lanka,” Sukumaran proposes the archive—more specifically, publications on food provisioning from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) archives. During the 1990s economic embargo issued by the Sri Lankan state on its Northern province, armed groups engaged in different forms of governance, including regulating provisioning and access to food. The author points out the difficulty of studying rebel groups and their forms of governance due to their duality of subaltern (to the state) and dominant (over the people in the areas they govern). Sukumaran engages with LTTE’s ideologies with a food lens through the analysis of their publications (books and monthly magazines), where she identifies the strategies that they employed to shift human-ecology relations in rebel-held territory. Overall, the author’s findings suggest that rebel governance of food systems relied on local and traditional ethnic foodways and on the participation of the civilian populations and their embodied knowledge, which is often gendered.In this special section on decolonizing food systems, Alyshia Gálvez and Gabriel R. Valle take a “behind the scenes” approach to food-systems education as well as to the teaching of sustainable education on university campuses in the United States. In their inspiring advocacy, the authors expose systemic and structural obstacles, such as evaluation of research productivity and allocation of space, as well as provide alternatives for community-driven and centric research collaborations that follow asset-based models, combating the pathologizing of communities.In “‘Back of the House’ Considerations in Decolonizing Food Systems Education: Research, Grants, and Space,” Alyshia Gálvez discusses the lesser-known and often invisible barriers to decolonizing food systems education: research, the physical space of the university, and grants. The author walks the reader through the core values of decolonizing education that should ground projects with Indigenous communities and other local racialized groups who are often over-researched and barely consulted. Gálvez provides examples from her institution, Lehman College (a Bronx-based public college), where she often navigates the tensions between community-centric projects that start with and benefit the community (in this case, the many diverse communities from Bronx) and university-led guidelines that prevent sustainable relationships as well as undermine community priorities. Of note is the author’s discussion of a collaboration between the Lehman Lab for Social Analysis, the Summer Youth Employment Program, and the Bronx Community Foundation around outcome evaluation for a series of small grants provided to community members, business, and organizations to address food insecurity during the pandemic.Gabriel R. Valle’s article, “Experiential Learning and Healing: Garden Pedagogies for Transformative Agroecology,” continues the conversation around systemic changes in higher education with a focus on reorienting teaching of agroecology from techniques toward experiential learning and healing. The author contextualizes “transformative agroecology” in the longer history of agriculture education in the United States connecting this history with the experience of developing their own course on sustainable agriculture, which involved the survey of thirty-four similar courses from peer institutions. One of the main takeaways from this comprehensive survey was that a course on sustainable agriculture ought to consider the entirety of the food system, as well as facilitating students’ ability to find themselves in these systems. And this, Valle argues, is possible through an intentional hands-on pedagogy that moves away from positivist thinking and instead centers experience, reflection, and action. To this modality, Valle also added healing, particularly to honor the lived experiences of BIPOC and other minoritized students, whose experiences with food procurement have been marked by insecurity, trauma, and violence. The author details the grounding of their own pedagogy in Indigenous methodology for healing, storytelling, and support for students to engage in healing practices as modes to help them navigate the world.From ketchup and Camembert to elevated soup kitchens and biopolitical interventions of rebel governance, to decolonizing higher education “behind the scenes” and front of house, this Gastronomica issue will challenge your assumptions about familiar foods and will encourage you to understand your own place in global food systems, something we all ought to care about. Thinking back at my grandmother’s ketchup recipe and connecting this memory with Valle’s writings on pedagogies of healing, I have a deeper sense of her motivations for what I considered most of my adult life an anomaly in her cooking repertoire.