Gastronomica

This episode introduces a special issue on food and philosophy. Robert T. Valgenti, of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective, talks with Andrea Borghini about the increasing attention to food within philosophy over the last three decades and shares the inspiration behind their special issue. They discuss how this issue of Gastronomica engages with different disciplines and formats by bringing together short essays and reflections on the field of philosophy from scholars around the world. By attending to ethics, value, and aesthetics through a range of topics that include art, taste, hunger, sustainability, food waste, and bioethics and GLP-1s, the special issue highlights different perspectives on how food can enter philosophical practice.

Gastronomica’s special issue on food and philosophy was published in Fall 2025 (25.3) and is available online here.

Andrea Borghini is an associate professor of philosophy and the director of Culinary Mind, a research center for the philosophy of food, at the University of Milan. Learn more about his work here and about Culinary Mind here.

Robert T. Valgenti is a professor of liberal arts and food studies at The Culinary Institute of America. A philosopher and translator, he works on the philosophy of food, Italian philosophy, and hermeneutics and is a member of the Editorial Collective at Gastronomica.

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.

The Gastronomica podcast returns to the air, bringing listeners new interviews with authors from the latest issues of Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies. In this episode, Alyssa James of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective hosts award-winning writer and historian Camille Bégin for a discussion of “Chiang Mai 2015,” a creative nonfiction account of a family trip and a search for sustenance that becomes entangled with questions of illness, climate, and care. In her memoir of failed culinary tourism, a story set against the smoky skies of northern Thailand, Camille asks what it means to travel, to look for meaning, and to eat ethically. In conversation with Alyssa, Camille talks about how the haze shapes her story, reflects on the politics of culinary tourism, and shows how food can become a small anchor in times of crisis.

“Chiang Mai 2015” was published in the Spring 2025 issue of Gastronomica (25.1) and is available online here.

Camille Bégin is the author of Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Her personal essays have appeared in Gastronomica, Adelaide Magazine, and the scientific journal, Brain. She is currently writing a food memoir called Crumbs: A Trail of Taste and Illness. Website here

Alyssa A. L. James is an anthropologist and postdoctoral scholar at the USC Society of Fellows. Her current book project, Revival Grounds, examines coffee, heritage, and temporality in Martinique. Learn more here

Listeners can now find the Gastronomica podcast on the New Books Network here. Subscribe to Gastronomica’s podcast feed to stay updated on the newest episodes.

In this episode, Gastronomica’s Irina D. Mihalache talks with Ozoz Sokoh, creator of Kitchen Butterfly and author of the forthcoming book, Chop Chop: Cooking the Food of Nigeria (2025). Ozoz reflects on how movement and mobility have shaped her work, recounting her journey from Nigeria to Canada and from the field of geology to food, and the life stations she’s encountered along the way. The conversation centers the process of creative and curatorial work in food history and storytelling, with a focus on how food connects us. This episode concludes with a preview of Ozoz’s debut cookbook. She shares the joys of living in a diverse city while developing recipes, being able to source ingredients not only from Nigerian grocers but from a wide range of multicultural stores, with similar items, and one of the dishes she's most excited about in the book. 

Photo by Oluwapelumi Bamidele of Ovia Reflex Photography.

In this episode, Gastronomica’s Dan Bender talks with anthropologist Alyssa Paredes about the role that stories of celebration can play in remembering food history — and in eclipsing alternative narratives about the past. Spotlighting the case of banana ketchup, Alyssa shares competing stories about the production of this popular condiment and explains how it came to be a celebrated symbol of Filipino cultural identity, yet one that overshadows unpalatable realities. Connecting narratives of past and present, Dan and Alyssa discuss the work that stories do and the process of interpreting them in food studies scholarship. Alyssa’s new article, “Banana Ketchup: Food Memory and Forgotten Labor across the Filipino Homeland/Diaspora Divide,” will be published in the next issue of Gastronomica (24.2), coming Summer 2024.

What do the stories we tell about food reveal about the moment in which they are written? Gastronomica’s Melissa Fuster is joined by literary scholar turned food studies scholar Julieta Flores Jurado in a conversation about American food writing and how it has changed in recent years. They discuss key shifts in food journalism and the role of the critic, where a focus on pleasure and tastemaking has given way to new emphases on systemic and structural issues, a phenomenon accelerated in 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic. Julieta sheds light on how contemporary American food writing differs from prior eras that showcased food as a platform for activism and change and explains what she takes to be distinctive about such writing in the current moment – its revisionary sentiment and the impulse to transform a field. Julieta’s research will be published in the next issue of Gastronomica (24.2), coming Summer 2024.