Back to School

Hey folks, I’ve been studying towards an MA in Food Studies (via the University of Adelaide) since last August.  While I don’t have any concrete plans for what I’ll do with that learning once I finish, I must say that I’m really enjoying the study.

Instead of going to university after high school, I chose culinary school.  That was over 20 years ago.  Now, many kitchens, bakeshops, and countries later I’ve taken an extended break from the industry.  It has felt good to step away, though on the other hand, there are aspects of kitchen life that I miss.

Luckily, I have found a way to step back into the life every now and again.  I’ll be posting more about that in the future.

In the meantime, I hope you’ve liked reading some of the pieces I’ve done as assignments for my Food Writing class.  There are two more to come, a piece of creative writing on the topic of dining alone, and a longer restaurant review.  I may also put up some of my writing from last semester, so stay tuned.

 

Back in the saddle

I cycled to work today.  No more excuses about the weather or the bike not being ready.  Riding felt good.  Spring is here and my goal is to ride to work 2-4 days per week, with a mix of driving or catching the bus for the rest, depending on what best suits our schedules.

When I lived in New York, I rode all the time.  I lived in Williamsburg and rode a fixie.  I worked in Manhattan, first downtown, for a few years, then uptown.  Working in restaurants meant finishing late.  Late meant trains ran less frequently.  Often I could get home faster by riding.  It also felt good not having to depend on other people.

Canberra isn’t as suited to fixie riding (and my knees are ten years older).  Last year, I rode the fixie a fair bit while we were living in Kingston.  Now we live in Belconnen and my work is in Dickson.  There’s one mega hill, down on the way in and up on the way back.  I’ve retired the fixie and use the road bike out now.  It takes about 26 minutes for me to get to work and half an hour to get home.  My best time last year on the fixie was around 22 or 23 minutes.

My bike, despite its American motif, is made in China.  I bought it in June 2008, to get around Ho Chi Minh City, from an elderly gentleman who runs a specialist bicycle shop out of his house.  He sold a range of stuff, from mid- to high-end, mostly road-oriented.  From Vietnam, the bike traveled to New York and sat in storage while I spent another season on the Ice.  A year later, it came with me to Australia.

Wading into the books

The books I ordered are starting to come in.  I was a bit ambitious to order so many at once, as I now have about a dozen books to look through.  Once I’ve flipped through them all, I’ll have a better idea of which ones I want to spend more time with and which ones I can return to at a later date.

I’ve earmarked Food: A History by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto as the first book I’ll want to read (after or concurrently with The Cultural Politics of Eating: A Reader).  It looks like it will provide a broad overview of the subject and I hope it will lay the foundation for future readings.  In the preface, Fernandez-Armesto calls this work a devoir de vacances or “holiday homework.”  The material for Food came as a spinoff of the material he was preparing for an earlier book, Civilizations, a study of the relationship between civilization and the environment.

He classifies the material into eight divisions, or revolutions:

1. the invention of cooking
2. food as rite and magic (as more than sustenance)
3. the herding revolution (animal husbandry)
4. plant-based agriculture
5. food as a means of social differentiation
6. food and the long-range exchange of culture
7. food and ecological exchange (the ‘Columbian Exchange’)
8. food and industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

What’s your Dewey?

When I started working in a public library, I joked that I would get a Dewey Decimal tattoo, specifically 641.815, or bread baking, which is something I did professionally for about nine years.

Today, I discovered my real Dewey- 394.12, which has to do with customs and norms around food.  Huzzah!  As my partner puts it, “You’ve found your people.”

How awesome is it that I now have these titles on request?

• The anthropology of food and body : gender, meaning, and power
• Art, culture, and cuisine : ancient and medieval gastronomy
• Chinese tea culture
• The cultural feast : an introduction to food and society
• The fearless diner : travel tips and wisdom for eating around the world
• Feast : a history of grand eating
• Feast : why humans share food
• Food : a history
• Food in Japan
• A history of the world in 6 glasses
• I’m not eating any of that foreign muck : (travels with me dad)
• Man eating bugs : the art and science of eating insects
• Seed cake and honey prawns : fashion and fad in Australian food
• A sociology of food and nutrition : the social appetite
• When Mabel laid the table : the folklore of eating and drinking in Australia

Taking the plunge

So I’m applying for this new job. It’s not that I don’t like my job now.  I actually love it and I’m afraid that I might get the new job and find it’s less awesome than the job I have now.  However, the new job would provide better  flexibility for study, less hours, no weekends, and pays five to ten grand more than I make now, and has greater opportunity for advancement.  It also has the potential to be fairly awesome.  It’s a bit of a long shot, but I thought I’d toss my hat in the ring and see what comes of it.  Instead of children and crazy old coots, I’d be dealing with uni kids and academics… it’s kinda six of one and half dozen of the other, eh?

Hello world!

This is a workspace I intend to use to hash out ideas on food, travel, and the history and culture of eating.