This article examines Palestinian home-based restaurants in Israel as ambivalent culinary spaces where hospitality is shaped by cultural and political tensions. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic research, it traces how Palestinian citizen restaurateurs—positioned as ethnic and national minorities—negotiate the competing demands of cultural expression and accommodation when hosting Jewish Israeli diners. These encounters unfold through food, décor, and narrative expression, revealing restaurateurs’ careful calibration between pride and pragmatism. Rather than straightforward sites of empowerment, the restaurants function as fragile spaces in which Palestinian cooks and hosts navigate the risks and possibilities of making Palestinian cuisine publicly legible within a dominant Jewish-Israeli social order. Attending to the sensory, material, and affective dimensions of the meal, the article shows how culinary interactions generate moments of proximity without mitigating structural asymmetries, illuminating the complex work of sustaining Palestinian cultural continuity within a contested national space.

Insects are a potential sustainable protein source. To date, scholarship regarding insect consumption in countries without a major history of it has most often focused on consumer acceptance or critically reflected on the industrialized nature of insect farms and processing firms. This article presents the empirical findings of a pilot project that supported seven individuals with no previous experience of insect farming to safely produce mealworms for consumption at home. It explores how raising mealworms affected their confidence and willingness to eat them, their attentiveness and care toward the mealworms, as well as the potential and/or desirability for such production systems to scale up. Household-level production of insects and worms affords a unique opportunity to explore these considerations, as it is both an example of an alternative food practice, as well as an accessible opportunity for individuals to interact with a form of livestock. The research brings together literature from more-than-human geographies and sustainability transitions. It contributes to debates regarding the potential to scale up sustainability-related experiments and considers how the handling of mealworms builds relationships between producers and their mini-livestock.

Northern Indigenous communities in Canada face complex barriers rooted in ongoing colonial impositions to access the land and land-based food systems. They also continue to implement a variety of strategies to address these challenges and build more sustainable food systems. Youth are imperative to these processes because of their unique roles in the transmission of knowledge and culture. Our research examines the challenges to and opportunities for youth engagement in land-based food programming in the Dene and Métis community of Fort Providence, Northwest Territories, Canada. We also explore how participants viewed youth as important in land-based food systems and how their experiences support cultural continuities, self-determination, and adaptive capacity to socio-economic and environmental changes. Our work is informed by Indigenous methodologies and based on semi-structured interviews with Dene and Métis youth, community members, leaders, and non-Indigenous residents involved in local food initiatives. Our results demonstrate how youth participation in land-based food programming can respond to pressing colonial-imposed changes and foster food systems strategies in their communities and broader society.

Climate change debates have helped frame vegetarianism as a conscientious choice across the globe and also projected India as a shining example of vegetarianism. Before this Euro-American vegetarians had long romanticized India as an ideal vegetarian society, and have assumed it to be based on progressive ethics. This article challenges such assumptions and complicates the Euro-American association of vegetarian dietary preferences with the ethical concerns of virtue, animal welfare, and sustainability. We contend that neither is India a vegetarian society nor is mainstream vegetarianism in contemporary India based on progressive ethics. We use in-depth interviews and extensive news reports to show that vegetarianism in India is a majoritarian political ideology associated with caste-based discrimination and violence, making it inimical to notions of non-violence, equality, and freedom. Majoritarian vegetarianism in contemporary India aims to conserve the caste system and its attendant inequalities. This study traces the ideological and repressive state apparatuses through which the fantasy and norms of vegetarianism are propped up in contemporary India. We argue that an uncritical acceptance of mainstream vegetarianism in contemporary India as a benevolent cultural preference whitewashes its discriminatory and violent nature, helps the caste system persist, and can undermine the well-being and nutritional outcomes of a majority of the Indian population especially those from non-elite social groups that have historically been omnivorous.

French novels of the 19th century recall the aspects of food culture in different ways through their reflections on the golden age for both gastronomy and the pleasures of the table. La Comédie Humaine is a milestone in highlighting the keystones of French food and gastronomy. In this study, we propose a multistage analysis of 21 novels of La Comédie Humaine by examining the food terms and their translations into English and Turkish. Our main contribution is the qualitative and quantitative analysis of food in the Balzacian context. We have performed food data visualization from original and translated texts and thus revealed how the terms for beverages and mealtimes are interconnected in the Comédie Humaine and how food translations might differ in English and Turkish, especially the names of wine, coffee terms and mealtime names. We provide a contextualized food approach to Balzac’s novels through the lens of Turkish and English culture revealing their openness, or not, to French food culture, linked to the rules of prestige and the habitus of the target culture. We started our analysis by localizing food patterns in the source language. Then we analyzed them in distant reading – analysis of quantitative data – and close reading focused on the qualitative analysis. This mixed methodology gives a new layer of insight and could be extrapolated to other texts and languages in the domain of food and literature.

We are not only what we eat, but how. This article examines the 1970s’ morality politics of spork usage that accompanied the rollout of rice in school lunches. I argue that these discourses about the material culture and etiquette of eating reflect the economic and political context of 1970s Japan and (re)emergent tensions about national identity and the role of children’s diet and table manners in determining Japan’s future. Japan’s national school lunch program is a critical site of “making Japan.” Schoolchildren and teachers generally eat identical meals in their classrooms, serving and cleaning up after each other. Revived in 1946 by the Occupation, the program was nearly universal in public elementary and middle schools by the 1960s. Meals were mostly bread, milk, and soup, stew, etc. The spork was the standard utensil. Cheap, multipurpose, and hygienic, it was a rational mass-catering solution. In the mid-1970s, simultaneous to the introduction of rice to the menu, the spork became the villain in a morality play about children’s eating habits and the nation’s fate. Culturalist pundits warned that sporks hindered development of the special dexterity, cleverness, and sensitivity that made Japan superior among the nations of the world.

This essay will interrogate how hip-hop—a form whose sound is not only connected to but defined by ideas of place—uses food and place as discursive objects to construct notions Southern urban particularity. Reading soul food as both a national cuisine symbolizing Black resilience in the face of institutional racial violence and a local cuisine that can symbolize the particularity of place, I argue that Southern hip-hop melds sound, taste, and place to construct Southern urban identity. I argue that this tension is maintained on a discursive plane in which each representational object—music, place, or food—articulates locally specific identity while resonating within a broader diasporic identifications. Looking specifically at Goodie Mob’s Soul Food (Atlanta), Bun B’s Instagram series “#TrillMealz” (Houston), and Lil’ Wayne’s Tha Carter II (New Orleans) this essay explores how place, food, and hip-hop function as representational objects of identity that are dependent on one another to articulate the place-specific urban identities of Southern cities.