Note: This was initially written as part of a larger project explaining how I ended up in Food Studies
I started in the Gastronomy program in 2017 thinking I was taking a quick summer break from my career in Information Science and Cultural Heritage. I had planned to take a single class to clarify my thinking on the United States food system. For the past few years, I had been searching for the “perfect” diet that both suited my nutritional needs and was relatively harmless for the environment and society in general. In prior jobs, I had the opportunity to work on projects with small-scale farmers and had also learned to cook at a Boston-area non-profit. Instead of clarifying my thinking, my initial class in the Gastronomy program complicated my understanding of food systems, and the myth of the “perfect diet.” In the single class, “Anthropology of Food” I found food to be deeply ingrained in cultural and personal histories.
Immediately following that class, I took a solo trip to Iceland. During the trip, I participated in a number of food events including visiting greenhouses and farms, thinking critically about the similarities and differences between Icelandic and United States food histories. During this trip I began to identify myself as someone who studies food, deciding to take a second class in the Gastronomy program. During this second class, focused on Cookbooks, I began to consider how studying food could intersect with my degree in Library and Information Science and formally applied to the program. In my time in the program, I found many of my short-term research projects related to the intersections of Food Studies and Information Science. I explored the possibilities of the programʻs culinary library, wrote a finding aid for a menu collection, and considered how the interdisciplinary nature of food studies challenges linked museum search engines.
In January and July 2019 I attended workshops at Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. In the first of these workshops, focused on Provenance, I discussed how stains, burn marks, and handwritten notes can be used to follow the history of individual cookbooks, especially cookbooks owned by multiple generations of a single-family. After this workshop, I visited many cookbooks in collections around the Boston area and found that newspaper articles and other ephemera found in the cookbooks often told a further story of the book users and owners.
My second workshop at Rare Book School focused on the History of the Book in the United States. For my final project, I presented how cookbooks have become more visual in reject years and reflect a move to more visual culture. I also began to consider how many cookbook authors, past and present, have developed multi-media empires, creating links between their works in the various media of their time. This workshop also provided an opportunity to work with printing presses, and I experienced how, like cooking, printing consists of embodied knowledge dependent on muscle memory.
For my final project of the Gastronomy program, I began to consider how the field of Computational Linguistics (a term I learned after finishing my thesis) could be used in cookbook studies. For the project, I developed an initial workflow to compare the frequency of terms used in multiple cookbooks. This allows a researcher to analyze how uses of food terms were popularized over time and show the influence of corporate marketing of foodstuffs in cookbooks. I hope to continue working on this workflow incorporating new-to-me computer languages and search technologies.
When I took my first class in the Gastronomy Program I thought it would clarify my relationship with the food system. Instead, it challenged me to take my Information Science career to new places while allowing me to make connections between book history and food history that I had never considered. Looking forward, I hope to encourage others to participate in cookbook scholarship using tools from their own professional fields.