A brief digest of food and nutrition-related items that caught our attention recently. Do you have items you think we should include? Send links and brief descriptions to dberiss@gmail.com or hunterjo@gmail.com.
This past week, Peng Chang-Kuei, the inventor of General Tso’s chicken, died at aged 98:
As Hunanese chefs adopted General Tso’s chicken, the dish entered a strange second career. In a sweeping act of historical revisionism, it came to be seen as a traditional Hunan dish. Several Hunanese chefs have described it in their cookbooks as a favorite of the 19th-century general’s.
The end of the year is fast approaching, which means it’s already time to look back on food in 2016. Forbes tells us about 5 trends to look for in 2017. The Guardian reviews a few of the best food books of 2016, though they are mainly recipe-focused. I’m sure there’ll be more digests looking back at our food year– let us know if you see a good one.
Here’s an article reporting on divided U.S. food attitudes, basically dividing Americans into two distinct camps, which I’m not sure our readers would be quite so ready to do:
“Food has become a flashpoint in American culture and politics,” the researchers wrote in their report, released Thursday. “The way Americans eat has become a source of potential social, economic and political friction.”
For personal inspiration, we loved this story about using paying customers to support non-paying customers:
“The inspiration came from Pope Francis, who’s spoken again and again about the importance of giving people dignity, whether it’s through bread or through work,” said Father Ángel.
Haddad, Hawkes and colleagues wrote about creating a new research agenda for food. We think it gave a lot of space for the work of food anthropologists:
Pairings of single foods and diseases are the basis of risk-factor analysis in global burden studies, but tell us little about diets as a whole.
Do you have readings we missed? Let us know!
FoodAnthropology 