Welcome to foodstuff
and thanks for helping me procrastinate my dissertation writing!
foodstuff is a monthly newsletter the wades through the cultural, political, environmental, and emotional entanglements that food elicits. Here, we will consider the messy ways that food media and the food industry perpetuate harm through diet culture, capitalism, colonialism, and environmental destruction, often simultaneously. At the same time, we will embrace the joyful, nourishing, deeply felt, and collaborative possibilities that thinking with food offers!
Each month’s issue will cover a different topic but will always include a critical reflection from me, as well as food-related reading, watching, and listening recommendations. I promise to link free resources whenever possible!
I want this to be a collaborative space, so having you here, reading, commenting on, and engaging with this work means a lot! Thank you!
In the fall of 2021 I taught an undergraduate course in Popular Culture at McMaster University that focused specifically on food in media and popular culture. To keep in touch with students and to keep conversations going I started a variation of this newsletter. And, as it turns out, I really enjoy writing in this medium and would like to do more of it!
I’m currently writing a PhD dissertation on food literature. foodstuff will intersect with some of that work but will also, I hope, invite more public-facing conversations about food culture and scholarship.