Down with Dry January!!!
plus the official L&D in/out list of 2023
And just like that, I have finished the first term of the PhD program. It has honestly been a joy— I get to read incredible and mind-expanding books and discuss ideas with peers and mentors. Not to be too gushy, but I am very grateful for all that this year brought and all that next year may (will!) bring.
I do apologize, however, for letting this newsletter slip a bit. Getting adjusted to the pace of the program took a while, and some days I just did not feel I had it in me to write or read any more than I already was doing for work. But now that I am in the rhythm a bit, I hope I can write somewhat more consistently on here. One of my New Year’s goals is to write 10 newsletters this year, so expect to hear from me once a month ish.
Please take my official in/out list of food-related (and non-food-related) items for 2023 as an apology gift 🫶 (This is mostly a joke)
In
Instant yeast
Checking out cookbooks from the local library (shoutout to friend-of-the-newsletter Caleigh for being the biggest inspo in this)
Vermouth
Speculative fiction
Not hitting your Goodreads goal (and/or switching to Storygraph)
Legumes
Re-watching Girls
Cheese wheels
Out
Sous vides
Orange wine (sorry!!)
Sweet oatmeal
Geoengineering
Calling every stroll you go on a “hot girl walk”
Using anti-depressants as a cultural signifier (ie. the Phoebe Bridgers/Bo Burnham situation is Brangelina for people on Lexapro)
Grazing boards
On January 14, 2020, Olga Khazan posed a seemingly simple question in The Atlantic “Whatever happened to the anti-alcohol movement?” As Khazan notes, unlike in prior generations, “hardly any formal organizations are pushing to reduce the amount that Americans drink” and “warnings about the devil drink will win you few friends.”
Almost exactly three years later, though, and the premise of Khazan’s question seems to be altogether moot. Outlets are hailing it the “era of sober curiosity,” every wellness influencer on TikTok promises my depression would just go away if I quit drinking a glass of red wine every few days, and emails about Dry January (and the products to along with it!) are clogging my inbox. The neo-temperance movement is a tsunami, and it is crashing down upon us.
Let’s start with this: anti-alcohol movements have long been a way for elite and middle-class white communities to shore up racial and class boundaries. I have seen this up-close in my research on toddy: as Piya Chatterjee has argued, British colonizers in South Asia used the laboring population’s consumption of alcohol as a way to construct a “racialized and classed inferiority,” as well as work to “rationalize, and justify, the gendered order of the plantation’s labor regime.” The discursive function of alcohol as a form of social control extended globally: Gilbert Quintero has shown that colonial knowledge surrounding alcohol was a key tool in the imperial project in North America— ideas of “native drunkenness” worked to racialize Indigenous bodies and legitimize colonial rule.
A similar process functioned in the United State’s Second Temperance Movement, which culminated with the infamous Prohibition enshrined in the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919 and eventually repealed by the Twenty-First in 1933. While prohibition today is best commemorated in the speakeasy-themed bacchanals which plague college campuses today, its roots lay in social unrest and racial anxieties in the post-Reconstruction era: scholars have shown how temperance ideas among white communities were intimately tied up with eugenics, as alcohol was seen as a poison that could catalyze “race suicide.”
Today’s temperance is cloaked differently, to be sure. Present-day neoliberal capitalism has moved the subject of control from broader social groups to the individual body itself, presenting a reactionary value under the guise of Goopy “progressivism”. Abstaining from alcohol—like all eating practices under the political economy of neoliberalism—allows for the tee-totaler to physically embody moral, ethical, even spiritual purity and superiority through self-restraint and individual choice. And, it creates the opportunity for new, alternate forms of consumption: it is unsurprising that CBD and “functional” drinks are taking center stage as the new “it” wellness drinks just as wine’s status dwindles (and, it will be unsurprising in a decade or so when the moral backlash begins to paint CBD-based and nootropic drinks as unhealthy, and moves on to new products that manifest moral purity and just happen to open new markets…).
I should say here that the title of this newsletter is intentionally glib and provocative. My goal here is to not yuck your Dry January yum, nor do I think it is a bad thing to reevaluate your relationship with alcohol (and anything else you consume, for that matter). I don’t think drinking is in of itself a moral signifier, just as I don’t think abstention is. Indeed, as the long tradition of Black prohibitionism reveals, temperance—when divorced from commercial purity discourse— has the potential to “emancipate entire communities from the worst excesses of predatory capitalism” (and colonialism). But I do think we could all stand to think a little critically about the long history of temperance in the US and beyond, and how the wellness industrial complex is driving its embrace by the so-called “progressive” left. All to say: this January, I will be raising my glass to resisting reductive visions of health and moral purity, and thinking about what it means to move beyond the sovereign body. Cheers!
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
I’ve been thinking a lot about the “merchants of doubt” who undermine public understanding of the climate crisis, and this article about the phenomenon in the meat industry is damning. (On a similar note, please check out Ben Franta’s work. He is a historian-cum-lawyer-cum-physicist [seriously] who uses rigorous archival research to hold fossil fuel companies legally culpable for their role in the current emergency).
I recently finished reading this edited volume, which features interviews with food studies scholars on how they think about eating in their day-to-day lives. It was very interesting to see the way academic research on food and daily life collide and converge!
When I was in London I got to meet up with Dr. Anna Sulan Masing, an amazing writer, storyteller, and scholar— her podcast Taste of Place on the history of pepper is phenomenal (and I was lucky enough to be featured in the first episode). If you want a taste (pardon the pun), check out her recent Guardian op-ed.
While I recognize I just went on a diatribe about why I am drinking this January, truth be told I just haven’t been doing it that much, save for mulled wine, the consummate wintery drink. In London, I enjoyed some delicious gløgg (not pictured), Scandinavian mulled wine with lots of liqueur and fruit and nuts. And, I got some good-enough pub mulled wine with my wonderful friend Aymen who made the trip down from Manchester to see me (in true Aymen fashion, she had a Guinness).
It was not the most delicious mulled wine ever, but it was the most heart-warming one since I could share it with my dear friend!!
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
My piece on the history of the catawba grape recently came out in Arnoldia Magazine. I don’t believe the article is online, but you can hear me talk a bit about my work on that project here, and I am happy to send anyone a PDF if you are interested!
This term, I wrote a short blog post on my MPhil work on salt for Environmental History Now, and gave a conference presentation on it for the North American Conference of British Studies. I also learned my research on this was recognized by the Graduate Association of Food Studies, which is very exciting! I’ll be talking a bit more about this work at the American Society for Environmental History conference in March, if everyone isn’t completely sick of hearing about it.
It was truly a joy to write about women + cheese + DC (my three favorite topics!) for my WaPo debut.
That about sums it up for now, folks. Right now, I am prepping for the upcoming term. I am doing a lot of reading on the nitrogen cycle + metabolism + the Green Revolution for the seminar paper I have to write in the next few months, and supplementing my reading time with cooking time. Lately, I’ve been going through Meera Sodha’s book East: 120 Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing, which I have really been enjoying. I made her coconut dal with tomato sambol this week, and am going to try my hand at making mushroom bao next week. I’ll let you know how it goes.
Onwards and upwards in 2023!
Love,
Julia
Loved this!