Slow Cooked; or, how academia boils us alive
plus why are anchovies so popular in Nepal?
I have officially finished week one of the PhD, and so far so good! While I’m sure that sentiment may change over time, I have been so excited to start classes + meet people + read books + think about why I study history. It has truly been a joy.
And, perhaps more importantly, the food (and food for thought about food) has also been wonderful. Despite vocal complaints about the lack of good food in Palo Alto from some peers, I have managed to find some really exciting spaces to buy and eat and think about food— I’ve loved participating in events at the Stanford Educational Farm, which often feature treats from the farm like hibiscus tea, heirloom tomatoes, and peppers. I got to try Georgian food at Bevri with a friend and colleague who studied abroad there (the cucumber and tomato salad with walnut dressing blew my mind). And, the farmer’s market on California Avenue has lived up to expectations— I recently got a box of maitake mushrooms for just three dollars!
All to say, despite my structural qualms about academia (more on that later), as well as some general adjustments from moving to suburbia, it’s been wonderful. I can’t wait to see what the next six (or seven or eight) years bring.
Recently, I was lucky enough to get to read an advanced copy of Slow Cooked, a new memoir written by food policy expert/nutritionist/author/food studies scholar Marion Nestle.
The book is a deeply readable story of how Marion Nestle, to put it simply, persisted. She dropped out of college at 19 to get married, only to start again 10 years, two kids, and one divorce later. She wrote her most influential book at age 66, and had to navigate ample sexism throughout her career. It is a stunning reminder, in the era of hustle culture and yearly bucket lists, of the potential of persistence and the “long, slow start.”
I should say this up front: I loved reading Nestle’s book, and I admire her hugely. But reading Slow Cooked during the first week of my PhD, I felt an immense wave of sadness, even pain. For Nestle, part of the purpose of the book is to show how “following personal values, along with sheer persistence and hard work, pays off in the long run.”
Now, we know that hard work and persistence particularly for oppressed groups does not pay off more often than not. Nestle, at points throughout the book, recognizes this as well as her own positionality as a white scholar.
But what I want to talk about here is also the particular academic structures that allowed a career like Nestle’s to take place. So much of what allowed Nestle to succeed— a spousal hire, new tenure lines allowing her to hand-pick hires— are no longer viable options in academia. That is not to undercut Nestle’s hard work or resilience (for her spousal hire at Brandeis, for instance, she was the only woman and only untenured person working in her group at the dean’s office). But it is to say that the conditions that allowed Nestle to produce her important work in the end simply are not possible for scholars any longer: spousal hires, particularly in the humanities, are not really a thing anymore. In 2019 and 2022, 1,799 scholars earned their PhDs in history, and just 175 of them are employed as full-time faculty. The problems of contingency + adjunctification abound on both an institutional and individual level.
At the end of the book, we see Nestle at her best: having created a new academic department in food studies and contributed to the blossoming of the discipline, having published in the double digits on important issues, and having been in conversation with people from Sidney Mintz (with whom, in a kind of wild paragraph, she mentions she had an ongoing flirtation that was sanctioned by his wife) to Julia Child to Alice Waters and so on and so forth.
But I’m not quite sure what the broader takeaway is. Under the present material conditions of academia, I am left at a loss of how such a life— such fortuitous accidents, Nestle emphasizes throughout the book— could have happened today, much to the detriment of both individual scholars and our collective understanding of one of the world’s greatest issues. And I see next to no way a multidisciplinary humanistic field of inquiry like food studies could emerge in the current climate today. Austerity, in many ways, has changed the stakes of academia in the humanities, shifting what sorts of inquiry can and will emerge.
Erin Bartram in her now-famous essay on the “sublimated grief of the left behind” asks us: “'What would happen if we acknowledged the losses our discipline suffers every year? What would happen if we actually grieved for those losses?” I (perhaps selfishly, perhaps foolishly) wished Nestle could have grieved our current losses, even alongside narrating her own success.
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
I recently got a digital copy of Rasa, Whetstone’s new South Asia-focused vertical, and read it cover-to-cover. I particularly loved Prashanta Khanal’s piece on the popularity of anchovies among Gurkha communities in landlocked Nepal.
The flooding in Pakistan is deeply horrifying, and has huge impacts on food security there. This piece in the New Yorker on climate reparations for Pakistan is essential reading.
A history piece about an allegedly extinct plant that reads like a detective investigation? Sign me up!
Not much drinking lately as I am trying to get back into the swing of the whole school thing, but when I went to Bevri, Sierra picked out a bottle of Georgian wine to share.
This was a delicious and affordable dry amber wine. It was complex enough to be interesting (think apricot mixed with the coolness of stone), but also still very accessible and able to compliment all of our dishes from trout to kachapuri. I am going to Bevri soon with Michael and will lobby to get this bottle again!
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
Dr. Anna Sulan Masing came out with a new podcast Taste of Place with Whetstone Radio Collective. She interviewed me for the first episode on pepper and how we can view it from the lens of the plant humanities. Please tune in!
Speaking of plant humanities, I also recently co-wrote an article on the term and its pedagogical value for the American Historical Association’s magazine.
My piece on women in the DC cheese scene is shaping up, and should hopefully be out soon.
As always, thank you for reading! I am grateful I don’t have to cook all the time now, as my scholarship program provides breakfast and lunch during the weekdays and there always seems to be free food around Stanford campus, but I am looking forward to cooking a new batch of kimchi jjigae for dinners this week. In other food-related news, my brother just got an ooni so I can’t wait for pizza nights at his place in San Francisco. Send me pizza recipe and/or reading recs, and see you next time.
Love, Julia