Whale Blubber and Money Grubbers
plus I got into some PhD programs!
Hello all! Avid readers may note there was no newsletter in your inbox last Monday. I took a break from Linking & Drinking last week in order to recharge— the PhD application process is long and hard. But even as it is long, it is over in the blink of an eye. I have officially received all of my decisions, save for two, and now know pretty much what schools I am deciding between (!!!).
Most likely, I won’t be working with a bona fide food historian as my advisor. Food history as a field is pretty new, and there are not really any job searches specifically looking for it. Instead, my advisor would probably be an imperial historian or an environmental historian or a British historian. I am excited to learn from all of these methods. But I am also excited to combine them with what I have learned from my own foray into food studies, be that through attending ASFS and other food studies conferences, reading the works of scholars like Heather Paxson and Jayeeta Sharma, and taking classes at Boston University as a James Beard National Scholar. All of this is to say: I am so eager to deepen my commitment to the historical study of food, even as I bring in other methods and topics. Stay tuned: in 6-7ish years, I will officially be Dr. Julia Fine. That rolls quite nicely off the tongue, I have to say.
In the food justice world, most people believe in the importance of food sovereignty. As defined by La Via Campesina, food sovereignty refers to the “right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.” But what happens when culturally appropriate food runs up against Western definitions of what is ecologically sound?
This question is at the crux of a recent Civil Eats article focused on whaling, a practice central to many Indigenous communities in North America and beyond. However, as the article points out, “All Indigenous whalers and their communities also face criticism—as well as hate and violence—from animal-rights activists and conservationists who often lump traditional Indigenous subsistence whaling together with the commercial whaling practiced in Japan, Norway, and Iceland.” Beyond the hate and violence, there are heavy policies set by the International Whaling Commission as well as national governments limiting, and, at times, effectively curtailing all practices of whaling.
However, it is critical to recognize that the scale of Indigenous whaling does not come anywhere close to that of commercial whaling ventures—and, indeed, the current threat to the whale population off the North American coasts stems from a long history of commercial whaling in the United States. As historian Bathsheba Demuth writes of commercial whaling ventures in the United States, “nineteenth-century legal and commercial ideas were not calibrated to the slow wildness of whale lives…Thus, even with the words extinction and extermination in their conversations, the value of a whale was in present death. There was no entry in the accounting ledger for future cetacean lives.”
If United States officials in the nineteenth century could not account for a live whale, today it seems they cannot account for a dead whale. Any whale killed— be it for blubber and flesh to be sold as a commodity or for an important part of the Inupiaq diet both nutritionally and culturally— is seen as a tally in the “anti-conservation” ledger, and condemned accordingly.
The fact that the Makah community in what is now Washington State still can’t practice whaling highlights the need for complexity, the need for policymakers and legislators to understand ambiguity. A dead whale used to feed an Indigenous community in Washington is not the same as a dead whale being sold in the black market meat economy across the globe is not the same as a dead whale hunted for sport. We must, as Demuth writes, “decide what we value, the scales on which we conceive life and consume death.” Only then can we truly “wager on the world we wish to compose.”
Other food-related pieces occupying my mind:
What do we lose when we lose plant biodiversity? In the case of rice, the answer is quite a lot. Debal Deb recently published an excellent piece detailing the attenuation of the number of rice varieties in Bengal and the way it has altered local cultures. As he notes, this is something hardly grappled with by economists and geographers, who tend to just see the “functional role of land for economic activities.” But, as Deb argues, “the loss of genetic diversity of indigenous crops has additional consequences that are rarely discussed – namely, the alteration of local cultures associated to this diversity.”
My friend and mentor Ashley Rose Young recently published an article on the life of Lena Richards and her influence on the history of TV cooking in the United States. Richards was the first Black writer to publish a cookbook detailing Creole cuisine, and was the “first Black woman to host her own self-titled cooking program.” And yet, her influence is often elided in discussions of American food culture. Young, in this article and her forthcoming book on the topic, seeks to rectify that by highlighting Richards’ work to “create a better future for the next generation of Black culinary professionals.”
The New York Times recently published a piece arguing that The Sims is the “internet’s most exciting place to eat.” I am kicking myself that I did not pitch this article, and also think I need to get my hands on a copy of Sims 4.
We’ve been on an Albariño kick for months in my household, ever since we got a sip of the Old Westminster Winery Pèt-Nat Albariño. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to make the trek out to Maryland lately to pick that up, but we have been enjoying Dozoe Albariño wine in its stead. Margo picked it up at Each Peach (I think) last week, and as you can see, it was so good that we downed it before I could even take a picture.
This is nice and dry with a fresh hit of lemon peel. It is neither acidic nor cloying— the overall word I would use to describe this wine is fresh (in a delicious salad type way, not a mouthwash way). Try it and let me know what you think!
Here is a brief update on some of the food-related work I’ve been engaging in lately:
Too much! I have a lot of upcoming projects (and am feeling a bit daunted, truth be told). I recently pitched a piece to Civil Eats on current projects to breed grapes for the climate crisis, so look for that out in a couple of months. The editor wanted me to use this piece on seed breeding as a sort of model and I am so excited!
I am also currently writing a piece for Whetstone’s new South Asia-focused print magazine on the burgeoning wine industry in South Asia (I say burgeoning because it definitely is having a moment right now, but the piece does touch on its long historical roots).
Last but not least, I am working on a JStor Daily piece about hops, race, and labor. This article on Indigenous laborers working on hop farms in the Pacific Slope is proving incredibly useful.
Thank you all for reading (and thank you to pals who have reached out with book/article/podcast recommendations!) This week, I will be diving into fermenting some basic sauerkraut and celebrating Valentine’s Day at Queen’s English in Columbia Heights. I hope your week is similarly filled with fermentation, wine, and maybe some silken tofu.
Love, Julia