Last summer was my first foray into the field for my dissertation research on the German recipe industry. I set out to study how recipe authors transform the fragrant, splatteringly sensorial experience of cooking into tidy prose, and I learned so much from my interviews and observation. The biggest surprise of the summer was the…
Petty Aunts and Stolen Broccoli
Who owns a recipe? How do you know? Does it matter? The answers to these questions are not absolute or universal, but rather rooted in beliefs about skill, expertise, knowledge, and the value of food and cooking. Consider how the characters in this absurdly catchy (and recently viral) TikTok music video would respond to the…
The Illegitimate Tent: My article published in Food and Foodways!
It turns out I had quite a bit to say about these domes! I’ve had an article published in the scholarly journal Food and Foodways (a significant career milestone for me!) that explores what these domes say about inequality in San Francisco and the contested boundary between public and private space. This article is a…
Botanicals 2020
Wine is alchemically transformed into vermouth through the addition of botanicals: aromatic and flavorful plants. To make Z Line Vermouth, we steep plants in brandy for several days to extract their scents, and then mix the filtered tincture into the wine. All of the botanicals in this year’s vintage were growing wild on Sam’s farm,…
Wild Fermentation
A cluster of grapes is an all-inclusive wine starter kit – everything you need to make wine is pre-packed in each and every cluster: sugar, acid, yeast. This year, I wanted to make one batch of wine that simply let the grapes do their thing. If you’ve ever seen grapes ripe on a vine, or…
Ariana Gunderson 