In my research on recipes, I’m often engaged in discussions of authorship and ownership. Who can be called an ‘author’ of a recipe? What does authorship of a text entail (in terms of copyright law or social norms) and who gets to be an author when freshly published recipes are based on older recipes or…
Tag: From the Field
AAA Annual Meeting: Tips for a huge anthropological gathering
By Ariana Gunderson and Gaya Morris We returned from the 2022 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Seattle with our notebooks full of reflections and ideas for next time. Here are our notes to self for this year’s annual meeting, which might be of interest to you for your first AAA! Gaya’s sketched…
Text and Visual Context
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…
Lessons from the Produce Department
This past summer, I worked in the Produce department of a large supermarket in Portland, Oregon. This work allowed me to peek into the intersection of food production and consumption at the most common point of exchange: in the grocery store. It changed the way I look at food on the shelf, the way I…
Brazilian Beach Barbecue
A beach day on the southeastern coast of Brazil requires many supplies beyond a towel and sunscreen. Your day trip from São Paulo is well provisioned and won’t be complete without chairs, tables, multiple barbecue grills, coolers, cups, and dishware, as well as a speaker blaring music. The food that best sustains an all-day beach…
Ariana Gunderson 