Foodways: Rooted, Made, Shared, Imagined

Published October 20, 2025

Kahn Institute Long-Term Project, 2026–27

Meeting time: Thursdays 4:30–7:30 p.m.

Organizing Fellows

Suleiman Mourad, Religion and Middle East Studies
Javier Puente, Latin American & Latino/a Studies and Lewis Global Studies Center

Project Description

Foodways encapsulate the human experience and shape their personhood, social interactions, and relations to their natural world. Modernity has complicated this relationship, with both positive and adverse effects. The recent 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic and escalating military conflicts around the world further highlighted crucial and structural vulnerabilities and inequities in food, foodways, and food systems, with larger reverberations on the cultural, political, and economic significance of food amidst widespread uncertainties and imminent societal collapse. These disruptive crises, coupled with the current global authoritarian turn, cultivate an urgent need to interrogate the centrality of food to daily life and society, whether in kitchens, factories, laboratories, farms, or think tanks across the globe or in our backyards. Foodways, broadly construed, also offer opportunities to explore the multiple registers of the material, experiential, and metaphysical aspects of the human experience. How might ingredients and their consumption offer a window into understanding memory, identity, indigeneity, rituals, biology, and health in the context of uncertainty and inequity? Foodways provide an opportunity to consider the circulation of goods (local/global), knowledge (recipes/techniques), people (migration), technology, and taste, which embeds us in socio-political, psychological, as well as human-made and natural environments across time and space with unintended and intentional consequences.

This Kahn project invites colleagues from all disciplines, divisions, and ranks whose teaching, research, or writing intersect with the study of food to consider what it can reveal at this post-pandemic moment about the complex and multifaceted dynamic between individuals and society.

Join us to create, stimulate, and sustain a conversation about food and foodways that could endure beyond the seminar. Some potential outcomes might include new collaborative curricular offerings and research directions. We will meet throughout the academic year on Thursdays from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. Dinner will be provided (and in a few cases, it will be prepared by the fellows themselves).

Student Recruitment

We are now actively recruiting student applicants for “Foodways: Rooted, Made, Shared, Imagined.” Those interested in applying should:

Assess their eligibility and interest by reading the Kahn Student Fellowships page.
Attend an informational session with the organizers, Tuesday, December 2, 4:30 p.m. in person at the Kahn Institute or RSVP for the informational session.
Participate in the Kahn Institute Application Writing Workshop, Tuesday, February 3, 4:30 p.m., in person at the Kahn Institute. RSV for the application writing workshop.

Applications are due by Tuesday, February 10.

Fellows

Nathan Derr

Biology & Biochemistry

Derr’s research asks, how do we separate the biology and biochemistry of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from the political, economic, and social factors that oversee and influence their use and need across the globe? He is also researching how teaching the human right to science can influence students’ understanding of the conduct of science, ultimately leading to a more just scientific enterprise that addresses how the benefits of science can truly be delivered to all humans.

Efadul Huq

Environmental Science & Policy

Huq researches so-called invasive species such as Japanese Knotweed (Itadori) and suckermouth catfish as more-than-human interlocutors who bring us face to face with contemporary political and epistemic predicaments of migration and belonging in cities. Global circulation of invasive species raises questions about how societies decide what counts as “out of place” and thereby displaceable. Through engaged research in Northampton and Dhaka, Huq explores how co-creative practices with plant and fish “migrants” such as Itadori and suckermouth catfish can reimagine foodways, belonging, and climate resilience in cities.

Aaron Kamugisha

Africana Studies

Kamugisha’s work engages cuisine’s observed presence in Caribbean thought and the political economy of the region. He is studying the socio-historical processes that have created Caribbean cuisine first as a route towards conviviality and community building, as evidenced in his study of the lifework of Barbadian-Canadian novelist Austin Clarke, who published an entire food memoir. And secondly through the political economy of underdevelopment and contemporary food insecurity, which have their roots in colonialism and slavery.

Jinwon Kim

Sociology

Kim is working on a new book project examining how East Asian geopolitics, transnational investment, urban redevelopment, and gentrification in downtown Flushing have generated complex interethnic and intraethnic relations and conflicts among Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Korean Chinese immigrants and their children. Through interviews with 181 individuals across these four groups, she plans to write about how the popularity of Korean food has shaped new ethnic relations and placemaking within the Asian community.

Leslie King

Sociology

King’s research examines corporate power and environmental sustainability. She is exploring food movements that 1.) aim to reconnect communities through food and gardening; 2.) provide local alternatives to corporate-produced food; 3.) create environmentally sustainable food systems; and/or 4.) envision more socially equitable methods of producing and distributing food. Food advocacy and activism, in all its varied iterations and permutations, is rich with possibilities and real-world examples of positive and feasible action.

Sarah Mazza

Geosciences

Mazza will explore the connection between geochemistry and the terroir of wine to improve our understanding of the influence different geologic terrains have on agricultural products. She will be examining how geochemical signatures can be recorded in grapes and thus potentially used as a marker for the authenticity of geographic origin of wines. This research will also include an examination of soil additives (e.g., fertilizers) and how vineyards are addressing the issue of topsoil degradation.

Suleiman Mourad, Organizing Fellow

Religion & Middle East Studies

Many in Lebanon consider Kibbe their national dish. It is prepared in a myriad of ways—fried, baked, boiled, or raw; meat or meatless; with spices or spice-less; stuffed or not—which were traditionally dictated by season, affordability, and religious diet. Mourad’s project, “Kibbe & the Lebanese: A Match Made in Heaven,” investigates Kibbe's origin and constant evolution in light of new ingredients, techniques, and eating habits (historically and today), and how food shapes national identity and consumption of specific dishes in the Middle East.

Yancey Orr

Environmental Science & Policy

Orr is conducting an ethnographic study on hedonic landscapes, examining how people perceive aesthetic pleasure through food, based on fieldwork in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia. He is testing which visual and sensory features of foods people find most aesthetically appealing, as well as whether these preferences extend across categories. A key question guiding this work is whether individuals identify consistent aesthetic patterns across different types of food. He also researches the history of the organic food movement.

Juan Sebastian Ospina

Philosophy

Ospina will explore a conceptual understanding of a “right to food” through a decolonial framework. Decolonial frameworks tend to resist the necessity and importance of conceptualizing rights. He is looking for conceptual methods to think about a practical question of a decolonial rights-based approach: how exactly do we work in a decolonial state to secure food systems that ensure the protection and reproduction of human and non-human life?

Melissa Parrish

English Language & Literature

Parrish’s book is on the poetics and politics of emergency in the US–which includes a brief history of SPAM, whose reputation has undergone a fascinating evolution from wartime food to a source of joyful sustainment. Parrish’s research at the Kahn will also support the writing of a new book, on cultures of apologies and reparation. This project asks questions like: how can food have reparative power when its history is marked by imperialism and global racial capitalism?

Javier Puente, Organizing Fellow

Latin American & Latino/a Studies

Peru’s pollo a la brasa, honored with a national holiday each July, has become a key symbol of identity, with pollerías (a pollo a la brasa restaurant) consuming about 180 million chickens annually. Puente’s project, "The Authoritarian Origins of Pollo a la Brasa: The Military, Poultry, and Peru’s Food Politics, 1969–1975," traces this culinary rise to the agrarian transformations engineered under Peru’s last military dictatorship, showing how authoritarian interventions reshaped food production, consumption patterns, and national culture through a lasting shift toward poultry-centered diets.

María Helena Rueda

Spanish & Portuguese

Rueda’s current research project examines how contemporary Latin American cinema explores care and its practices, particularly in contexts marked by violence and precarity. Often, these forms of care revolve around food and its circuits of production, distribution, and consumption. From the environmental impact of food production to the intimacy of dinner conversations, many Latin American films place food at the center when examining human interactions with one another and with non-human entities.

Margaret Sarkissian

Music

Sarkissian’s current research project illuminates how, in the search for new ways to reinforce human bonds within a small Malaysian coastal community severely endangered by the double threat of climate-related and man-made environmental destruction, music and food have taken on even greater significance. The connection between musicians and food has always been strong. Now, musicians are initiating new projects that tap into traditional practices to create solidarity and raise awareness both within and beyond the community.

Maria Succi-Hempstead

Italian Studies

Succi-Hempstead has long been shaped by food in her identity, memory, and daily life, and she is drawn to understanding where ingredients come from, why certain foods gain prominence, and how culinary habits evolve. She is especially fascinated by how recipes travel and are reshaped through cultural exchange. Succi-Hempstead aims to investigate these dynamics through questions of sustainability and biodiversity, and she looks forward to engaging in interdisciplinary conversations about food as a lens into our shared human experience.