In honor of the upcoming holidays where feasts aplenty will be served, Dr. Jennifer Jordan will be teaching us about how the stories we tell each other about the past shape the food we eat. Even as countless varieties of plants have vanished permanently from the face of the earth, people are working hard to preserve the biodiversity and "genetic heritage" not only of rare panda bears or singular orchids, but also the plants of the backyard vegetable garden.
A major consequence of this work is the
emergence of heirloom food—varieties of fruit, vegetables, grains and livestock
left behind by modern agriculture, but now experiencing a striking resurgence.
Through a close examination of apples and tomatoes, this talk reveals the
phenomenon of edible memory—the infusing of food, heirloom and otherwise, with
connections to the past, in ways both deeply personal and inherently social.
Paying attention to edible memory reveals deep connections between food and
memory, social and physical landscapes, pleasures and possibilities.
Jennifer Jordan is professor of sociology and urban
studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Edible
Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and other Forgotten Foods (University of
Chicago Press, 2015) and Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in
Berlin and Beyond (Stanford University Press, 2006) as well as numerous
scholarly articles on topics ranging from kitchen gardens and collective
memory, apples and German national identity, and dumplings. Her latest research
delves deeper into two kinds of edible landscapes—historical kitchen gardens,
and a thousand years of hop cultivation. Her research always addresses the ways
that the stories we tell about the past shape the world around us—whether in
orchards and vegetable gardens (in her latest book), or in the urban landscape
of Berlin (in her earlier research). She has been a Fulbright scholar, a senior
scientist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a fellow at the US Holocaust
Memorial Museum.
