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Comfort Food in Culinary Tourism: Negotiating “Home” as Exotic and Familiar

Lucy M. Long

in Comfort Food: Meanings and Memories

This essay examines the ways in which comfort food functions in culinary tours. Focusing on the American Midwest, it suggests that such tours offer occasions for indulging in foods that would ... More

This essay examines the ways in which comfort food functions in culinary tours. Focusing on the American Midwest, it suggests that such tours offer occasions for indulging in foods that would otherwise cause concern or guilt. Furthermore, both comfort food and culinary tourism are social constructions dependent on the perspectives and experiences of the people participating in them, and both use “home” as a normative measure of familiar food. Culinary tourism involves a negotiation of the exotic with the familiar, and comfort food, because it typically represents the familiar, seems to be used differently according to the food culture being featured—as a way to make an exotic “Other” seem familiar; but also as a way to see the familiar differently, that is, to exoticize “home.”Less

Farming under Weather Risk: Adaptation, Moral Hazard, and Selection on Moral Hazard

Hsing-Hsiang Huang and Michael R. Moore

in Agricultural Productivity and Producer Behavior

American Midwest farmers determine cropping patterns and crop insurance in springtime after observing pre-plant precipitation. We examine cropping-pattern adaptation to pre-plant precipitation as a ... More

American Midwest farmers determine cropping patterns and crop insurance in springtime after observing pre-plant precipitation. We examine cropping-pattern adaptation to pre-plant precipitation as a natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-experiment created by a federal program that sharply reduced insurance deductibles to examine risk-taking in cropping pattern as a moral hazard of insurance and selection of insurance coverage in response to the risk-taking. Using a 2001-2014 panel of high-resolution spatial data on land use and weather, we find heterogeneous adaptation in cropping pattern across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota. We find evidence of heterogeneous risk-taking in cropping pattern during the federal program in 2009-2011, with farmers in Nebraska and North Dakota more responsive to pre-plant precipitation in both adaptation and risk-taking than farmers in Illinois and Iowa. Using a 2001-2014 panel of county-level data on crop insurance expenditures, we find limited evidence of selection on moral hazard in insurance expenditures in response to pre-plant precipitation. Farmers in Illinois and Iowa increase (decrease) the rate of insurance expenditures on corn when they increase (decrease) corn acres. The interaction of adaptation, moral hazard, and selection on moral hazard reveals incentives, hidden actions, and hidden information in major cropland and insurance markets.Less

Teaching Region

Dwight B. Billings, Gina Caison, David A. Davis, Laura Hernández-Ehrisman, Philip Joseph, Kent C. Ryden, and Emily Satterwhite

in Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters

The final chapter in this book examines pedagogies of place. The seven authors discuss the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies in or on Appalachia, the South and Southwest, the ... More

The final chapter in this book examines pedagogies of place. The seven authors discuss the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies in or on Appalachia, the South and Southwest, the Midwest, and New England as well as trans-regional Native American studies. They discuss whether and how region still matters to the students they encounter, what role they think region should play in contemporary social science and humanities pedagogy, and how they attempt to leverage interests in regional inequities and uneven geographic development to provoke student insights into other varieties of social injustice.Less

Pioneering Visions: The Midwestern Grid, the Atlas, and An Aerial Imagination

Jason Weems

in Barnstorming the Prairies: How Aerial Vision Shaped the Midwest

The story of aeriality and midwesternness is a complicated mixture of innovation and continuity. It begins with an assessment of preaviation aerial gazes as a means of seeing, conceptualizing, and ... More

The story of aeriality and midwesternness is a complicated mixture of innovation and continuity. It begins with an assessment of preaviation aerial gazes as a means of seeing, conceptualizing, and constructing prairie space. Faced with the unconventional topography of the prairie in its natural state, the region’s first settlers found traditional horizontally oriented modes of sight insufficiently able to convey an imagery for, or an understanding of, the region. Consequently, the first Midwesterners developed an alternative practice of envisioning the region in which imagined bird’s-eye prospects, coupled with more abstract and cartographically constructed gazes, provided a means to escape the overwhelming openness and relative featurelessness of the terrain and imagine the landscape as organized and hospitable. These practices of aerial looking also exhibited substantial congruence to the broad, rational gaze embedded in the government’s land-survey grid—the actual and ideological template by which the region was settled. Chapter 1 underscores the ways that that grid view and aerial imagination came together to fashion a particular, Jeffersonian, image of the region and its inhabitants and a specialized mode of atlas-oriented prairie description and representation. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding the historically constructed relationship between Midwestern identity and aerial representation.Less

Jews in Small Towns, on the Farms, and In-Between

Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost

in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

This chapter focuses on Eastern European Jewish settlers in the Midwest. Eastern European Jews left their homes, crossing vast expanses of terrain in all kinds of weather, heading for a harbor where ... More

This chapter focuses on Eastern European Jewish settlers in the Midwest. Eastern European Jews left their homes, crossing vast expanses of terrain in all kinds of weather, heading for a harbor where they could board a ship to take them to America. While majority headed straight for urban centers, a smaller number of Jewish immigrants headed toward America's less congested towns and cities. The mass migration that began in 1881 affected the makeup of America's major Jewish centers almost immediately, but it took perhaps a decade, and sometimes longer, for East Europeans to begin arriving in smaller cities and towns in significant numbers. The German-Jews, although somewhat ambivalent toward these newcomers, rallied to provide whatever support they could—money, food, clothing, English lessons, citizenship and cooking classes.Less

“Every Woman Deviating from the Code”: Cultural Lag, Moral Contagion, and Social Disintegration

Maureen A. Molloy

in On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism

This chapter discusses Mead's least well known work, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932). Located in the American Midwest—far from her usual ethnographic locus in the Pacific—the book ... More

This chapter discusses Mead's least well known work, The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932). Located in the American Midwest—far from her usual ethnographic locus in the Pacific—the book provides a compelling contrast to the exoticized and eroticized “natives” of the other ethnographies. Mead, whose Pacific ethnographies are marked by denial of Euro-American imperialism's effects, was unable to refute colonization's impact on the “Antlers.” Indeed, the book's little reception reflects both the difficulties America had in coming to terms with its internal empire and Mead's dismissal of the study's usefulness for anthropology because the culture was broken.Less

The Early Jewish Presence in the Middle West

Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost

in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

This chapter describes the early Jewish settlers in the Midwest. The first one was a German-Jew from Berlin named Ezekiel Solomon who landed at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula in 1761. A ... More

This chapter describes the early Jewish settlers in the Midwest. The first one was a German-Jew from Berlin named Ezekiel Solomon who landed at the northern tip of the Lower Peninsula in 1761. A simple marker, erected by the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, in Michilimackinac State Park, Mackinaw City, says that he survived an Ojibwa massacre at Fort Michilimackinac in 1763, was a fur trader who ran a general store provisioning the British Army, and was one of the founders of Canada's first (Sephardic rite) synagogue, Montreal's Shearith Israel. The chapter also details how during the 1800s and even as late as the 1910s, Jews who kept kosher often had a difficult time during their overland journeys to or through the Midwest. They either had to carry food with them hoping their supplies would last until they reached their destination; subsist on purchased or bartered eggs, milk, nuts, and/or fruits, if they could find them; or eat at “kosher” hotels or boarding houses of which there were woefully few.Less

Introduction

Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost

in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the state, shape, change, and evolution of Midwestern Jewish cuisine through time. It tracks ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book explores the state, shape, change, and evolution of Midwestern Jewish cuisine through time. It tracks geographically based culinary recipes and changes made to them through time by presenting and analyzing ones from Midwestern Jewish sources, both kosher and non-kosher. It documents the availability of fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles throughout the Midwest that impacted how and what Jews cooked; and considers the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways. Then, it examines the impact on Jewish foodways—the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food—of large-scale immigration, relocation, and Americanization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the attempts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients.Less

Lederman's Vision

in Fermilab: Physics, the Frontier, and Megascience

This chapter discusses the leadership of Leon M. Lederman as director of the Fermilab. It provides a biographical background of Lederman and describes his leadership style. Like Robert R. Wilson, ... More

This chapter discusses the leadership of Leon M. Lederman as director of the Fermilab. It provides a biographical background of Lederman and describes his leadership style. Like Robert R. Wilson, Lederman structured his vision for Fermilab on his self-image with a personae based on his all-embracing passion for physics. This chapter discusses how Lederman stabilized the laboratory, improved its funding environment and nurtured a vigorous megascience in a truly national laboratory whose frontier science was integrated within the cultural matrix of the American Midwest.Less

Trends in the Heartland

Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost

in From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways

Authentic and healthy, traditional plus tasty, these are phrases that are used over and over to describe today's Jewish foods. This chapter presents examples of dishes, both Ashkenazic-based and ... More

Authentic and healthy, traditional plus tasty, these are phrases that are used over and over to describe today's Jewish foods. This chapter presents examples of dishes, both Ashkenazic-based and Sephardic-inspired, meeting those criteria. These recipes of Jewish foods shared by Etheldoris Grais and Joseph Israel use Midwestern ingredients; they are also versatile, and grounded in Jewish food traditions, insofar as “Jewish foods” are often simply foods Jews eat wherever they live. These include Etheldoris' “Clear Wild Rice Soup,” Cold “Raspberry Cream Soup,” “Chinese Style Steamed Fish” and Joseph' “Zucchini Soup.”Less