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Garlic Galore: Festival Inversion, Subversion, and the Enactment of Labor Relations

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based ... More

This chapter analyzes major events at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, which include the Gilroy Garlic Queen Pageant, garlic braiding classes, and the garlic topping contest. It argues that as place-based food festival royalty, the Garlic Queen personifies the locality’s food–place association. She and her court symbolize Gilroy and its garlic, further strengthening garlic’s role as the vehicle by which citizens of Gilroy affirm community values. The garlic braiding classes enact the classic festival inversion: what is in reality work is situated as play, and those who normally enjoy the fruits of others’ labors do the labor themselves. The garlic topping contest is a microcosm of the labor, power, and race relations of garlic production in Santa Clara County, and of worker–consumer relations in general.Less

A Brief History of Jews and Garlic

Jordan D. Rosenblum

in Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food

This chapter investigates the historical association between Jews and garlic. In the process, it explores how garlic functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that ... More

This chapter investigates the historical association between Jews and garlic. In the process, it explores how garlic functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that represents Self and Other; or, in the terminology favored in anthropology and food studies, how garlic operates as a metonym for Jews. In doing so, it references a wide variety of sources, including biblical and rabbinic texts, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, vampire lore, and 1960s rock music.Less

Making a Foodscape: Gilroy and the Iconization of Garlic

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to explore the creation and perpetuation of Gilroy’s identity as a foodscape, a food-themed place. It then explains the concept of foodscape; traces ... More

This chapter sets out the book’s purpose, which is to explore the creation and perpetuation of Gilroy’s identity as a foodscape, a food-themed place. It then explains the concept of foodscape; traces the history of the development of Gilroy, California; and discusses the campaign to promote Gilroy as the Garlic Capital of the World.Less

The Festivalization of Garlic: Creating and Celebrating Community in Gilroy

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter first describes the changes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has undergone over the years. It then discusses why food festivals are so popular among community leaders seeking to distinguish ... More

This chapter first describes the changes the Gilroy Garlic Festival has undergone over the years. It then discusses why food festivals are so popular among community leaders seeking to distinguish their towns; how the festival creates and sustains a sense of community; and how the Gilroy Garlic Festival serves as a model for other festival organizers.Less

From Foreign to Fad: Garlic’s Twentieth-Century Transition

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period ... More

This chapter discusses place–food associations; the origins of people’s negative perceptions of garlic, which are rooted in culinary egocentrism from the colonial era and reinforced during the period of massive southern European migration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century; and garlic’s infiltration of mainstream American cookery.Less

Place Branding and Selling Place: Creating and Marketing Identity Capital

Pauline Adema

in Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape

This chapter analyzes the branding of Gilroy as a festive foodscape. While Gilroy business leaders initially sought to reverse its negative image, what they established was an ongoing campaign of ... More

This chapter analyzes the branding of Gilroy as a festive foodscape. While Gilroy business leaders initially sought to reverse its negative image, what they established was an ongoing campaign of selling place. Gilroy’s branded identity is sustained by the successful food-centered event and place marketing in the forms of auto-ethnographic texts and media coverage. But there are also multiple identities generated by the Festival and the foodscape place brand, one of which is Gilroy’s image as the Garlic Capital of the World. A second collective and multidimensional identity generated by the Garlic Festival is the community of Festival volunteers. A communal spirit is operating and being reinforced on multiple levels as volunteers simultaneously play numerous roles.Less

The Trouble with Taxa

in What Did the Romans Know?: An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking

This chapter demonstrates that relatively innocuous-looking assumptions about how phenomena are related, and how those relationships enable possibilities for interaction, can have major effects on ... More

This chapter demonstrates that relatively innocuous-looking assumptions about how phenomena are related, and how those relationships enable possibilities for interaction, can have major effects on how the world itself looks to be put together, and on what kinds of things are possible or impossible, patently obvious or patently ridiculous, in that world. It also asks why it is that the ancients think that garlic interferes with magnetism. Plutarch's appeal to experience for garlic-magnets was not unique. In their counterarguments, both Giambattista della Porta and William Gilbert notably divorce garlic-magnets from their traditional taxonomic context. Garlic and magnets had been of a kind in Plutarch's day, and during the scientific revolution the lodestone got classified. The kind of experience to which both the pro and con claims about garlic and magnets presented in this chapter was not the laboratory-experimental kind of experience.Less

Nearly as nature intended: An exhibition of some curious molecules in the foods we eat

John Emsley

in Title Pages

There are scores of myths surrounding the things we eat: chocolate is almost addictive; Coca-Cola is just a concoction of chemicals; garlic wards off heart disease and cancer; an aspirin a day ... More

There are scores of myths surrounding the things we eat: chocolate is almost addictive; Coca-Cola is just a concoction of chemicals; garlic wards off heart disease and cancer; an aspirin a day keeps the doctor away. None of these statements is true, but they contain a germ of truth. In this gallery we can inspect the portraits of some of the natural and unnatural chemicals which a normal diet contains. The pleasures of eating are sweet but fleeting, while the warnings about food seem bitter and never-ending. The warnings we should heed are those of professional dietitians, the front-line troops who are fighting the war against poor nutrition and unbalanced diets. While they help the people who are referred to them, the rest of us only hear their advice second-hand, and even then we do not heed it—which may explain why one person in five is now classed as obese (33% or more overweight) in the USA, and one in ten in Britain. Behind the front-line dietitians is a regiment of armchair food commanders who offer their advice to anyone who listens. Often it is soundly based, telling us how to lose weight and still be properly nourished, but a lot is rather unhelpful, merely condemning some popular foods as ‘junk’ without explaining why they are so (although this term is generally taken to mean that they contain too much sugar, salt, saturated fats and additives). Examples of junk food are chocolate, colas, hamburgers and french fries. Sadly the healthy alternatives, such as raw celery, mineral water and lentils, lack appeal for many, and especially for children. Alongside claims about junk food come more dire warnings about the chemicals that are present in other foods, and especially if these have been added merely to make food look and taste more tempting, or if they are there as contaminants that come from pesticides and processing. Surprisingly, most food-related illness comes not from these, but from micro-organisms such as bacteria and fungi, and we are most at risk when we eat food that has not been properly stored or prepared. Ideally food should be free of all dangerous impurities, be they bacteria, fungi or chemicals. Less

From the Antitaurus to the Karabudak: Zimara, and the road to Nicopolis: (Maps 13, 14, 16, 17, and Figs. A1, A2)

Timothy Bruce Mitford

in Discovering Rome's Eastern Frontier: On Foot Through a Vanished World

From the bridge over the Çaltı Çay, the Roman road curved east beside the Euphrates to reach Zimara, an important fort, utterly remote, from which Corbulo knew downriver navigation of the Euphrates. ... More

From the bridge over the Çaltı Çay, the Roman road curved east beside the Euphrates to reach Zimara, an important fort, utterly remote, from which Corbulo knew downriver navigation of the Euphrates. A journey by raft through the enormous Antitaurus gorge. Continuation to Decius’ bridge over the Sabrina (Karabudak), and division of roads. The route, by Armudan, to Nicopolis. The significance of places until 1915 occupied by Armenians.Less

Vegetables and tubers

Daniel Zohary, Ehud Weiss, and Maria Hopf*

in Domestication of Plants in the Old World: The origin and spread of domesticated plants in Southwest Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean Basin

This chapter discusses the domestication of vegetables and tubers. The soft parts of vegetables and tubers were rarely charred and preserved; thus, most of their remains are not found during ... More

This chapter discusses the domestication of vegetables and tubers. The soft parts of vegetables and tubers were rarely charred and preserved; thus, most of their remains are not found during archaeological excavations. The archaeobotanical data on the early phases of vegetable domestication are mostly incomplete; however, Mesopotamian Bronze Age literary sources and drawings found in Egyptian tombs compensate for this problem. The chapter also discusses the cultivation of vegetables and tubers particularly watermelon, melon, leeks, garlic, onion, lettuce chufa, cabbage, turnip, beet, carrot, and celery.Less

The Early World of Chigagou, 1600–1750

Robert G. Spinney

in City of Big Shoulders: A History of Chicago

This chapter talks about a marshy area Native Americans called Chigagou, meaning the “wild-garlic place”. It describes Chigagou as an inhospitable place and very few American Indians wanted to live ... More

This chapter talks about a marshy area Native Americans called Chigagou, meaning the “wild-garlic place”. It describes Chigagou as an inhospitable place and very few American Indians wanted to live on the area's marshy land. It also points out that the ancestors of the Native Americans who settled in the Chigagou area came from Siberia. This chapter explains that Chigagou was never the site of a major settlement and its geographic location suggests it was a place that American Indians passed through while traveling. The chapter mentions white traders that realized that the Chigagou swamp amounted to a mini-continental divide. East of Chigagou, rivers flowed eastward toward the Atlantic Ocean, and, west of the swamp, rivers flowed westward toward the Mississippi River.Less