food | MUSEUM FATIGUE

Good Food Class: Ramen Cookoff

November 15, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

“In fact, instant noodles may well be the most successful industrially produced food, at least in terms of world penetration: they constitute a huge social reality—and one inviting attention. Much like sugar, instant noodles are a capitalist provision that provisions capitalism…Because they feed people quickly and cheaply, they appeal to busy and economy-minded people everywhere” (Errington, Fujikura and Gewertz 2013: 6). This last week our Good Food First-Year Seminar finished reading The Noodle Narratives: The Global Rise of an Industrial Food […]

Categories: Anthropology, Assignments, Food, FYSEM: Good Food • Tags: class activity, Deborah Gewertz, food, Frederick Errington, ramen, Tatsuro Fujikura, The Noodle Narratives

Good Food: First Day Food Activity

August 31, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This semester I am teaching a first year seminar (FYSEM) called Good Food: Eating and Culture. The primary goal of the class—in addition to all of the standard introduction-to-college kinds of things required of all FYSEMs—is to consider what makes a food “good.” Humans can and do eat pretty much everything on the planet that won’t kill them, but what makes something good to eat is primarily dependent on sociocultural contexts. Eating is an intimate, personal act of taking something […]

Categories: Assignments, Food, FYSEM: Good Food • Tags: class activity, First Year Seminar, food, Good Food, Hamline University, students

Gold, DVDs, Surveillance Cameras and Meat: Supplies for the End Times

August 7, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: End of Times, Surveillance • Tags: apocalypse, cameras, DVD, food, gold

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American Breakfast in Japan

June 9, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

What makes a breakfast “American?” I considered this question after ordering an “American Breakfast” at a restaurant at Narita Airport. If the first meal of the day had an elementary mythological form the meal served to me was a Levi-Straussian ideal. It was an hr-breakfast—a meal reduced through the necessity of rough translation to its barest essential “American” form. Its bland color pallet, processed form and simple textures and flavors spoke to its role as simple morning fuel. Its […]

Categories: Food • Tags: American, American Breakfast, breakfast, food, Japan, Narita Airport

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Museum Fatigue Reads, May 17, 2014

May 16, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

Diagrams in Anthropology: Lines and Interactions Utopian Origins of Restroom Symbols The Special Obligations of Tenured Faculty After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen Young Chinese Maoists Set Up “Hippy” Commune Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Book) 为什么会没有中国队长？(Why Don’t We Have a Captain America?) The Search for General Tso – Trailer from Wicked Delicate Films on Vimeo. Marxism and the Critique of Value (Book) Wages for Facebook The Sad, Slow Death of America’s Retail Workforce The Postcapital Economy […]

Categories: Museum Fatigue Reads • Tags: cinema, diagrams, Facebook, food, General Tso, Historical Films, Karl Marx, labor, Logistics, Mao, Mars, nostalgia, symbols, Tenured Faculty, value, video games

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Don’t Fear The Twinkie Apocalypse

November 18, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

“Preparing for the Twinkpocalypse.” Recently it seems that any little thing might be a sign of The End of Days. We have endured the threat of an avian flu apocalypse and an unrelated, but unnerving bird apocalypse. There have been snopocalypses, a few snomageddons, or stormageddons. Fears of swine flu inspired Pork-pocalypse. On the horizon there are various immanent economic apocalypses. It seems that every few months the arrival of an invasive species, an unexpected weather event, spreading disease, natural disaster or humanmade catastrophe is interpreted as a […]

Categories: Consumption, Corporate Culture, End of Times, Food, Labor, Zombie • Tags: apocalypse, armageddon, food, Hostess, Twinkie, unions

油条: The Simplicity of Oil and Dough

October 26, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I have always been impressed with the charm of the Chinese youtiao (油条). I find poetry in the simplicity of taking a strip of dough, plopping it in a wok of hot oil and frying it to a golden brown. No spices, no salt, no sugar. No fuss. Just hot oil and dough doing their thing. Youtiao are quick, easy and utilitarian. They are made of the most basic ingredients, can be effortlessly produced by the dozens, and quickly snatched up […]

Categories: China, Everyday Things, Food, Video clips • Tags: food, translation, youtiao

An Afternoon Lunch at the Zhiqing Villa

June 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Ten years ago this month I finished my PhD dissertation, “Remembering Red: Memory and Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China,” in the anthropology department at the University of Washington in Seattle. My dissertation research examined nostalgia and memory of the Cultural Revolution among members of the generation who were most active in it. Specifically I looked at memorial practices of former “educated youth” or zhiqing who were sent down to the Chinese countryside beginning in the fall of […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Video clips • Tags: chinese countryside, food, nostalgia, video, zhiqing

United Airlines: The Food of the Future is Now

June 24, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I don’t sleep well on long airplane flights. I usually stay awake through the whole thing and keep myself busy by reading, writing, watching movies and thinking. After twelve hours in the air I usually get pretty antsy and a bit punchy from lack of sleep. Often in my head I replay parts of Louis Black’s funny monologue about his airplane flight to New Zealand. Sometimes, however, in the final hours of the flight—when I have no endurance left and […]

Categories: Food, Random Reflections • Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, airplane meals, David Graeber, food, future, Hipstamatic, Science Fiction, soylent, soylent green, United Airlines

Making Zongzi

June 20, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

While walking in some of the back streets of Nanjing just days before the Duanwu Festival I came upon a woman preparing zongzi for sale. I have eaten the bamboo leaf-wrapped rice many times over the past two decades, but until then had never seen how they were made. I was fascinated by how the simple ingredients of rice and red beans were deftly filled and wrapped by her experienced hands. It took her about half a minute to make […]

Categories: Food, How To, Video clips • Tags: China, cooking, food, zongzi

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