Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

I explore English-based digital cookbooks created during the Covid-19 pandemic as case studies for analyzing the practice of public pedagogy within community cookbooks. I am particularly interested in modes of making that interrupt the individual/collective binary, especially during a global pandemic which has emphasized distance, isolation, and shelter-in-place. Contemporary creative process, I argue, can be modeled and archived by digital community cookbooks, which help to democratize the food writing genre by expanding the possibilities of narratorial ownership by expanding the notion of who gets to “own,” “author,” or belong within the realm of recipe-writing. Moreover, the community cookbook offers time-specific portraits of a community’s immediate needs, thereby inviting forms of social response that might help to honor and nourish a community in a given time. As writer-scholar Thao Goffe argues, gastropoetics creates an “archive where recipes are the primary resource and thus argument or evidence for how humans have cultivated and been cultivated by their environment” (Goffe). To read a community cookbook through the framework of gastropoetics allows readers to view how recipes both shape and document human responses to a historical moment in time. That said, digital cookbooks can also decrease access to specific food(s) and communities, given both their format and their reliance upon specific [reading] technologies and fluencies in media platforms that may not be accessible to some potential readers.