food studies

Happy New Year 2015!

What a wonderful gift the new year brings. It kicks 2014, by most accounts a most miserable, stingy, and violent abuser of a year, out the door. Let’s celebrate!

There are big things in store for me in 2015, and I’m thrilled to announce I’m making plans to become a better writer and photographer.

As you may know, I’ve been struggling with personal loss and injury for the past few years, and my life hasn’t been terrific. My divorce and shift in teaching position at the university and the realities of this small town have made it so I can no longer live the life I had. Nor do I really want it any more.

What I do want, I realized, is to live more fully and richly in the skin I feel most comfortable in, as a food and travel writer, so I can continue to bring stories of the north to all of you and discover more friends and colleagues in an even wider audience.

So I’m off to do it. I’ll be leaving Eugene this summer and relocating closer to the city life that can feed my need to tell these stories. This means I’m losing my home, which is almost unspeakably difficult as one deeply in love with this place.

It also makes the continuation of my cherished issue, Culinaria Eugenius, an impossibility in its current form. Culinaria Eugenius is the story of a place, and Eugene is the small hearth upon which I will no longer be able to warm my stories. It’s rather scary, but I am confident that all my years with you have provided me a strong and everlasting flame that will fuel me wherever I go. I’ve been writing this award-winning local food blog for almost seven years, nearly 1000 posts. In its virtual pages, I have documented the dramatic change in the Eugene food scene and offered countless original recipes and stories about our local food shed. It’s been a transformative experience, and I’m deeply thankful to all my readers who have joined me.

There’s still plenty of time before I make the final transition, so I hope you’ll continue to read my work. You may know I maintain a Facebook feed for CE, which is far more active than the blog, and that I write a quarterly column for Eugene Magazine called “Eat, Drink, Think” (featuring local farmers and my favorite recipes using seasonal produce) and some features that appear there. I’ve written in the past for other places, including NPR’s The Salt, Acres USA, and Gastronomica, as well as our two local newspapers. I’ll still be teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Oregon and other places, and will keep you informed about cooking classes and demos.

I’ve been writing more and more travel stories, interviews with cool Oregonians, and the latest in Northwest tastes for AAA’s Via magazine, work I really love and want to undertake in greater quantity. I am working on a cookbook for single people, a food history book, and a number of articles that will be announced as soon as they find a home. I’m also proud to say I’ll be interviewing Novella Carpenter and moderating a panel on Diana Abu-Jaber’s food writing at the CSWS Northwest Women Writers Symposium this spring.

To raise funds for the move and upcoming travel research, I’d love to hear from you if you have paid freelance needs for food features (writing or photography) or book reviews or judging gigs, and I’d be deeply appreciative if you could pass my name along to folks who might be interested in someone with this experience. I am not only a writer and budding photographer, I’m an accomplished public speaker for both academic events and cooking demos, and an event organizer. I have served as a panelist, panel moderator, interviewer, and judge at myriad venues, including for international book awards, our local Iron Chef competition, and academic panels in the U.S. and abroad. I’ve interviewed some of our brightest culinary lights on an NPR-affiliated food radio show (as a co-host for the late, much lamented Food for Thought on KLCC) and at live events, and have curatorial experience working with 600 years of rare books related to food history. The best email address is wellsuited at gmail dot com, and I’m happy to provide a full CV upon request.

May 2015 treat all of you, of us!, with the dignity and respect it should, and grant you the gift of good eating and great companionship. Happy adventuring!

It’s Spring, and you know it, another term! I’m teaching a larger version of my Food Studies introduction at University of Oregon, and could use your help spreading the news. If you know any current UO student who’s enchanted by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, wants to know How to Cook a Wolf, and can negotiate The Jungle with no fear, we’ll be reading all that and more, studying the fiction beside articles on contemporary issues in the best food and culture reader on the market. It’s a Gen Ed/IC offering, so consider your requirement needs pwnd. Standard tuition fees apply, must be enrolled at UO. Course is about half full, so sign up soon!

Course introduction video is here, produced by Jennifer Simon for the COLT Department.

COLT 231
Literature and Society: “Literature, Food, Society”
Jennifer Burns Bright

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” wrote French essayist Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who penned the first modern treatise on gastronomy. In this introduction to Food Studies course, we’ll explore savages and mothers, farmers and fat activists, socialists and colonialists, all seeking to express their communal identity through food. Examining the food practices in a range of texts that capture issues facing urban and rural societies in flux, we will seek to understand how and why diet, nutrition, and agriculture are all political battlegrounds that deeply impact history. Course goals include understanding multiple ways in which scholars analyze food and international foodways, drawing methodologies from a range of disciplines, including sociology, philosophy, art history, and literary and environmental studies. (Lecture CRN 38595 plus discussion section; Satisfies Gen Ed, IC.)