Periodic Roundup and Call for Help
The beginning of June seems like a good time to take stock. I had no idea when a little over a year ago I started a blog that it could bring so many new friends, open so many doors, or take so much time. This is a moment to thank all of you who have sent the smart, witty, informed, skeptical and cheering comments that have kept me going.
It’s also time for me to think through the blog. Lots of things are happening. I have at least two gripping projects under way. The one I can talk about now is the world food history that I have been working on for the best part of a decade. It’s now under contract (hurrah!) and I have to get my massive manuscript in shape by the end of the year.
Working on this has been the most exciting intellectual adventure of my life, if at times made me cry and rage with frustration. I think the story makes world food simple and comprehensible. I think it also shows that food and cooking moved history, that they did not languish as an afterthought to agriculture and colonization.
It will be a crossover academic/trade book, accessible and scholarly. Deciding to go this route was difficult. The reason I did it, rather than “simply” writing something designed to be a best seller (ha!) was that I deeply believe that serious scholarship, the clarification of hypotheses, the testing of ideas, is what gives value to something that otherwise might be just a series of apercus, and at its bets, the academic review process enhances these virtues.
My history of food and cooking is my springboard into food politics, something I want to write much more on in the future. The minutiae of how vermicelli or fideos moved around the world in the 14th or 15th century is one of the keys to dealing with the food politics in the future. The details of old kitchens give us a way to assess the role of cooking today (including Amanda Hesser’s throw away editorial urging Michelle Obama should step up to the stove).
So I may be posting less frequently. Or perhaps I may even up my posting levels. I would love to get your individual or collective wisdom about the many, many facts that remain obscure or, more important, about the story I have put together. Writing is lonely, forging the connections and the ideas is the work of one individual, but the resources reflect communities that stretch across time and space.
A blog community is special in some ways. It is self elected, it is energetic, it is the kind of readership that I would love my book to reach. So I would feel privileged if I could call on your individual or collective knowledge and experience in the coming months.
Hope the link works today —–
This sounds very exciting and I’d be happy to review or etc. anything that you have. I’m a very ‘in-brain-out-mouth’ person!
Diana.
Thanks for the encouragement, Diana.
By the way in-brain-out-mouth is new to me. Great phrase.
Rachel,
If there’s anything I can do, please ask. I might be able to get articles and other things for you that you can’t because of being where you are, etc.
Congratulations!
Cindy
Congrats on the contract! That’s great news. I admittedly have very little in the way of individual knowledge, but you may indeed call on it whenever you’d like.
As if to drive home my very point, I signed your name as mine in the post above. Ah, the brain-killing power of studying for the bar exam.
World food history under contract!! Wonderful news Rachel. Congratulations!
Rachel – this sounds like a wonderful project – I have put my order in for a copy already! I’d like to think I could add value, but I feel like a bit of a dilettante, really. I can certainly encourage and support however!
Rachel
I have enjoyed your blog so much!! I feel I am getting a late start in studing food history, but your post on “Getting Started in Food History” has been a great help.
I wish you luck with your book and trust me I will buy a copy.
Tracy :)
GO! RACHEL!!!
… and, call and time for assistance I might be able to provide.
Anytime, Rachel. Really looking forward to your book!
Wonderful news for you, brava and auguri! If there is any help you need, it would be my sincere pleasure.
Judith
well, i certainly can’t wait for the book to come out!
I am so excited to hear this! Your article “A Please for Culinary Modernism” is one of the most sensible and balanced articles I have read (on any topic). General food histories seem to have gone out of style recently; the best general books I have read on the topic were published in the seventies. I’m so glad you’ve taken the scholarly but easy to read route, I am sick of books that sacrifice facts for the sake of a ‘good story’. When it’s done and dusted, I’d also be really interested in hearing more about the process of writing a book over such a long time – did you set out to write a food history book a decade ago or has it just evolved from your studies?
What a wonderful project! Congratulations, Rachel!
If there is anything I can do to help, please ask.