Shingles, Blogging, and Opportunities in Food History
Why this image? Well, it went over well on Facebook. It seemed seasonal. If you choose to read more into it, go ahead.
I’ve not had such a long holiday from blogging since I started, I think in 2008.
Shingles: A Public Service Message
The reason? Shingles, aka Herpes Zoster. It’s enough to confirm your suspicion that there are bad things out there in the world. Chickenpox as a child, fifty years or more pass, and then one day you look at your body and think “Hives? What am I allergic to?”
If this happens to you, even if you have had the shingles vaccine, hoof it to the doctor immediately. To be effective, the antiviral medicine has to be taken within a day or two of it starting.
I had a medium case, so far as I can tell. Two to three weeks of feeling as if a rebar was banging in the left side of my body, with the skin so sensitive that even the softest sweater was painful, and a field of red bumps that gradually scabbed over. Luckily little itching for me. Since the pain is in the nerve endings, the usual home painkillers don’t do much. I was prescribed Gabapentin but that didn’t seem to do much either, so I only took a few.
Almost worse than the pain for me was the fatigue and foggy head that continued for six to eight weeks after the pain subsided. I managed to put food on the table (thanks, freezer) and do the laundry but that was about it. Thinking coherently. Forget it. Not a comfortable feeling.
I was lucky. If you have immune problems or if it affects the fact instead of the body, it can be very nasty indeed. And one in three adults gets it.
So I post this in case for one reason or another you are as blissfully unaware that you might get it as I was. Why risk it?
If you had chickenpox and haven’t had either the vaccine that came out several years ago (the one I had had) or the one that is now available (and is supposed to be more effective), get it. You may still have shingles but it won’t be as bad. If you haven’t had your children vaccinated against chickenpox, do. It will protect them from this long-delayed whammy.
Blogging: Why I Continue
While I was lying around, I wondered whether this was the moment to stop blogging, especially since every week or two I read that blogging is dead.
My conclusion was no, not yet.
Blogging is a useful way to try out ideas. It allows me to write about all intriguing issues I run across when writing articles or books but that don’t fit in those formats. I like to think that readers will pick up some of these and give them the attention they deserve.
Some posts even seem to be useful. My page, Getting Started in Food History, which started out as a post, has had about 40,000 hits, not exactly viral, but not bad for a pretty specialized topic. I’ve several more similar posts/pages well on the way to being ready to put up.
On-line publications, which I have published in and which at first sight seem an alternative that will get a much larger readership, seem a little ephemeral. Just last week I realized I had lost a piece which I stupidly had not downloaded. Moreover unless you can also publish on your own webpage, your work gets scattered. I find it handy to be able to refer myself or others to earlier posts.
Finally, I’ve found it a wonderful way to meet others. Commentators often shed a whole new light on a topic. Students, editors, journalists, radio hosts, conference organizers, and people simply interested in food history and politics contact me because they have read something on my blog. Almost never have I had a problem with trolls.
It’s lots of work. If I were beginning a career, I doubt that I would set time aside for a blog. With a long career behind me, it’s worth it.
Opportunities in Food History
A reward for those of you who have plowed through the preceding two sections.
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The Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’alimentation is organizing its 2018 Summer University. This has terrific faculty and a perspective on “food studies” very different from the American one.
https://summerschool.iehca.univ-tours.fr/edition-2017/edition-2017–406679.kjsp
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For a very short period, the entire special issue Accounting for Taste (Senses and Society 13(1)) is open access. Curious about how perfumers, chemists, and machines have come together to shape flavor? https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17458927.2018.1425210 … Good articles.
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Calling all foreign-born culinary professionals: The Vilcek Foundation is accepting applications for its 2019 Creative Promise Prizes. Immigrants working as chefs, beverage artists, and food writers are invited to apply for one of three $50,000 prizes.
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The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas is an amazing rare book collection and much more besides. Although it does not specifically collect in food and food history, it has many resources in this area. Just think of the Knopf papers, which include Judith Jones’s correspondence with Julia Child and the many other important cookbook writers she published. Worth investigating if you are in the area. Eric Colleary, besides being Curator of Theater and Performing Arts, is responsible for culinary matters. You can see his blog at americantable.org
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And finally, pizza. Should you happen to be in Dusseldorf, the NRW Forum is running an exhibit on pizza and art “Pizza is God” until 20th May. It is accompanied by a book Pizza is God that includes a lot of intriguing articles. I was delighted that my piece “The Pizza Effect” was included. If you don’t know about the pizza effect you have a treat in store. The story follows a Viennese youth turned Hindu monk turned American anthropologist who invented the term for cherished national traditions that on inspection were little valued in their home country until taken abroad, elaborated, and then adopted in their supposed land of origin.
- Thank you, Breakthrough Institute
- Good as Far as It Goes, But It Doesn’t Go Far Enough: Nigella Lawson’s Defense of Home Cooking
Dear Rachel, I am so sorry that you’ve experienced such a trying time with the shingles attack. The mere thought of them sets me to cringing. Blogging seems to be on the way out as far as readers go, but not in all cases. Your blog continuously offers a lot to ponder. Not only that, your conclusions offer encouragement to keep on learning and thinking. I hope that you continue to feel better and to serve up many more delicious posts for our enjoyment!
Thank you Cindy. Much appreciated.
So sorry to hear of your shingles episode; so glad to know you are on the mend. ODAIJI NI (take care!) Your blogs are of immense interest: please continue stimulating and informing us all!!!
Thank you Elizabeth.
So sorry to hear of your shingles. How unpleasant.
Glad you’ve decided to continue blogging. I always enjoy your blog posts and would miss them. And yes — having a backlog of work to point people to is worthwhile, as well as having a place to put things that just might not fit into anything one is writing for work.
As for the article on chemistry, perfumery, and flavor — very interesting. It made me think of a video someone posted the other day of robots mimicking the actions of chefs, and my thought was that they wouldn’t really duplicate the chef’s foods because the robot would not be tasting the food — but it appears from this article as if we might even get around this — set a flavor profile and have the robot analyze the food as it cooks. Hmm. Still prefer having humans do cooking — because what value does life have if we can’t do beautiful things ourselves.
Anyway, glad to hear the ordeal is over — and glad there are likely to be future posts. Be well.
Well snap! After a particularly stressful start to the new year, when my son fell 12 metres from a tree and nearly killed himself, my husband and I took ourselves off to Bali 2 weeks ago for a well earned break. You can imagine my horror when I promptly broke out in the shingles rash, after having had a couple of days of puzzling pain and discomfort before we left home.
I thought it was a spider bite ( we live in the country – lots of spiders) and the 12 year old doctor in our Balinese hotel treated it as such. It wasn’t until I sent a photo of the rash to a medico friend back home that the truth was revealed so, of course, I missed out on the anti-virals.
I was unaware of the other symptoms (tiredness, foggy brain etc) so was completely unprepared for the exhaustion I felt at the end of a day doing nothing but lolling around a pool and the fact that I was in a dead sleep by 8.30 at night.
We arrived back home last week and I’ve had to hit the ground running with various commitments, but perhaps I’ll try to be a bit gentler on myself for the next week or two.
And maybe I’ll just spend some time wandering through some of the fabulous resources you’ve unearthed for us, Rachel!
Oh Rachel, I have seen how horrible it can be. It will pass. Important that you rest and do whatever you need to to get fully better before trying to get back to normal, as I am sure the doctors have told you.
I am happy that the shingles episode was no worse. A friend of mine spent an extremely miserable 6 weeks stuck in Florida with it.
The provincial health plan here is offering shingles vaccinations for older people and I jumped at the chance. My sister kindly gave me chicken pox for Christmas when I was 18.
Dear Rachel,
Oh, I am so sad that you had to go through the nightmare of shingles!!
I was also most interested to read your thoughts on blogging, which are very much in-line with my own. I’ve been at ye olde “Madam Mayo” posting since 2006 and will admit to a more or less thrice yearly crisis of motivation. But the same incentives pull me through each time: It’s a place to try things out; a place to publish works that, for various reasons (style, subject, length) may not be suitable for publication elsewhere; a way to share and celebrate (this Monday, for example, a most charming book by a friend); and also, as I increasingly appreciate, a way to keep an on-line filing cabinet, as it were. So many of my early on-line articles, stories, interviews, and guest-blog posts, not to mention assorted other links, have gone dark, so when I can, I reproduce these items on my blog (and, by the way, on my website as well).* I have also begun using my Madam Mayo posts, on rare occasion, as a way to take notes on subjects apropos of my work-in-progress– linking to on-line texts, podcasts, videos, and more, for my own reference (though I would also hope it would be surf-worthy for my readers).
* You might be able to recover your lost piece by trying the Internet Archive Way Back Machine
http://web.archive.org
Blog on dear Rachel!
Thanks so much for the suggestion for retrieving my work.
And for sharing your thoughts about blogging.
I am sorry you were ill, but glad you are better. My cousin got it in her ear, which led to all sorts of complications, so I am glad you are done with it.
I have just recently discovered your blog and find it very interesting. I was waiting for the second part of your last post – which now seems to have disappeared. I will be grateful for any further blogging you do.
Thanks for the encouragement. Yes, my last post on Scott’s Against the Grain has vanished. Not for long though. I am now writing the whole thing for a journal. As soon as it is published there, I will post a link. A couple of months perhaps.
Perfecto. :)
Please keep blogging. Pretty please!
I was worried that something had happened to you. Shingles sounds nasty, I am glad you are well again.
I am glad, too, that you encourage people to get vaccinated. Our government started offering free voluntary HPV shots this year to girls aged 12 to 14, and all kinds of ‘vaxxing kills’ boneheads keep exploding in our local corner of the WWW. It makes children autistic overnight, it makes them infertile, and it somehow makes them interested in sex ASAP, they claim.
Had there been a HPV vaccine in about 1985 I might still have an uterus and a pair of ovaries. Cervical cancer is no fun, and it hurts like hell, and the return to something resembling a life after the operation can take years. So I am all for vaccines.
And half of the antivaccination crowd cannot even spell ‘vaccine’. Grand brains indeed.
I am going to keep blogging!
Sorry to hear about your miserable operation.
Your blog was one of the things that helped me to come back. It was just too interesting to give up and die without reading your next post. So, inadvertently, you have helped to save a life.
Sorry to hear of your bout with shingles but so glad you’re feeling better. Your blog is one of my favorite places on the web. Thank you for the work you put into it and your willingness to share that work in an open access way.
Much appreciated. Thank you.