Food as Practice

A foodway is a food practice understood as a route of transmission: who learned it, from whom, by what means, and what it came to mean in the process. It is narrower than a cuisine and different from a recipe. A recipe tells you proportions. A foodway asks why the proportions are the ones this household uses.

These essays are written to be checkable. Every claim that rests on a historical record is labelled with what kind of support it has — a primary text, an official register, modern scholarship reporting a source, or an explicit gap. Where the record is thin, the gap is named and the question is left open. That is not indecision; a claim about food and tradition travels very widely and very quickly, and an unsettled question that is clearly marked as unsettled does more good than a confident answer nobody has checked.