New Books in Anthropology Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry White, "Ways of Eating: Exploring Food Through History and Culture" (U California Press, 2023)
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Dec 17, 2023 
Merry White, a Boston University anthropologist who blends sensory anthropology with personal vignettes, and Benjamin A. Wurgaft, a food historian and storyteller, chat about food across time and cultures. They explore the origins of agriculture, culinary authenticity and its politics, sensory history and smell, convergent foods like dumplings, and how migration, trade, and social rules shape what we eat.
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Food Requires Cross Disciplinary Tools
- Writing about food works best when it uses intellectual tools from outside narrow disciplinary boundaries.
- Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry White deliberately blend history, anthropology, memoir, and sensory methods to reveal dishes as indexes of social life.
Oxford Symposium Where Eccentrics Share Survival Cooking
- At the Oxford Food and Cookery Symposium, professional cooks, scholars, and obsessive amateurs mix freely and trade highly practical knowledge.
- Wurgaft recounts an eccentric telling him how to remove a bat's poison gland if stranded in a cave as an example of that practical expertise.
Catering At Harvard Led To Cookbooks And Career Friction
- Merry White once catered weekly luncheons at Harvard and purposefully cooked non-Western dishes to avoid attendees' expertise.
- That practical cooking led to early cookbooks and later academic friction when food work was devalued in hiring.
