Cooking the Books

“Food is an extremely interesting subject,” says Harvard alum Jeffrey L. Steingarten ’64, food columnist for Vogue, frequent judge on the Food Network’s “Iron Chef America,” and acclaimed food essayist. “It’s certainly more important than sex. If you want to know which subject is really more interesting to the human race, just fast for 36 hours.”

Over the past few decades Harvard has taken the message behind Steingarten’s comments to heart. Formerly a marginalized field at the college, the culinary arts now enjoy a more significant presence on campus. In 2007 alone, the Harvard Culinary Society, Real Food Harvard College, and the Office of Career Services’ panel for careers related to Food and Drink were created.

But is this extracurricular and professional recognition of food really enough to usher the culinary arts into the mainstream on campus? The Culinary Society is currently grappling with a lack of facilities as well as the demands of being a resource for all things food-related, and the Office of Career Services still faces the perennial problem of persuading Harvard students to consider non-traditional career paths. In order to determine the ultimate degree to which the culinary arts should be integrated on campus, Harvard must determine what place, if any, food studies have in the liberal arts.

COOKBOOKS AND CAREERS

According to current president C. Cooper Rizler ’09, Culinary Society founders Cass L. Forsyth ’08 and Avery A. Cavanah ’08 were luckier than their predecessors when they approached the deans in the spring of 2007 to get approval for their new student organization. Previous proposals for a food society had been turned down because the deans assumed a lack of interest on campus.

At the Freshman Activities Fair the following fall, the nascent organization was flooded with nearly 600 prospective members. “People were apparently just begging for something to fill this really huge niche,” Rinzler says.

Barbara Haber, food historian and former Curator of Books at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, tried to address this interest in the culinary arts when she developed a cookbook collection in the early 1990s. “When I started at the library [in 1968], there were cookbooks, but I was told they were just there for decoration,” she says. “And when Julia Child gave her collection of books in 1990, it was still a feminist library with a fairly feminist staff. Believe me, I’m a card-carrying feminist, but I wanted to prove to myself that food and gender go together.” Despite the sub rosa discontent that pervaded the library in the early years of the collection, Haber persisted. In 2005, the Food Issue of The New Yorker credited Haber as having “invented the history of women and food,” and in 2007, when Drew G. Faust, then the Dean of Radcliffe, held a conference about Food and Gender, Haber knew the field had arrived.

Despite the historically lukewarm reception of the culinary arts, many Harvard alumni have made names for themselves in the food industry. OCS has tapped into this alumni connection in the food industry to bolster its new program for careers related to food and drink. Last month, OCS hosted a panel for careers related to the industry, featuring three Harvard alumni and the son of a Harvard professor. Sommelier R. Michael Meagher ’02 was in attendance, along with other representatives of the food industry.

Nancy Saunders, the Associate Director for Global Outreach and Internship Development at OCS, developed this program to encourage students to consider unconventional career paths. “Something happens when students get to Harvard,” she says. “Students are afraid to acknowledge their unique interests. It isn’t that there’s a stigma on campus toward non-traditional careers. There’s just an absence of validation. If sticking the Harvard name next to a non-traditional career allows students to suddenly take their passions seriously, let’s keep offering these programs.”

FUNDING THE FOOD

The climate for food appreciation on campus has changed within the last two decades, but new student groups and a program at OCS alone may not be enough to consider the culinary arts sufficiently integrated at the University. Lack of funding for culinary opportunities may undermine OCS’s attempt to “turn up the volume” on non-traditional careers. “Right now, there’s no movement to fund domestic experiences,” Saunders says.

Even in cases where funding is available, students struggle to coordinate job opportunities with the timing of fellowship decisions. Rinzler is experiencing this frustration first-hand. “Basically by the time I’d find out if I got the fellowships [for culinary school], I’d need to have a job lined up,” he says. “Do I take a crapshoot and maybe not have any good opportunities out there or do I not follow what I love? It’s a position I don’t want to be in.”

While OCS attempts to prepare students professionally, the Culinary Society tries to provide adequate recreational resources on campus. “Trying to do everything would end in epic failure,” Rinzler says. “We can be very good about promoting people’s passion and interest in food on very small, pocket, individual scales. But for an issue as all-encompassing as food literacy, I don’t think any student organization has the means to really make any meaningful impact.” The Culinary Society president sees the University’s involvement in the issue as the only hope for tangible change. In addition to renovated house kitchens, he believes there’s a need for a formalized food studies program on campus with courses that explore the culinary arts academically and practically.

THE LIBERAL CULINARY ARTS

A few food studies programs already exist around the world, including a Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy at Boston University and an undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate program in Food Studies at NYU. Though Harvard does not have a formalized food studies program, students can study food laterally through various departments, from Anthropology to Human and Evolutionary Biology. Francesca T. Gilberti ’10, founder of Real Food Harvard College (which is connected to the Slow Food on Campus program), has pursued food studies within the bounds of her History and Literature concentration. “I certainly have found ways to academically shape what I do around food,” Gilberti, who is also a Crimson Magazine writer, says. “I’ve written countless papers about food for classes whose focus is not gastronomy. And the classes about food are there if you kind of poke around.”

It has also become increasingly less difficult to find courses relating directly to food as more specialized courses have been created in recent years, including the Anthropology research seminar “Global Food Systems,” the Social Analysis course “Food and Culture,” and the Science B core class “Feeding the World, Feeding Yourself.” History Professor Joyce Chaplin’s graduate seminar “American Food,” slated to be taught in the spring of 2009, serves as a model for a General Education course under United States in the World.

But while food-related classes are more common, they are scattered throughout the University. The consequent lack of cross-departmental communication may be slowing the development of the field. The question remains whether food studies should stay nestled within traditional disciplines or be incoporated into a formalized study of food at Harvard.

“I’m really of two minds about this,” says former New York Times food editor and current Wall Street Journal Eating Out columnist Raymond A. Sokolov ’63. “I went to a meeting a year or two ago in the Radcliffe Yard honoring [food historian and author] Barbara Wheaton, and there was a lot of discussion about an academic food studies program. I got up and asked everyone, ‘If suddenly Melinda Gates came and offered lots of money for a chair in food studies or food history, would you really want it? Would it seem odd...to have a chair exclusively devoted to food?’ There was a great division in the room.”

Sokolov compares the birth of food studies to the emergence of Women and Gender Studies and Black Studies as legitimate disciplines. “As I recall it, a parallel argument was made for Black Studies,” he says. “Whereas it was true that there had been distinguished work done in Black Studies, without having a real structure, it wasn’t being given a fair crack. People weren’t really thinking about it in the best possible way. And it holds true for food. But, you know, I’m just divided about it in the way maybe people were then.”

Even at BU, where a formalized study of gastronomy exists, the discipline is suffering from the lack an exclusively food-focused faculty. According to Rebecca C. Alssid, the director of BU’s masters program in Gastronomy, the students “do get advised now, but sometimes they have to run from someone in one department to another...NYU, I believe, is facing similar problems.”

THE BRAIN AND THE BELLY

There is no shortage of opinion on how a food studies curriculum should look if it were to become an acceptable discipline under the umbrella of FAS. Haber contends that any food-related undergraduate curriculum cannot be divorced from the practical side of food. “You’d have to know how to make it. You’d have to eat it,” she says. “You can’t completely intellectualize food and know what it means.”

Gilberti suspects that a completely intellectualized approach to food wouldn’t be a concern. “Learning about food without eating it is a little bit like studying music without listening to music,” she says. “But I think we’ve come to a point in academic studies where the vacuum approach isn’t really à la mode. I’d be surprised if people who were interested in food studies weren’t interested in food in more than an academic way.”

Both Haber and Alssid agree that any program in food studies would also have to hold students to the standards of a traditional discipline. “You have to be trained in straight history, before you can be a food historian,” Alssid says.

But Alssid isn’t convinced that a food studies major should even have a place in the undergraduate education. When asked if BU was considering a program for undergraduates, Alssid says she hasn’t even thought about it. ‘The undergraduate degree is a practical one,” she says. “In graduate school, it’s a year or two and you graduate having a very specialized knowledge in one field. The undergraduate degree is four years. I’m not sure just studying food would be enough.”

But Steingarten, who served on the board of the NYU food studies program and is notorious for his obsessive research, is unsure of the reverse—whether the undergraduate education would be enough for the study of food. “I’m looking at my bookshelf right now and all the books you’d need to have read to know anything about food,” he says. “Good cookbooks. Bad cookbooks. Food writing. Biology. Literature. History...I mean, my God. You have, what, 32 classes to take? Wouldn’t you want to learn something else?”

But divergent opinions must not justify silence on the issue. “People care about food studies and no one’s talking about it. It’s almost obscene,” Rinzler says. “The University has to ask itself, ‘What could possibly be the solutions to recognizing this interest and acting upon it?’...We’re looking at structural changes. We’re looking at something the University has to take up.”