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 Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 1-2           © American Folklore Society 2020 
	

Letter from the Editors of Digest 7:1 (2018-2019) 
 
Dear Readers, 
 
We bring you the inaugural issue of the online Digest: A Journal of Foodways & 
Culture on Indiana University’s IUScholarWorks Open Journals platform 
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/. Digest joins several folklore journals on this site, 
including Journal of Folklore Research, Children’s Folklore Review, New Directions in 
Folklore, Folklore & Folk Music Archivist back issues, and others from kindred fields.  
 
Back issues from 1977-1999 (volumes 1-19) of the pre-online publication of Digest can 
presently be accessed from the Digest portal at the “Journals” site above, and by using 
the search function, for example, for “Foodways Section of the American Folklore 
Society” as author, or by using the direct link to this archival repository: 
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/13619 . A final volume 20 (2008) in 
the old series will be available in the near future. For the time being, the Archive link 
on the online Champlain site of Digest (2012-2018) leads to an index of past issue 
contents that can help navigate the IUScholarWorks repository: 
http://digest.champlain.edu/archive.html . The old and new online Digest back issues 
will all eventually be accessible from the new Digest site through an Archive link. 
 
Our many reasons for moving Digest to this site include IUScholarWorks’ guarantees of: 

• online security and preservation over time  
• access to tools that can increase our publications’ scholarly visibility and citation 

impact, and  
• fulfillment of dissemination and data-sharing responsibilities to grant-funding 

agencies. 
  
For those of us in the AFS Foodways Section, we hope the site’s open access journal 
production tools will make for greater collective participation and ease of input and 
editorial succession. 
 
Digest’s editors, editorial board, Foodways Section conveners, and others have 
contributed to this transition, a juggling act with ongoing editorial responsibilities for 
incoming submissions, peer reviews, revisions, updated and still emergent submission 
guidelines, and all that is involved in production. There is still a lot of work to do, folks, 
and we welcome your talents and expertise to assist us with technology, editing, 
communication, and scholarship. As ever, we invite readers and section members to 
propose and organize special issues, and consider short and spicy contributions to our 
Research Essays, Notes & Queries section, Announcements, News, & Collections section, 
or Amuse Bouche section. 
 
This issue’s production has the peculiar distinction of unfolding along with the COVID-
19 crisis around the world. Communications with authors, editors, IUScholarWorks 
specialists, and in online listserv groups like Publore and the Association for the Study 
of Food and Society have afforded far-reaching insights into what’s happening 
simultaneously at distant locations as well as in the personal experience of sheltering in 
place. A burgeoning mass of social media reporting, journaling in many formats, formal 



2      Gilmore, Letter from Editors, Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019) 

and informal ethnographic documentation, and planning for prospective publications 
and productions often focuses on intimate, small group, and more public foodways. 
While this issue does not specifically bring fruits of these initiatives into its mix, its 
contents have inevitably drawn this editor to ponder how they relate individually and 
collectively to the moment—and the ongoing foodways that cycle up and down in 
rhythm with crises. Themes that emerge in the issue’s topics and reviewed books may 
relate to thoughts, memories, worries, and coping strategies that many of us under siege 
have been pondering and experiencing perhaps more closely than we’d like. 
 
Feeling the punches and poignancies of Lent, Passover, Easter, or Ramadan, refugees, 
slavery, colonialism, or exile? Mira Johnson’s and David Puglia’s “The Chocolate 
Easter Egg in South Central Pennsylvania” research essay features seasonal 
coping and communal spirit through church egg-production for fundraisers. Julia Fine’s 
2019 Samuelson Award essay, “‘Without Sympathy There is No Cookery’: 
Imperial Knowledge and the Creation of ‘Indian’ Cuisine,”—and reviews of 
Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century 
America and Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel—speak to 
transcendence and cultural empowerment in distinctive settings through regional 
cookbook writing, political culinary and health initiatives, and negotiations around food 
preferences and stereotypes.  
 
Anxieties over uncertainties, restrictions, and mortality plaguing you? Consider the 
wide-ranging creative and customary solutions presented in reviews of Dying to Eat: 
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife; Diet and the Disease of 
Civilization; and Food and Power. Adaptations to new diets, cookery, grocery access, 
food selection, scarcities, and abundances necessitating new approaches to cooking and 
eating? Are you drawn towards exploring traditional repertoires for eating and dining in 
confinement and past hard times, or renewed interest in sumptuous feasts of symbolic 
foods, or herbal medicinals?  Elements flit through this issue, including roots of “boar 
taint” in Johanna Mörlein’s “History of Pig Castration” research note.  
 
Home cooking in close association with confined family members resulting in 
interesting negotiations over tastes? Check out Sarah Shultz’s 2018 Samuelson 
Award essay, “‘She did what?’: Married Women’s Renegotiation of Kitchen 
Mistakes through Narrative,” for edgy and perhaps familiar narrative humor and 
relief in gendered exchanges over food values, preferences, and labor parities. Longing 
for those special brewskis in public gathering places to refresh friendships and 
experience community and perhaps even communitas? See the review of A Rich Brew: 
How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture to confirm the importance of this blend of 
actions, expressions, and spaces to us social beings, historically and presently. Relying 
ever more on your cookbooks, recipe collections historical and contemporary, from all 
over the world, local, and among pals? Enjoy the Folger’s links to its Early Modern 
Cookbook collection and “Before ‘Farm to Table’” project. 
 
With special thanks to Book Review Editor Jennifer Dutch, editing assistant Megan 
O’Sullivan, and in-bound Lead Digest Editor, Theresa Vaughan, 
 
   –your Lead Editor, Janet Gilmore, transitioning-out in the Spectacle of 2020 


