Microsoft Word - Letter from Eds-Digest 7(1) .docx 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