I first met David Beriss through the Society for the Anthropology of North American (SANA). In 2007 SANA held its annual meeting in New Orleans as an expression of solidarity with the city after the disastrous floods of Katrina and Rita. David Beriss is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans, and in 2007 he was an outstanding conference chair for SANA’s annual meeting which was hosted by UNO. Now another crisis has hit the Gulf Coast, the BP oil spill. Savage Minds has invited David, whose expertise is in food studies, to write about how the catastrophe is affecting local seafood and Louisiana’s rich culture of eating.
David is interested in the relationship between foodways and ideas about cultural distinctiveness in post-diluvian New Orleans, although more broadly his work focuses on southern U.S culture, food, ethnicity, and applied anthropology, as well as on France, Europe and the French Caribbean. He is the co-editor (with David Sutton) of “The Restaurants Book: Ethnographies of Where We Eat” (2007, Berg) and author of “Black Skins, French Voices: Caribbean Ethnicity and Activism in Urban France” (2004, Westview Press). He is also an active blogger, co-editing (with Rachel Black) the blog of the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition.
David says, “I am having a great time this summer working with a select team of UNO undergraduates on a study of a thriving New Orleans restaurant row and its relationship to the diverse neighborhood that surrounds it. Read about that at the collective Restaurant Row Recovery Project blog.”
A wonderful project. A quick look at the project blog has left me hungry for more.
To taste a culture’s food is is to come to a much deeper emic relationship to it.
There is an idea from an elementary principle I know in Dallas, who works in a traditionally black school, which is now about 50/50 black and Hispanic. However, the classrooms are still segregated, largely by language and ESL programs. There is an almost total separation of the social networks by ethnicity in this neighborhood among the parents too.
The principle was really into an idea of developing a community garden on her school lot for her kids. She figured she could use it to teach biology, economics, green organic practices, etc… But, and this is brilliant, she wanted to get her kids to grow foods traditionally cooked by their families. They could then take the foods home to be cooked and then shared among everyone at something like a PTA meeting. She felt that by sharing one’s traditional food with another is a great way to open up lines of communication and overcome stereotypes; many of which are about food.
This still isn’t a reality, but I’m hoping to get an anthropologist that’s moving to the area soon, and an expert in the use of native seeds, to maybe help with something.
I’ve used “The Restaurants Book” in my class on Food and Culture and found it to be an excellent edited volume. Some of the articles really resonated with my students and my teaching style.