Student Work Wednesday- Featuring Nick Lucovich
This week we're highlighting the work of Gastronomy student Nick Lucovich. Nick completed this project on food waste in the cruise ship sector for the Food Waste course taught by Steven Finn here at Boston University's Metropolitan College.
A little about the author:
Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, Nick Lucovich has a passion for food deeply rooted beyond the local fare of pierogies and Primanti Brothers sandwiches. Frequent visits to the mushroom farm, where 3 generations of his family worked, ignited his interest for agriculture & food. He spent his teenage summers maintaining the grounds and hand packaging mushrooms. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Food Science from Michigan State University, Nick started his career at Giant Eagle gaining experience in food service and retail with roles in sensory evaluation, quality, food safety, merchandising, and procurement. Nick joined Nestlé in 2013 and is currently a product developer within their Baking Division, responsible for leading innovation, renovation and optimization projects from idea to commercialization. He loves the science of prototyping and scaling recipes to large manufacturing proportions that ultimately lead to new or improved products in the market.
Cruising Ahead with Less Food Waste
Photo by Royal Caribbean: Icon of the Seas, 2022
Touted as the largest cruise ship in the world, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, capable of hosting up to 7,400 passengers is scheduled to set sail in January 2024 and features more than 40 restaurant concepts1, confirming that food is central to the cruise industry’s business model and a major part of the gastronomic experience for cruise passengers. According to Cruise Market Watch, there were 323 cruise ships total worldwide at the end of 2021, with a total passenger capacity of 581,2002. A large cruise ship requires a massive amount of food to feed the crew and guests daily, and unfortunately in the process, generates a significant amount of food waste.
Course Spotlight: Food & Museums
Got Food? Got History? Go Public.
Food and Museums (ML623), Fall 2023
In Food and Museums (4 cr), we examine food-related displays and programming from
museums, living history museums, and folklore/folklife programs, as well as culinary
tourism offerings, “historical” food festivals, and food tours. Our goal is to compare
different approaches that use food to teach the public about food, history, cultural
heritage, science, art, even contemporary issues such as sustainability. How do we best
engage the public? How do we demonstrate the relevance of food as a historical subject?
How can we use food programming to connect our audience to issues that are critical
today—the future of food movements, for example, or the preservation and
understanding of cultural difference? We will consider how to engage the public in
different venues using food, material culture, media, and sensory experience.
Student Work Wednesday- Featuring Richa Chitgopekar
This week we're highlighting the work of Gastronomy student Richa Chitgopekar. Richa completed this recipe recreation project for the Cookbooks and History course taught by Dr. Karen Metheny here at Boston University's Metropolitan College.
A little about the author:
Richa Chitgopekar is a food enthusiast with a keen taste for cuisines of different regions and communities. Through her food writing, she attempts to bring out the connection between people and food and how people have influenced her love for home cooking. She is that Culinary Luddist trying to find balance.
Thinking of Mrs. Fisher, through her Croquettes
Recreating Mrs. Fisher’s recipe as I add her in my list of people who have been a part of my food memories, she being the most unique. The heart and soul of the recipe is Mrs. Fisher’s. Just a few details are mine to ease the process for you, not only of making Fish Croquettes but also thinking of Mrs. Fisher every time you make them.
Spring 2023 Pépin Lecture Series in Food Studies & Gastronomy
Spring 2023 lectures will be presented either in-person or via webinar format, no hybrid events this term. Registration is free and open to the public – please follow the link for each program to register.
New Students for Spring 2023, part 2
We look forward to welcoming a wonderful group of new students into our programs this spring. Enjoy getting to know a few of them here.
Karina English was born to immigrant parents from Panama and El Salvador, and it was these multicultural and multiracial roots that introduced her to many flavors at a young age. She developed a love for food while watching her parents cook meals that spanned across continents. She gained her basic cooking skills in high school while working in several restaurants. She continued honing her skills as she attended Culinary School in Vail, Colorado, under the instruction of some of the nation’s top chefs. During culinary school, she answered the call to serve her nation in the United States Air Force, supporting important missions such as Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. During her service, she traveled the world tasting new flavors, learning new skills, and working in diverse environments further expanding her knowledge of food.
After leaving the Air Force, Karina earned her BA in Small Business Management and Entrepreneurship. She then ventured into different fields such as urban farming, fashion design, and administration all while raising her large family. When COVID hit and the schools transitioned to online learning, she and her husband decided to homeschool their 5 children. During this time, she began teaching her children cooking skills, the importance of food, and food origins. There was no curriculum to follow, therefore she created her own. She felt that this information was essential for every child to learn so she decided to write a curriculum that would be available to everyone.
When not researching recipes and food origins, you will find Karina traveling around Arizona with her family, at a local farmers market, or car shows. She can’t wait to take a deeper dive into the study of food and learn from some great industry professionals.
Welcome New Students – Spring 2023
We look forward to welcoming a wonderful group of new students into our programs this spring. Enjoy getting to know a few of them here.
Jadel Myra Biteng (She/They)- Jadel has always been surrounded by food and the love of food for as long as she can remember. Having been raised by her grandmother, who was a farmer and a cook, Jadel naturally grew up to become interested in the world of food herself.
After working in numerous restaurants/bakeries, she saw firsthand how COVID affected the restaurant industry. Spending the better half of the pandemic making food for the community, packing, delivering fresh groceries for homebound Asian elders and baking goods for free food fridges in NYC. Jadel really believes that food heals and everyone should have access to nutritious food. The system itself is broken but how we fix it and/or make it better is one of her main focuses.
Jadel is now seeking to gain the knowledge and background to be able to share more about this industry she called home for over 15 years. She hopes to gain strong connections and concrete opportunities with like-minded folks. To tackle meaningful issues that will ultimately lead her to a position where she can help push the industry that always made room for people like her to push forward.
Jadel currently works as baker, where they use freshly milled, traceable and locally sourced grains and flours. Jadel can always be found either reading up on her favorite food history magazine, Eaten, or cooking new recipes, eating with friends, and drinking a good glass of wine.
Course Spotlight: Writing Cookbooks
Jessica Carbone (she/her/hers) will be teaching MET ML 610, Writing Cookbooks, in the spring 2023 semester.
Course Description:
Cookbooks are artful, researched, evocative, and often personal texts that take a tremendous amount of craft and vision to execute. They are also products that sit at the unusual intersection of literature and commerce, informing but also soliciting the buy-in of a broad, varied readership. How are cookbooks crafted, and what considerations should be taken to make a cookbook as powerful and successful as possible?
Here is a bit of Professor Carbone’s vision for the course:
This course is designed both for students who have long desired to write a cookbook, but also for people who wish to have a more critical, engaged conversation about the process of crafting and selling a cookbook into the broader culinary marketplace.
The class will toe that line between art and commerce, looking at examples of successful and pathbreaking cookbooks across culinary history (and across culinary audiences) and the opportunities to develop voice, argument, and aesthetic in the cookbook format, while also investigating such details of a successful proposal as recipe development and styling, researching comparable titles, and thinking about the potential sales and placement issues required for a cookbook to reach its target audience.
Course Spotlight: Food & Art
Carmel Beer and Michal Evyatar will be co-teaching MET ML 672 Food and Art for the Spring 2023 semester.
Course Description:
Many rituals in diverse parts of the globe were created to gather people around food and eating. For example, the "Sagra" in Italy to celebrate the local seasonal yield, the Bougoule festival that celebrates the first vintage and the Jewish Passover Seder feast, to commemorate the people of Israel's journey in the desert. Food and Art is a course that explores the ingredients of food and eating "experiences'' and channels it through the five senses. In this class we will unpack personal and communal experiences through food and eating and their environments, thereby invoking both past and present. By creating immersive experiences, we aspire to deconstruct the mechanism of eating and to expose the patterns and norms involved. The course will culminate with a communal event, wherein the students will present their research outcomes and insights as installations.
The course will begin as Professor Beer and Professor Evyatar introduce the students to their own work with Mela studio where they create multi-sensory events with installations and performances that blend the culinary, performance, and visual arts.
Students will be taught to create art that is not only visible but able to touch all the senses. The five senses will be explored individually, with a few classes spent on each.
Course Spotlight: Food and Gender
Dr. Megan Elias will be teaching MET ML 706, Food and Gender, in the spring 2023 semester. Here is a preview of her plans for the class:
I am really excited to be teaching Food and Gender again after two years. It is my favorite class because every time I teach it I get to re-think some of our most basic assumptions about food and who we are. I see everything around me differently and students have told me that the same thing happens to them. We take an intersectional approach, so our conversations reach far into questions of identity and power.
Students assign half of our readings/viewings/activities and I have found myself watching Tamil sit coms, reading poetry about fermentation, and acting out an old family recipe, to name just a few of the student-designed assignments. We have wide ranging, challenging conversations in this class and the student projects always reflect that. I would say that of the classes I teach, it engages most with popular culture and media of the moment.
We will be reading some amazing classics, like Psyche Williams Forson’s Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, and some thrilling new work, like Diners, Dudes and Diets, by Gastronomy graduate Emily Contois, and Nurturing Masculinities, by Nefissa Naguib about food and masculinity in the Arab world. And, of course, at the end of the semester we’ll have one thought-provoking and probably also delicious thematic potluck to bring everything we have learned to the table and onto our plates.
MET ML 706, Food and Gender, will meet on Thursday evenings in the spring 2023 semester, starting on January 19. The course is open to graduate students and upper-level undergraduates. Non-degree seeking students can find registration information here.
Course Spotlight: Culinary Tourism
The Gastronomy program is thrilled to have Alicia Kennedy teaching MET ML 692 E1, Culinary Tourism for the Spring 2023 term.
This new 4-credit course is in hybrid format, combining online content with a week of in-person excursions and activities in Puerto Rico during BU’s spring break (March 5-11, 2023).
Course Description:
'Culinary Tourism', sometimes called 'Food Tourism' or 'Gastronomy Tourism' encompasses the active engagement with food and beverage experiences within a given culture or society, reflecting a sense of place, heritage, or tradition. Most often associated with international travel focusing on food, drink and tourist economies, examples of culinary tourism are increasingly found even domestically, in one's own home city or town. The idea of exploring a place for culinary purposes (eating, drinking, cooking, learning about local and regional foods) has a long history, however today the travel industry is showing record numbers with no signs of slowing. Nearly 50% of international travelers cite food and drink as the primary purpose of their journeys and the field has never offered so many options and of food and drink experiences to choose from.
From 'gourmet' chef-led tours and ultra-local street food crawls to home cooking classes, agricultural visits, and everything in between, this course will consider both the theoretical and practical aspects of culinary tourism in the 21st century. It will focus on questions around identity (food as expression), authenticity ('going to the source'), commoditization ('who gets to cook/eat what and why?') and the role of food and travel media, as well as travel industry issues such as over-tourism, environmental impact and cultural appropriation.
On top of learning the history and concepts behind culinary tourism's development, students will be taught a practical approach, looking at how the industry itself functions -- how are food and drink tours/experiences put together? Who are the industry stakeholders? What are the trends and forces driving the growing interest and what affect can this have -- both good and bad -- on local economies and cuisines?