Project team:

• Dr. L. Sasha Gora (project director & principal investigator)

• Philine Schiller (PhD researcher)

• Penelope Volinia (PhD researcher)

• Annika Feldmeier (research assistant)

Project funding:

Elite Network of Bavaria (supported by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts)

Funding period:

01.05.2023 - 30.04.2029

How food is produced and consumed is closely tied to the environmental crisis. The research group “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment” at the University of Augsburg merges food studies with environmental history to introduce the “culinary environmental humanities.” The project is led by cultural historian Dr. L. Sasha Gora and aims to shed light on culturally shaped eating habits as central sites of ecological transformations and to rethink the environment through a culinary lens.
Food is one of the most direct ways people interact with the environment, literally digesting it. Through food we also experience climate change and are confronted with the question of how to feed a growing population on a planet with limited resources. The kitchen, thus, serves as a starting point to contextualize the sixth mass extinction and the future of planetary health. Food connects the local with the global, and its study enables connections between law and economics, geography and environmental sciences, sociology and history.
“Off the Menu” pursues an interdisciplinary approach by examining the intersection between culture and the environment with a focus on seafood. Three case studies address the question of how human appetites create, shape, but also respond to transformed marine ecosystems:

• Global cod cultures and the Newfoundland fishery collapse,
• culinary extinction and the ethics of endangered foods,
• how cuisines accept or reject so-called invasive species.

The research project also considers the emergence of climate-conscious eating habits. Cuisine reflects how cultures categorize and mediate relationships with plants and animals. Studying it, therefore, yields a better understanding of how people transform the worlds around them. In short, “Off the Menu” seeks to historicize the intimate relationship between cuisine and environmental transformations.
The research group is affiliated with the International Doctoral College “ Um(welt)Denken: Die Environmental Humanities und die ökologische Transformation der Gesellschaft”, also funded by the Elite Network of Bavaria.

You can access the research group’s website here.

Publications (selection):

• L. Sasha Gora: Life, Death, and Dinner Among the Molluscs: Human Appetites and Sustainable Aquaculture., in: Routledge Handbook of Sustainable Diets, edited by Kathleen Kevany and Paolo Prosperi. London: Routledge, 2022.
• L. Sasha Gora: Baccalà in Venice, Cod in the World. In Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide, edited by Cristina Baldacci, Shaul Bassi, Lucio De Capitani, and Pietro Omodeo. Venice: Wetlands, 2022.
• L. Sasha Gora: Sad ol’ mush’: The Poetics and Politics of Porridge in Residential Schools in Canada. Childhood in the Past 15, no. 2 (July 2022).
• L. Sasha Gora: Today’s Special: Restaurant Menus as Cultural Texts. In: Food Studies: Matter, Meaning & Movement, edited by David Szanto, Amanda Di Battista, and Irena Knezevic. Montreal: Rebus, 2022.