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Autumn 2024, Posts

Using Images of Objects for Healthcare in Sixteenth-Century China

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By Cheng He

Late-sixteenth-century China witnessed the increasing publication of illustrated books of various kinds. This includes books on health preservation, which deals with treating illness and everyday practices that are good for one’s health conditions and longevity. Sleeping, eating, drinking, walking, reading, writing, playing musical instruments, traveling, collecting, and appreciating art objects were all related to nourishing one’s life. In 1591, the book Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (Zunsheng bajian) was published. It covers the aspects mentioned above, and illustrations accompany a few sections. In addition to images that introduce gymnastic exercises, which have been discussed in academic research, there are also some images of objects. 

Fig. 1: Hamper for cold food and drink, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 40b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

The first group of illustrations of objects is in the chapter on traveling in natural landscapes with friends. It is both a physical and spiritual pleasure to immerse oneself in nature, to enjoy the scenery, food, and drink of each season, and to create poems to record precious moments.

Fig. 2: Hamper with a stove, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 41a. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

In this chapter, two images introduce the internal structure of hampers and ways of packing (Figures 1 & 2). The author, Gao Lian, mentioned that he made both hampers himself. The first one is for cold food and drink, with upper layers for plates of different sizes and a lower layer for flagons and wine cups. The second hamper is equipped with a small stove in the lower layer. One can place pots for tea, wine, or congee in the middle layer for direct heating. Rather than depicting the food or drink themselves, the illustration is more about better utilizing the space for packing, which is also an element that helps the reader enjoy the trips.

The second image on flagons further emphasizes the practical purpose of using it (Figure 3). It shows two types of flagons: one round and the other gourd-shaped. Accompanying texts introduce their materials and uses. Here images simply show the shape of flagons as a visual introduction.

Fig. 3: The flagons, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 8, 41b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

However, illustrations are far more than just practical methods of  instruction. In other cases, they were as crucial as the text. A considerable quantity of illustrations in Eight Discourses are in the chapter on inkstone. One can grind an ink stick against the inkstone with water to make ink for writing and painting. Finely made inkstones vary in shape and materials, and are valuable collectibles commonly seen in study rooms. Literate people used them for writing or painting, appreciating the stones’ aesthetic quality, and thus gaining pleasure and cultivating their spirit. In the book, Gao shows his preference for inkstones over other collectibles. He carefully introduced the ways of appreciating and preserving inkstones, explaining the desired textures and colors of stones for grinding ink. He was sad that inkstones were less valued than gold or jade, easily lost or hidden at corners. 

His concern is demonstrated first through the number of illustrations: Gao included images of twenty high-quality inkstones that he claimed to have seen in the recent decade (Figures 4 & 5). Afraid that these fine works would be lost or damaged in the future, he made images as a record, stating that “I’m ashamed of my limited painting skill, failing to portray these inkstones fully.”1 This suggests that, for Gao, images can serve as a more helpful method than texts for describing objects or instructions for collecting.

Fig. 4: Inkstones, in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 24b–25a. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

Compared with the illustrative images with inserted texts on hampers and flagons, the images here are more prominent and separated from the texts. Although aid is needed from the text to know the different materials and sizes of each stone, we can notice that more details are added to portray the patterns, textures, and shapes. The stone in Figure 5 is called “silver thread inkstone.” Besides the dimension, black color, and jade-like gentle texture, Gao emphasized that the silver thread patterns are “picturesquely intersected within the stone.”2 Therefore, images are both visual descriptions and aesthetic expressions. When appreciation of art works became a part of pursuing health, the images of health instruction went beyond illustrative functions. Illustrations of inkstones are not only visual translations of texts explaining “how to preserve health” but also convey artistic qualities that texts can hardly capture. 

Fig. 5: “Silver thread inkstone,” in Zunsheng bajian: Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 30b. Courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library, Chinese Rare Book Collection.

Images in Eight Discourses illustrate the concept of health preservation in sixteenth-century China; it was crucial to nourish one’s spirit with entertainment and art in addition to daily practices such as eating, sleeping, or exercising. Although the reasons for including or not including specific images can vary, these illustrations provide clues for understanding images in recipes for health. In Eight Discourses, images were deeply associated with the author’s own experience: he made or saw those objects with appreciation. For Gao, Images as recipes helped visualize texts for both practical and aesthetic purposes. 

Cheng He recently completed her PhD in History at the University of Warwick. Her doctoral research focuses on the evolving concept of “lacquer” in early modern Britain, examining its materiality and varied applications in art and medicine. She is interested in early modern material culture, history of science and medicine, and global art history. 

  1. Gao Lian 高濂 (active 16th century), Zunsheng bajian遵生八牋 Eight Discourses on the Nurturing of Life (1591), Vol. 15, 20b. All translations are the author’s own. ↩︎
  2. Gao, Zunsheng bajian, Vol. 15, 30b. ↩︎
Autumn 2024, Posts

Puttu, Rockets, and Game Controllers: South Indian Immigrant Recipes in the Video Game Venba

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By Haritha Govind

You pick up your game controller and settle down in front of the screen to learn about South Indian family recipes. What you don’t realize is that you are about to be pulled into the emotionally charged world of Venba and her family in Canada, complete with the financial, cultural, and generational hardships and joys that are part of the immigrant experience. While cooking challenges have been a mainstay of video gaming, Venba presents itself almost like a composite ethnography where food means something more than simply cooking, serving, and eating. It introduces the player to a complicated network of what it means to be an immigrant and connect with your home culture through food (Waszkiewicz 2022).

Illustration of South Asian family preparing traditional foods with the title Venba
Venba Video game promotional poster (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/).

As you play through the game, you are introduced to Venba and her husband Paavalan, who have moved to Canada from South India. Amidst the trials and tribulations of fitting into a new country and their son Kavin being born, you are taught how to make traditional Tamilian and South Indian dishes like idli (steamed rice and lentil cakes), biryani (layered rice and meat dish), dosa (fermented rice and lentil crepe), and murukku (crispy lentil and flour snack). All the recipes displayed to you are from Venba’s mother’s cookbook, with smudged and concealed text, inviting you to learn as you go.

There is a section in the video game where Venba asks a young Kavin what he would like to eat, and he requests a pizza with lots of cheese. In an attempt to introduce Kavin to more traditional Tamilian foods, she suggests they make a dish called puttu. At first, Kavin is not convinced, but when Venba explains that the dish reminds her of a rocket, he is excited. You are then whisked to the kitchen to cook puttu, using the smudged family cookbook and ingredients of rice, water, and coconut. This single narrative and cooking section represents the intergenerational struggle between preserving Tamilian culture and integrating into Canadian society. It forces you to think about more than the recipe and consider how foods come to be synonymous with identity in many immigrants’ lives. 

Towards the end of the game, you see adult Kavin opening his mother’s cookbook to feel connected to his culture and childhood. He decides to make nattu kozhi kulambu (spicy country chicken curry/soup) and fumbles his way through the recipe along with you. This section of the game allows you to step into the shoes of a second-generation Tamilian in Canada and understand the complicated connection between culture and identity. 

Biryani cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

Venba creates a cozy atmosphere for its players, with lively Tamil music in the background, sounds of cooking, and vibrant aesthetic ingredients and dishes. The ingredients and foods are designed in an abstract style but are instantly recognizable if you are familiar with them. The cloves, cardamom, bay leaves, and fennel seeds in the biryani cooking section are stylistic yet iconic. Waszkiewicz has suggested that cozy or ludic games like Venba encourage the player to approach the game and recipes with respect and curiosity, pulling them into an unfamiliar culture (2022). The creator of the game, Abhi, shared that he wants players to understand specific details about a recipe whether that involves getting the rice-to-water ratio correct or tempering spices in the correct order (Waszkiewicz 2022; Abhi 2023). To help the player carry on after the play has ended, the game also shares complete recipes with the player to try out in their own home kitchens.

Idli cooking process (Image sourced from https://venbagame.com/)

While you will have to play the game to learn Venba’s recipes, many Tamilian chefs and home cooks have recipes for the same dishes. Here is my mother’s recipe for Idli batter:

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups  Idli rice (or short grain starchy rice)
  • 1 cup   Urad (peeled black gram)
  • 1 tsp    Methi seeds (fenugreek)
  • 1 tbsp  Chutney daal (split yellow gram)

Instructions:

  1. Wash and soak ingredients overnight.
  2. Drain and grind ingredients in a high-powered blender until smooth and thick. Add fresh water as needed. Rub the batter between your fingers to ensure it is not gritty.
  3. Pour the batter into a large bowl or container and cover with clingwrap, lid, or plate.
  4. Let the batter ferment in a warm place for around nine hours.
  5. Once the batter has doubled in size and developed bubbles with a yeasty smell, it is ready.
  6. Add salt to the batter and store it in the fridge.
  7. Use it for steaming idli in an idli steamer or thin out the batter to make dosa on a skillet.

The Venba video game is a good opportunity to see how storytelling and recipe sharing can go hand in hand. It is also a good entryway into understanding specifically South Indian cooking techniques and flavors, an area that has not gotten the same attention as North India in the Americas. It also opens the floor for more culturally detailed immigrant stories to be told via interactive mediums such as video games. The video game as a medium does something very different from a perspective of imagery and visuals, compared to other mediums such as text, or a static graphic novel. The movement and paced story development, that you as a player control, work together to remove visualization barriers between the story and the player. This visual storytelling is also an excellent model for sharing subjects like History, Anthropology, Food Studies, and Cultural Studies in a palatable and inclusive manner. I believe that there is great potential for visual storytelling as a way to expand academia beyond university settings. 

Abhi. 2023. Venba. Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series/Xbox One, Playstation 5. Canada: Visai Games. https://venbagame.com/.

Waszkiewicz, Agata. 2022. Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

American Studies, Culinary History, Food and Drink, Modern, Posts, Summer 2024

Stovetop Solidarity: “Recipes for Semi-Starvation” and Antipoverty Organizing in American Cities

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By Kimba Stahler

Flipping through recipe cards or a cookbook is not the apolitical exercise some might think. Whether picked by workers earning a fair wage in a safe environment or transported by truck drivers fighting for a better union contract, ingredients politicize meals.

Historically and recently, American consumer boycotts have moved the picket line to the checkout counter. Refusing to buy meat in 1935, Delano grapes in 1969, or Starbucks coffee in 2024 meant standing against high prices, labor rights violations, and corporations’ political machinations.

Ingredients contain another critical political dimension. Given food’s ability to gather, meal preparation and consumption are central to grassroots movements. One progressive student organization in the 1960s, the Students for a Democratic Society, devised a meal-time strategy in their “interracial movement of the poor.” From 1964 to 1966, that community organizing campaign established projects in fourteen Northern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern cities. Full-time staff and summer volunteers organized locals while living in the same derelict housing as their constituents. But they didn’t just live locally: they ate locally too, serving similar dishes to the families who lived in these neighborhoods full-time. Over 500 white middle-class young people circulated and followed what they called “recipes for semi-starvation.” By adhering to welfare recipients’ budgets, they cooked up community and solidarity.

Community organizing and the “recipes for semi-starvation” brought together Americans who lived in two different societies. Many Students for a Democratic Society members grew up in the suburbs with access to pocket money and went on to college classes after finishing high school. Antioch College freshman Christopher Overs felt confident that summer organizing in Cleveland, twenty-five miles from his suburban home, would not jeopardize his fall tuition. Similarly, Elaine Lipshutz, a sophomore at Radcliffe College, could dedicate her school breaks to the Boston project, headquartered a twenty-five-minute walk from campus, rather than waged labor. Relocating these relatively short distances, Overs, Lipshutz, and hundreds of others entered another social world.

A summer organizing in inner cities introduced undergraduates to the estimated forty million impoverished Americans, a demographic hidden from their childhood neighborhoods. Living in derelict housing in Chicago, Cleveland, Newark, Boston, and other cities, they talked with their new neighbors, white and Black families that postwar affluence had left behind. Many were un- or underemployed men and single mothers receiving Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a program referred to as welfare. In discussions of daily struggles, the white students offered possible political solutions and invitations to tenant councils, unemployment unions, and welfare rights meetings.

Charlotte Brooks, “Image from LOOK – Job 65-2559 titled Divorced mother,” 18 Oct. 1965. Photograph shows divorced single mother Vi Erker eating dinner with her son Gary, Saint Louis, Missouri. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ds.08295

Voluntarily enduring poverty, progressives built community bonds and signaled their commitment to ending economic injustice partly through food. Both short-term volunteers like Harpur College student Judith Bernstein and full-time staff such as University of Michigan alumnus Carol McEldowney reckoned with the disparity between middle-class and low-income plates. Breakfast sometimes consisted of a single egg or an ounce of corn flakes topped with reconstituted milk. Between community meetings, they stuffed day-old bread with liverwurst and lettuce. After a long day of door-knocking, they often sat down to a dinner of liver and onions, creamed chicken over biscuits, or split pea soup with a salad dressed simply with a mayonnaise and ketchup mixture.[1] Their menus and their tireless efforts persuaded some locals that they were sincere and reliable social justice activists.

Eating what their neighbors could afford, the students came face-to-face with the political implications of welfare. Poor families could rely on the social safety net established by the New Deal and the War on Poverty. As countless learned firsthand, however, financial and material assistance programs afforded a bare minimum, placing countless commodities out of reach. The Cleveland project whittled their daily food allowance to forty-three cents per person, replicating the budget welfare programs provided.[2] Features of middle-class tables, like orange juice, were far too costly. “Don’t buy it unless the group shows signs of scurvy,” project leaders instructed.[3]

Through the Students for a Democratic Society’s organizational and culinary efforts, they established and revived grassroots antipoverty organizations that helped a national movement for economic justice to flourish. Their efforts most fruitful efforts were with single mothers who received welfare. They assisted the Citizens United for Adequate Welfare in Cleveland and Mothers for Adequate Welfare in Boston, organizations that channeled numerous welfare recipient activists into the National Welfare Rights Organization. While organizing at the grassroots, Students for a Democratic Society leaders used cuisine to establish interpersonal and political relationships between the sons and daughters of postwar affluence and less fortunate Americans.

[1] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 2, Students for a Democratic Society records, 1958-1970, Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections, Madison, Wisconsin (hereafter SDS records).

[2] Hugh to O and C, July 29, 1964, box 24, folder 5, SDS records.

[3] Recipes for Semi-Starvation, n.d., box 29, folder 1, SDS records.

 

Kimba Stahler is a Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. She is a historian of US women’s and gender history and social justice movements. She specializes in twentieth century antipoverty and feminist movements. Her research interests include participatory democracy, alliance formation among grassroots activists and organizations, and identity politics. 

For Kimba’s dissertation research, she conducted oral histories to uncover how members of the Students for a Democratic Society living in Cleveland constructed that organization’s most successful grassroots organizing campaign during the 1960s. Using those oral histories, she produced a story-telling podcast entitled “Visions of Democracy” that encourages listeners to think about the various forms that democratic participation takes. Her current book project, tentatively titled Rats in Common: The Untold History of Cleveland’s Interracial Welfare Rights Movement, explores how white middle-class political organizers and poor white and Black single mothers forged productive political relationships out of their shared commitment to radical forms of American democracy. 

 

Culinary History, Education, Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Medicine, Modern, Networks of Knowledge, Posts, Summer 2024, Women and Gender

“Pain au Levain”: Reproductive Rights, Recipes, and Community Cookbooks

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By KC Hysmith, PhD
Packaged in a brown paper and cellophane fold-over bag, not unlike those you’d find at your corner bakery or at the farmers’ market, the Beaux “Bread Bag” contains a hefty stack of paper printed with information about reproductive rights and health care access. Activists gather in-person around a table to share this knowledge, much of it word-of-mouth, and then work together to print, cut, fold, and assemble each bread bag specific to the needs of individual states–including Wisconsin, Kentucky, Georgia, Illinois, and North Carolina–whose governments have severely restricted or completely banned numerous essential reproductive health care procedures.

Activists packing up bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis
Sourdough loaves stenciled with phrases about abortion access. These loaves were photographed and then printed as ephemera in the bread bags. Image Credit: Borealis

Numerous scholars agree that recipes are a type of feminist discourse, and a “particularly feminine way of knowing and sharing knowledge.”[1]  Importantly, these crowd-sourced books also helped to spread information to other women, at times subversively and at others loudly. As Carrie Helms Tippen explains, “Recipes, and by extension cookbooks, are narratives that focus on silenced women and challenge phallocentric methods of writing history.”[2] It stands to reason, this rewriting also serves to create safer spaces for the sharing of other women-centered knowledge, including information related to reproductive health.

For many generations, reproductive health has been both an incredibly personal topic and      socially taboo subject. There are likely countless “recipes” for abortions in addition to instructions for providing post-procedure nourishment and care tucked away in unpublished manuscripts and personal correspondence – two historically important forms of media used by women to share food knowledge. Before the technological advancements of modern gynecology, when reproductive healthcare carried different political implications, women passed information to one another. This information frequently took the form of a recipe and used ingredients women often grew at home or that grew nearby. argues that women often collected and shared recipes based on herbal medicinal traditions of the time period and “were expected to have general medical knowledge in order to fulfill their Christian duties as wives, mothers, and caregivers, both within the home and the community.” [3]

Centuries later, despite advancements in printing technologies and progress for women’s political agency, the knowledge of reproductive care recipes continues to be shared using subversive and community-aligned methods such as zines, ephemeral pamphlets, and booklets. After the increasing threats to abortion access levied by the Trump Administration starting in 2016, and then the 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court, resulting in no constitutional protection of abortion access, activists across the nation published updated or reprinted reproductive care “cookbooks.”

The recipe format serves as both a commonly-known narrative device and a respected method of knowledge sharing amongst women. Modern reproductive care texts tend to feature one or a combination of “recipes” for at-home abortions using specific emmenagogue herbs or medicines, including mifepristone and misoprostol, in addition to more traditional recipes and meal guides for providing nourishment and care for those who have experienced an abortion. Zines including “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed” (published by Holistic Abortions) and “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists” by Catherine Marie Jeunet include herbal recipes as well as short historical overviews of herbal abortifacient histories. The second issue of Wildseed Feminism focuses on herbal remedies “for Lifelong Reproductive Care” and includes recipes to manage “uncomfortable symptoms relating to PMS, periods, pregnancy, and perimenopause.”

Cover of Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom. Image Credit: Microcosm Publishing
Cover of Cooking Up Trouble. Image Credit: Leela Cyd and Anne Parker

Using a combination of community knowledge sharing with fundraising, the Breadbox project, founded by social activist artist Borealis, “averts high tech surveillance through a multi-modal constellation of access points.” And much like other recipe collections, “no two installations, video presentations, bread bags, or conversations associated with this project are exactly the same; the project travels and evolves as social conditions require.” Each bag includes a small pile of ephemera, so similar to the small recipe leaflets that once accompanied early 20th century appliances and popular grocery store ingredients, with state-specific reproductive health care information, all-options phone numbers, colorful zines, and lists of action-items for supporting abortion access. One zine entitled “Medication Abortion” ends with a short section on “support” advising readers to consider “making food in advance (soups, broths, warm & easy to digest, simple snacks)” or asking someone else to cook for them.

The back of the North Carolina bread bag. Image Credit: Borealis

A larger booklet entitled pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release, artfully riso-printed in hot pink and brown, features a section on creating a care plan with the “universal things people need when they are bleeding through menstruation, miscarriage, or abortion: nutrition, rest, warmth, and community.” The booklet’s title is a play on the French phrase for sourdough (pain au levain) and the normal, but painful side effects of the abortion process. An additional layer of meaning to the phrase, refers to the painstaking process women face to access basic reproductive care in modern day America.

Much like any other community cookbook old or new, these reproductive health care texts continue the practice of supporting a network of women with resources, respect, and acknowledgement. The recipes serve a different purpose than a gifted baked good or a weeknight casserole; instead, they exist as an integral political medium of knowledge sharing and community in the precarious reproductive health care landscape of contemporary America. As the bright yellow tag on the Bread Bag reads: “We share our resources for the common good.”

[1] Carrie Helms Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 18.

[2] Tippen, “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories,” 18.

[3] Ashley Buchanan, “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control,” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

REFERENCES:

Borealis. pain au levain: safety, comfort, & expectations during pregnancy release. (self-pub.,  2022).

Borealis. Bread Box Project. https://beaux.studio/breadbox.

Buchanan, Ashley. “Dittany: Women’s Herbs and Reproductive Control.” Plant Humanities Lab, JSTOR, https://lab.plant-humanities.org/Dittany/.

Cyd, Leela and Anne Parker. Cooking Up Trouble: Recipes to Nourish Women  (self-pub.,  2016).

Helms Tippen, Carrie. “Writing Recipes, Telling Histories: Cookbooks as Feminist Historiography,” in Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, edited by Melissa A. Goldthwaite, 15-29. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.

Holistic Abortions. “Grow Your Abortion: Herbs to Make You Bleed.” Red Hook Collective, 2021.

Jeunet, Catherine Marie. “Reclaiming Our Ancient Wisdom: Herbal Abortion Procedure and Practice for Midwives and Herbalists.” Eberhardt Press, 2009 (reprinted through 2019).

Dr. KC Hysmith is a writer, food scholar, and historical recipe developer. She holds an MLA in Gastronomy from Boston University and PhD in American Studies focusing on food and culture from the University of North Carolina. Her dissertation, “#FOODHERSTORY: Food and American Women’s Political Resistance from Suffrage to the Digital Age,” investigated the legacy and power of women’s food history. She is the editor and co-editor of Edible North Carolina (UNC Press 2022), An American Girl Anthology (University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming), and When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen, forthcoming). Find more of her work on TikTok (@foodherstory) and on Instagram (@kchysmith). Find more of her work here: https://www.kchysmith.com/

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