Contributors

Abstract

Frank Dax is of Pennsylvanian birth but resides in South Korea, where he devotes himself to the dual vocations of teaching and writing. For avocation, look for him collecting tales of tigers in the hills of Seoul or befriending the bees of his rooftop garden. His published writings appear in Frogpond and Korea Journal.Debal Deb is a biologist with a PhD in ecology. He completed his postdoc research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and UC-Berkeley. He left his service career in 1996 to conserve vanishing folk crop landraces, and founded Vrihi, Asia’s largest folk rice seed bank for free distribution of seeds among farmers. He conducts freelance research with zero institutional funding.Sucharita Kanjilal is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is also associated with UCLA’s Center for India and South Asia. Her doctoral research examines the entanglements of caste and feminized domesticity in Indian digital publics, drawing on perspectives from the anthropology of food and digital media, as well as theories of affect.Aya H. Kimura is a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. Her books include Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima (Duke University Press, 2016, recipient of the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society for Social Studies of Science).Jean Lavigne is a geographer by training and associate professor of environmental studies at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota. Her research focuses on food and agriculture in France, where she spends as much time as she can with her husband in Lyon.Raúl Matta is a research fellow at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He conducts research at the intersection of the anthropology of food, heritage, and cultural studies, with an emphasis on the cultural, social, and political uses of food and cooking by different actors and stakeholders.Padma Panchapakesan is an independent researcher having published extensively on Services Marketing and Hospitality Management. Earlier, she served as senior lecturer at Taylor’s University Malaysia and as a research fellow at ISCTE-IUL—Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Portugal. She has also worked with Fortune 500 in the financial and IT sectors.Teresa Politano is a journalist, author, restaurant critic, and chocolate judge. She is editor of Rutgers 2020 (Rutgers University Press, 2022), a reflective collection. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and is working on Single-Handed, the nonfiction story of a chef with one hand. teresapolitano.comKrishnendu Ray is associate professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. He is the author of The Ethnic Restaurateur (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and The Migrant’s Table (Temple University Press, 2004). He co-edited Curried Cultures (University of California Press, 2012). He was a faculty member and associate dean at the Culinary Institute of America (1996–2005).Benjamin Schrager is currently a JSPS postdoctoral researcher at the Kyoto University Graduate School of Agriculture. He received his PhD from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa where his dissertation focused on chicken meat in Japan. His current research includes local food, meat industries, and disease ecologies.Andrew Simmons is a public high school teacher and writer in Oakland, California.Carolyn Tillie is a writer, artist, and curator focused on gastronomic themes. She has written about edible art and oysters for Reaktion Press and is currently in collaboration with Ken Albala for a book on aphrodisiacs. Her food-themed jewelry and artistic creations can be further explored at www.carolyntillie.com.L. Stephen Velasquez is a curator for the Division of Cultural and Community Life, National Museum of American History. He was co-curator for Food: Transforming the American Table 1950–2000 and Many Voices, One Nation. His current projects include Entertaining America as well as a research project on Mexican vineyard workers.