ABSTRACT Since their arrival in Japan in 1549, Jesuit missionaries described the cultural and dietary challenges of adapting to the local environment. Staples of their southern European refectories – grape wine, bread, cheese, meat, and sugary confections – were largely unknown or rarely consumed in early modern Japanese society. Even as they gradually accommodated local customs, the fathers continued to depend on annual shipments of familiar provisions carried by merchant vessels from Portugal until the 1639 prohibition of Christian and Iberian presence. The culinary dimension of this global circulation of tastes survives in a series of missionary “shopping lists” compiled by the Jesuits in Japan. Focusing on grape wine shipments, this article shows that such goods were far more than commodities: they served as nourishment for the body, symbols of continuity, and markers of belonging, revealing how familiar tastes reinforced identities and helped negotiate displacement in early modern cross-cultural encounters.

ABSTRACT The late Romanov Empire experienced a series of global transformations. New scientific fields such as nutrition, veterinary studies, and zootechnics were emerging, slaughtering processes were industrialized, livestock commodified, and agriculture commercialized – all of which served to intensify public and scientific debates over optimal diets. This article proposes meatification as an analytical framework for examining the global developments within the context of the late Romanov Empire. By analyzing the entanglement of livestock commodification, agricultural modernization, and dietary reform on the one hand, and evolving knowledge regimes alongside Russia’s imperial pathologies on the other, meatification works as a conceptual lens to unravel the logic and rationale behind the growing anxieties over meat in human diets, as expressed across diverse contexts in the Empire. Expanding the historical geographies of meatification to include the Romanov Empire opens new avenues for scholarly discussion of the “connected histories of empire,” and the role of non-Western empires in the imperial food regime.

ABSTRACT This article examins the nexus among global corporations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and nutritional habits in Turkey after WW II. During the Cold War, hunger and nutrition became political issues, and efforts were made to establish criteria, standardize “healthy nutrition, and eliminate “the danger of hunger”. The Rockefeller Foundation has emerged as one of the leading institutions coordinating research and investment in nutrition science in Western and non-Western societies. Turkey, with its strategic position as a NATO ally against socialist rivals during the Cold War, drew further attention. Multinational companiesentered the Turkish market and became significant actors in shaping nutrition patterns during that period. Relying on primary sources in Rockefeller and corporate archives, this article examines the efforts to control wheat and corn cultivation in Turkey, and focuses on two multinational corporations, Henkel and Nestlé, and the introduction of margarine and milk powder products to the Turkish consumers.

ABSTRACT This paper examines workplace catering in the Dolní Rožínka Uranium Mines in Czechoslovakia from 1957 to 1989. This topic was studied using content analysis and the discourse historical approach (DHA) applied to selected texts. The paper argues that these texts were written with the intention of changing existing workplace catering conditions and miners’ eating habits and diets. The study demonstrates the interconnected relationship between food, the party-state’s social policy, the mines’ economic performance, and the creation of a space in a Communist regime where public debate and criticism were accepted and things could be changed.

ABSTRACT Drawing on Persian travelogues, diaries, letters, cookbooks, endowment records, and inventories, this article explores the variations in everyday rhythms of food consumption, the centrality of food hospitality to status, honor, and hierarchy, and the social functions of votive offerings and festive meals. Methodologically, it engages with theories of everyday life, the gift, and conspicuous consumption to understand culturally significant forms of social exchange around food. This article argues that the exchange of food hospitality was one of the main ways through which society reproduced itself. At one end of the spectrum, food offered by those of inferior status to those of superior status was a tribute, implying domination. On the other hand, food offered by superiors to inferiors embodied a redistribution of resources, largess, and legitimacy. In both cases, food hospitality instantiated and reinforced social hierarchy.

ABSTRACT Sandesh and rosogolla, two chhana (milk curds)-based sweets emblematic of the Bengali palate and identity, are popularly attributed to the Portuguese introduction of milk curdling into Bengal. While collective memory situates sandesh’s emergence during what we call “creole Bengal,” when different European powers operated in the Hooghly district, rosogolla was purportedly invented in 1868 in Calcutta, then capital of British India. We analyse this temporal disjunction alongside similarities and differences in texture, shape and production, to reveal the sandesh as the prototype of mofussil creolization and the rosogolla, its metropolitan end-product; furthermore, we track the translation of taste into sound within 19th century Bengali nursery rhymes and kobigaan songs. By placing these memorialization processes against the politics of class and caste involved in the production of sandesh and rosogolla, we investigate how, at specific historical conjunctures, these sweets activate memories of a Creole Bengal shaped by transoceanic exchanges and encounters.