One of the unexpected joys and frustrations of finally putting the book together was compiling the index. I got to list all the foods mentioned in the book, and there were so many! From millet upma to pimiento cheese to things on the menu at super fancy New Nordic restaurants. Looking at the list of all the foods mentioned made me feel so much gratitude for having eaten these things. Writing about food culture is so emotional because you are constantly shuttling between the sensory and embodied and much broader cultural structures. Eating something is of course so intimate. The materials of this book have touched my life in such a visceral way!

And the hardest part is that each of these foods contains a whole world. Within each dish, you could untangle so much history, culture, memory and meaning. Within each ingredient of each dish! So it multiplies really quickly.

I have been thinking lately about the idea that our current polycrisis is fundamentally a crisis of scale, of scalar derangement. Which is to say that part of the challenge of writing a big, comparative book like this is being able to zoom very far in and very far out over and over again. There is no one obvious image or symbol to represent the project, which stressed me out about cover design, but the UNC team did a great job giving visual form to what is basically a book of ideas.

In terms of impact, I ended up including a "toolkit" at the end of the book with five suggestions for how to protect culinary heritage "from below." It's modelled on Sara Ahmed's toolkit at the end of Living a Feminist Life. I was so reticent to be prescriptive: I am not that type of doctor! To be honest, I felt churlish that food criticism is held to a different standard than other forms of academic inquiry: no one is asking for practical tips and solutions at the end of a book about Modernist literature or whatever. But the requests for how to do better in reviving traditional food have been pretty constant. Now, the toolkit for chefs and food writers is my favorite part of the whole book. Some people who have read the book now ask what they can do as consumers, if they aren't chefs or food writers. I would love to develop some kind of a framework, a workshop, something praxis-oriented so that readers can take these ideas and work to protect and re-value culinary heritage in their own communities.