I called the book  A History of Sake, because my method is mostly historical. I have looked at a lot of written documents, but I find that the more I do food studies, the more I borrow from other disciplines, like anthropology. For instance, there are a lot of interviews in this book, and one of the exciting parts of it was talking to brewers in the United States. And the 'craft sake' movement in the United States has just really taken off in the last 5 years. And there are all kinds of ideas about what sake should be, and where it's going. There are a lot of new recipes as well. It's current movement is very dynamic and exciting. 

I try to write in such a way that it's a very approachable and for anyone to understand. There's not a lot of theory—it's very concrete, because food is very concrete. It's something that we eat, and it becomes us. And in that way it's embedded in so many different things. You can talk about food and you can tap into class and gender and social class—it's very complicated in that regard. I try to make it understandable and approachable. At a very basic level, people get food. A lot of other topics in history do not have that effect. In one of my classes, if I start talking about some battle, I'll get glazed looks, but if I talk about food, then everybody kind of perks up and has an opinion about it. So, that's one of the exciting things about researching food.