I spent last week recording the audiobook version of my forthcoming book On Eating—a diary of the experience and a sample are forthcoming!—and so today I decided to share our recent Salon Series conversation with Anny Gaul: scholar, historian, and author of last month’s Book Club selection Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato (my notes).

We discussed tomatoes, of course: their dual role as luxurious and necessary, the way you likely have them in many forms in your own kitchen and pantry. Right now, I have fresh local cherry tomatoes, Cento tomato paste, jarred salsa, a passata of San Marzanos… it takes, as I said in our conversation, a lot of tomatoes to make a life. How does that manifest specifically in Egyptian cultural and culinary history? That’s the subject of Gaul’s brilliant book. What lessons does this specific history have for the rest of us? That’s a conversation I hope we’ll continue to have.

The subject of research came up, as well: The methodologies Gaul used while in the field, how she organizes her sources, and the development of “kitchen history” through cookbooks, conversation, and observation. Find a preview of the conversation here and the full video linked behind the paywall at the bottom.

I just want academic writing to be good writing, and we're never incentivized to be good writers as academics. Everyone's like, Well, that's nice, if you manage it, but that's not what we get rewarded for or promoted for. So I think in a lot of places, I wasn't trying to do food writing so much as I was just trying to make it good writing, so that's one piece of it, of that relationship.

But I also think on a more epistemological level, what is a source of authority? What are we learning from? What it means to be a scholar writing about food is that you actually have to find ways to really listen to and learn from people who know food in a different way from you. So reading the work of people who are have experience as cooks, as chefs, as recipe developers—I think food writing is a really important way to get into that.

I edited a volume of essays a couple years back, and it came out of a—we created a workshop. Basically, the typical academic way of producing a volume is you invite a bunch of people or do a call, and then you have people draft papers, then discuss them, and then you revise them based on the discussions, and then you publish them. And I really wanted people in the room, not just in the volume, but in the room for that discussion who had written cookbooks or who had run restaurants and also had grown up with the food we were talking about, right? Both academics and non-academics, because you just you get such different perspectives.

I think food scholarship and food writing should be cross-pollinating as much as possible, and that, I think, makes them both stronger, ideally.