What is ‘queer food’
A conference at BU explores that question and others
Following the first-of-its-kind Queer Food Conference at Boston University, the question that comes up frequently is: What is “queer food”? Potential answers to this question were on the minds of more than 160 scholars, activists, artists, writers, and food industry professionals who gathered in person and online for the two-day conference late last month.
Presentations and discussions covered a wide range of topics that went well beyond the obvious ideas about queer food, or as one presenter posited: “Is it simply food covered in rainbows? Or food cooked by someone that does not identify as cis heterosexual?”
The short answer is no.
The conference addressed gender and identity — as well as botany, social justice, and the science of baking — as presenters explored the “queering” of food in a broad way. megan Elias, a coorganizer of the conference and Director of Food Studies Programs at Boston University, explained that queering in this context means looking at food in ways that go beyond expected binaries.
“We’re searching for what happens when you think about queerness and food together, and how that opens up thinking beyond gender binaries, beyond binaries of sexuality, beyond the roles that cultures often assign to people,” Elias said. She noted that a single definition of queer food was never the intention of the conference, but rather the hope was to create a place for people to come together to have conversations about the topic.
“It’s distressing that the space [for these discussions] didn’t already exist,” she added.
In his presentation, writer John Birdsall, who is the author of a biography of James Beard and a two-time winner of the award that bears Beard’s name, spoke about why he is committed to “excavating” the food history of queer people from previous generations.
Birdsall recounted that his own introduction to queer food came at home when he was a child, through his uncle and his uncle’s partner who shared joyous meals with the family. When his uncle died unexpectedly at age 39, Birdsall recalled, “Suddenly this whole joyful world of gay food that I experienced was gone.” Police invested the death as suspicious, simply because the men were a couple.
Birdsall said that in times when being queer could come at a high price, “worlds vanished, sometimes from the outside and sometimes from the inside.”
When writing his biography of Beard, Birdsall discovered that the American food personality, who was gay, routinely threw away letters after reading them. It was part of Beard’s attempt to erase any incriminating de-* tails of his personal life that might come out. Recognizing that the papers might be of historical interest, Beard’s secretary kept many of the letters.
“I feel the responsibility to do more recreating the lives of our aunts and uncles who are gone,” Birdsall said.
Oral historian Joshua Lopez is also committed to telling queer food stories. As part of his doctoral research, Lopez has compiled food histories of people in El Paso, Tx., to help understand the connections between being queer and relationships to food.
Among the stories that Lopez has recorded are that of a man who recalled spending his summer as a 12year-old baking dozens of cakes in an “explosion of queerness” that was his way of coming out to his family, and a lesbian who rejected her mother’s insistence that she learn to cook. “Why would you think I belong in the kitchen?” the woman asked.
Lopez also talked about how food was part of his own coming out story. “The night I came out to my mom, she was speechless,” he said. Instead of a discussion, Lopez could hear pots and pans clanging in the kitchen and could smell boiling milk and spiced chocolate as his mother made a mug of Abuelita hot chocolate, for him. When she gave him the chocolate and told him not to stay up too late, he saw his mother’s simple act of presenting him with this family dish as a way of expressing love and acceptance without words.
Anna Salzman describes herself as a “messy pastry chef,” an anomaly in a field known for its precision and devotion to following the recipe as written. She is a baker at Clear Flour Bread in Brookline and a student in Boston University’s master of Arts in Gastronomy program. In a presentation on baking science called “These Cookies Are Going to Change Your Life,” she discussed how studying about baking helped her develop a sense of self and claim ownership of her queer identity.
Salzman uses her detailed understanding of the science and art of baking to improvise and explore the kitchen. By changing recipes in big and small ways that provide her pleasure, she sees this challenging of the status quo as an example of queering recipes.
In her presentation, Salzman educated attendees about the baker’s percentage — the ratio of flour to other ingredients by weight — as a way to understand and compare recipes. She also instructed on what ingredients like flour, sugar, eggs, and leaveners such as baking powder contribute to making a recipe work. Armed with this knowledge, she invited participants to make their own adaptations.
“Be yourself. Throw in a pinch of this. It will be different, and that’s fine,” Salzman advised.
She demonstrated the results of her explorations with a tasting of sugar cookies made from two familiar recipes, and one made from her own recipe that substituted brown butter, fresh milled whole wheat flour, and white miso paste to create something different.
“There’s not a recipe for queerness. That’s the point. It’s unbound by the cookbook rules,” Salzman said.
Elias also suggests that questioning the status quo and moving beyond simple gender binaries — chefs and farmers are male, servers are female, men eat meat, women eat salad — are important. “What happens if we challenge them, if we let them go?” Elias asks.
Sometimes you end up with a brown butter and white miso sugar cookie that breaks a few rules.