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Books by Krishnendu Ray

In Daniel E. Bender and Simone Cinotto, Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (University of Toronto Press, 2024), pp. 256-279., 2024

Once the lockdown was announced, Shibu and five of his friends began walking from Noida, near New... more Once the lockdown was announced, Shibu and five of his friends began walking from Noida, near New Delhi, towards their villages more than a thousand miles away. They bought muri (artisanal puffed rice), cookies, deep fried savories, candies, sugar, onions and chilies, to sustain them along the way. By the third day they were "crippled by their hunger for steamed rice." At this point, they would have given up their quest, Shibu said, for a bowl of cooked rice. People were distributing food, soap, disinfectants to workers on the road to Odisha, but no cooked rice. So, they "began watching videos of rice being cooked on YouTube. No matter what it was that they were eating… they ate while watching rice cooking on a stove somewhere." (Roy 2020). Shibu's quest illuminates the fragile threading of labor, mobility, hunger and desire both in the making of migrant lives and their unraveling in the wake of the pandemic in India. Capitalist systems have always depended on differently regulated flows of people, capital, commodities, and other living things, across and within national boundaries. Capital's general logic has been towards easier circulation of money and commodities. Territorial states in paired contrast have managed the flow of people and other living things, such as plants, seeds, pathogens, etc. built on administrative classifications of use, market value, and risk. The flow of people has been constrained based on their economic function and citizenship rights at least since the end of the nineteenth century and consolidated by the postwar interstate system. People with more powerful passports (currently places such as the US, EU, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, etc. defined by ease of travel) come from containers strongly correlated with greater concentrations of capital and have easier access to transnational mobility. Furthermore, between and within nations, people with locations higher in the global labor aristocracy-management consultants, development and international aid bureaucrats, professors, artists, architects, chefs and sommeliers, all strongly correlated with higher incomes-are allowed greater ease of flow across national regimes of mobility regulations. Their access to trans-national flows stands in stark contrast to lower-wage construction workers, farm laborers, street vendors, domestic and care workers. Connecting class to the current crisis of immobility, a domestic worker retorted, "Yeh virus plane vale laye, aur sadak par gareeb aadmi hai cycle par. Yeh kya insaaf?" [People on airplanes brought the virus, that elbowed the poor man on to the bicycle for the long ride home. What kind of justice is this?] (Dutt 2020). Mobility comes with a citizenship premium, threaded by class and occupational hierarchy. All people are not created equal in terms of their access to trans-national and intra-national mobility. This essay seeks to illustrate novel connections between taste, economics, and inequities in access to mobility as a right and a privilege, in the context of the Covid-19 lockdown.

Resilient Kitchens, 2024

The essays in this book come from immigrant restaurateurs, chefs, scholars, food writers, and act... more The essays in this book come from immigrant restaurateurs, chefs,
scholars, food writers, and activists who offer their reflections on
the importance of food on their journeys, and especially during the
COVID-19 pandemic. The sampling is diverse and unscientific, an
eclectic collection of perspectives that, we hope, will inspire readers
to seek out new and further stories and think about their own relation-
ships with food and identity during the pandemic.

This 2010 collection of readable scholarly papers on the globalization of culinary cultures in th... more This 2010 collection of readable scholarly papers on the globalization of culinary cultures in the Asian Pacific region has been reissued by the Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture in a convenient new one-volume format.

Papers by Krishnendu Ray

Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023

Verge, 2023

The Indian Ocean world has emerged as a major area of research over the last half century, althou... more The Indian Ocean world has emerged as a major area of research
over the last half century, although compared to the Atlantic, it is less
visible to nonspecialists. Historiographically, the writings
of Annales historians on the Mediterranean and the subsequent work of
Atlantic historians have vivified oceanic histories. With
the rise of East Asian economies in the last quarter of the twentieth
century, the Indian Ocean region’s strategic importance has reemerged,
connecting the rising economies in the East to the established ones in the
West via the densest networks of shipping lanes for container ships and
energy supplies. Further underlining the importance of this region is the
deployment of various kinds of hard and soft power between emerging
and declining superpowers, such as China and the United States. Soft
power is deployed in part by naturalizing epistemic frameworks to study
these regions, such as within the dominant frame of area studies and
nation-states under postwar American hegemony or as Belt and Road
Initiatives within the reemergent Sinosphere. Approaching the Indian
Ocean world as a unit of analysis is one way to account for the reorient-
ing world economy, connecting it to the long history before the rise of
the West, while sidestepping a wholly Sinocentric view, as we will show.

Anthropology of Consciousness, 2024

This article wrestles with the question of the relationship between the digits of our hands and t... more This article wrestles with the question of the relationship
between the digits of our hands and the digital in a dis-
persed but connected world. What can be held and what
fails our grasp in such a universe? How the everyday and
habitual skills of cooking and cleaning come into con-
sciousness or vanish into habit, in a constant choreogra-
phy of remembering and forgetting, with the digital as aid
or hindrance. In the process of thinking through posture,
gesture, and infrastructure, it reflects on the enduring
contemporary challenge of doing ethnographic work at
multiple transnational locations, by an ethnographer with
a passport that does not travel well, made worse by the
restrictions of a pandemic. In the process, it shows how
the same hands that can heal, can also hurt.

Encyclopedia of Food and Society, 2024

Abstract: Aesthetics as a philosophical concept excluded food in its high Western construction in... more Abstract: Aesthetics as a philosophical concept excluded food in its high Western construction in the 18th century. This article shows how that was a provincial European construction that is fast losing its raison d'etre in an increasingly globalizing conceptual world that puts European elite culture in its place. I illustrate that process by showing how spices lost value in that universe of modern Eurocentric judgment and is returning to haunt haute cuisine in the North Atlantic world.

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2016

The powerfully evocative chapters in Global Cities, Local Streets got me walking the avenues in d... more The powerfully evocative chapters in Global Cities, Local Streets got me walking the avenues in distant cities, ducking into stores, and lingering at street corners. Sometimes they had me as a tourist, a flâneur, eyeing the merchandise hungrily, but mostly as a familiar neighbor neither intimate nor anonymous, appropriating the public streetscape into my private wanderings, sometimes even as a stranger eavesdropping on the conversation between the ethnographer and the owner, ethnic and white. Varied interviewing and representational skills allowed me uneven access, closer and more racially fraught in Amsterdam’s Utrechtsestraat and Javastraat, but at an arm’s length in Shanghai’s Tianzifang and Minxinglu; yet both stories were tied together by narratives of upscale and downscale locales and processes of migration, marginality, and gentrification. The chapters on Amsterdam and Tokyo are the most engaging, because they are risky, opinionated, neither purely pedantic nor conceptually repetitive. In contrast, the Toronto and the New York chapters are ideologically pure; pro-poor, pro-working class, pro-immigrant, and always juxtaposed to white, gentrifying, touristy (another spectral figure) spaces. Global Cities Local Streets is a comparative study of twelve streets, one usually upscale and the other downscale, in six cities: New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Toronto and Tokyo. We do not get very good reasons why these particular cities are studied, although we do get a sense that some of it has to do with their global reach. Yet, Shanghai’s addition to that collation, which is quite radical and recent, is left untheorized. Those kinds of higher order connections are less successfully made. For instance, although the chapter on Tokyo is gorgeously described, the question is never raised about the everyday pleasures of such a city as a function, at least partially, of relative income equality and racial homogeneity of the populace due to restrictive immigration laws (which is mentioned in passing in the concluding chapter). Here a comparison with New York or Toronto would have been productive. Global Cities, Local Streets shows us why such a mundane thing as a street corner deserves closer scrutiny and, in doing so, illuminates the sociological tradition of theoretically informed qualitative research. In the process it elucidates the communing and the contradictions between individual bodies, social worlds, built environment, and cultural life. Authors Sharon Zukin, Philip Kasinitz, and Xiangming Chen successfully convey how auditory, gustatory, haptic, and olfactory senses thicken or thin the experiential connections and conflicts between people and place. That concrete coexistence between resident, visitor, migrant, tourist, ethnographer, and commuter is offered as a field of exploration with a view to engaging with the great unknown of everyday life. In pursuing the sensorial turn in the soft social sciences these sociologists successfully draw on the lessons of previous turns towards consumption, materiality, and embodiment. The authors say that they like urban markets as socially diverse and sensorially stimulating places, so they juggle to recommend the right policy mix to preserve such shopping streets with planning, zoning, rent regulation, recruitment, and sanction. Although primarily organized around commerce, they recognize the contribution of local shopping streets for their extra-economic function of cultivating community, by creating a sense of place, urban sociability, and everyday diversity where global flows of peoples are brought together to proffer the possibilities of at least a potentially generous corner-shop cosmopolitanism. Nevertheless the authors recognize that the argument for small and varied artisanal stores with local character will privilege consumers for whom price is not the most important factor in a purchase and exclude those seeking the benefits of economies of scale provided by discount stores and chains. So they recommend a balance between low-price chain 816 Reviews

Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 2021

Hispanics in the USA, particularly those of Caribbean descent, experience high levels of diet-rel... more Hispanics in the USA, particularly those of Caribbean descent, experience high levels of diet-related diseases and dietary risk factors. Restaurants are an increasingly important yet understudied source of food and may present opportunities to positively influence urban food environments. We sought to explore food environments further, by examining the association between neighborhood characteristics and restaurant consumer nutrition environments within New York City's Hispanic Caribbean (HC) restaurant environments. We applied an adapted version of the Nutrition Environment Measurements Survey for Restaurants (NEMS-R) to evaluate a random sample of HC restaurants (n=89). NEMS-HCR scores (continuous and categorized as low, medium, and high based on data distribution) were examined against area sociodemographic characteristics using bivariate and logistic regression analysis. HC restaurants located in Hispanic geographic enclaves had a higher proportion of fried menu items (p<0.01) but presented fewer environmental barriers to healthy eating, compared with those in areas with lower Hispanic concentrations. No significant differences in NEMS-R scores were found by other neighborhood characteristics. Size was the only significant factor predicting high NEMS-HCR scores, where small restaurants were less likely to have scores in the high category (NEMS-HCR score>6), compared with their medium (aOR: 6.6, 95% CI: 1.8-24.6) and large counterparts (aOR: 5.6, 95% CI: 1.5-21.4). This research is the first to examine the association between restaurant location and consumer nutrition environments, providing information to contribute to future interventions and policies seeking to improve urban food environments in communities disproportionately affected by diet-related conditions, as in the case of HC communities in New York City.

Culinary Culture in Colonial India

Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2021

The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons proposes a normative view of what food ought to be, i... more The Routledge Handbook of Food as a Commons proposes a normative view of what food ought to be, in the process highlighting instances where and when that potential has been actualized. Food currently is an object to sell and extract private value rather than social sustenance. This book proposes that food be reconceptualized against its long liberal and recent neoliberal history as property, making a persistent argument about decommodifying food in 24 detailed chapters. It is in re-commoning that the more than two dozen authors of the book--many of them leaders in their field--find better, alternative ideas about the right to food, global public good, food justice, and food sovereignty. They highlight how food as a commodity is currently characterized by its tradable features (appearance, calorie, price, packaging, purchasing power, taste, etc.), thereby denying its non-economic values. It asks two central questions: what would good policies look like if we build on the assumption t...

Taste, Toil and Ethnicity: Immigrant Restaurateur and the American City. This paper inverts the d... more Taste, Toil and Ethnicity: Immigrant Restaurateur and the American City. This paper inverts the dominant perspective of the consumer in academic work on ethnic food by inserting the habits, memories, work and dreams of immigrant entrepreneurs in an examination of taste in an American city. Although such a perspective has been ignored in most theoretical discussions, taste has for long been co‑produced by immigrants and natives in American cities. Taste is transactional in a number of ways, minimally between producers, consumers and commentators, but also between domains of value—economic, aesthetic, and ethical. Keywords: Ethnicity. Immigrant. Taste. New York. Restaurant.

Current Developments in Nutrition

Objectives Examine the acceptability and potential barriers for the implementation of healthy eat... more Objectives Examine the acceptability and potential barriers for the implementation of healthy eating promoting (HEP) strategies in independently-owned Latin American restaurants (LAR), including the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods LAR owners and staff were recruited via social media and community networks across the US. Potential participants completed an online survey (n = 20) on demographic and restaurant characteristics and current HEP strategies. Subsequently, we conducted semi-structured, online interviews with LAR owners and staff (n = 13) to examine attitudes of and barriers to the implementation of HEP strategies. Each verbatim transcript was analyzed by two coders using Dedoose, following an iterative process. Excerpts were rated according to how open respondents were to implement potential strategies (1 = opposed, 2 = neutral, 3 = open). Results The survey revealed that the most common HEP strategies already in place were offering vegetarian options (80%) and s...

Ecology of Food and Nutrition

Revista de Administração de Empresas

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is extraordinary because it unapologetically links W... more A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things is extraordinary because it unapologetically links Western capitalism to the ills of the global food system, and shows how the BOOK REVIEW | NO ESCAPE FROM CAPITALISM'S UNRELENTING LOGIC OF CONQUEST AND COMMODIFICATION Krishnendu Ray

In Daniel E. Bender and Simone Cinotto, Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines (University of Toronto Press, 2024), pp. 256-279., 2024

Resilient Kitchens, 2024

Rutgers University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2023

Verge, 2023

Anthropology of Consciousness, 2024

Encyclopedia of Food and Society, 2024

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2016

Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, 2021

Culinary Culture in Colonial India

Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 2021

Current Developments in Nutrition

Ecology of Food and Nutrition

Revista de Administração de Empresas

What could a book on balut, an embryonated duck egg, possibly teach us about the world we live in... more What could a book on balut, an embryonated duck egg, possibly teach us about the world we live in? Margaret Magat hopes to delineate a whisper of subversion in the face of cultural domination by taking a street food from a peripheral corner of the Philippines and tracing its circulation both nationally and globally, through various mass mediated urban sites and diasporas, to pose sharp questions about culinary nationalism; omnivorousness and the accumulation of cultural capital; and the role of old and new media. Though folkloristics was one of the founding sources of food studies, it has receded from view under the glare of cultural anthropology, social history, and sociology, and thus the first compelling aspect of this book is Magat's utilization of that fecund theoretical domain. Our debt to folkloristics is hidden in what is thought to be common sense. Folklore was not only one of the earliest domains of scholarly inquiry to focus on the quotidian object such as food to understand people and their relationships to each other in a spatially-embedded, object-oriented way, but it also gave us a theory about why it had not been more extensively studied. Roger D. Abrahams formulated it succinctly as a " triviality barrier ". Out of folklore also emerges one of the earliest critiques of the fraught search for " authenticity " – that eternal question that haunts modern consumers of culture-undertaken by Regina Bendix, who links it to the discovery of the folk and their aura in nationalist historiography. Yet, that search for authenticity is the very reason why documentation and analysis of everyday life emerges in the first place, allowing us to accumulate data and critique it. By pursuing the apparently trivial balut...

What might an epistemology of joy and pleasure look like? Why do we need one now?

In Food Studies we know much about the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, and their set... more In Food Studies we know much about the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds, and their settler colonial outposts, but relatively little about food cultures in other locations. This collection attempts to correct that imbalance by drawing us into the Pacific and the Indian Ocean worlds, and the spaces in between, by digging into sources in Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and of course English. To that vastly different spatial episteme, the editor Michelle T. King and a number of authors bring a distinctively different temporal frame that extends the analysis to before and after Euro-American hegemony. In the process, they give us the tools to critically interrogate the coming East Asian domination in capital and cultural accumulation. The book's central organizing principle is the narration of the relationship between taste, territory and power. It provides insights in at least four directions. First, that what humans eat, and how they cook and process their food, depends on where they are, where they have moved from, and where they want to move to, spatially and socially. It is about geography and history and as much about social location as aspiration. Second, what social groups eat, value, and despise partly depends on what their neighbors, superiors and inferiors eat, value and despise. Sometimes they borrow from each other, sometimes they refuse to do that for religious, racial, class, national or ethnic reasons. Third, what people eat and consider materially and symbolically important is brimming with memories--good and ugly--and riddled with forgetfulness. Groups and individuals are good at memorializing much of their long developed practices, often embodied with their palates and hands, but they are also good at faking genealogies and ignoring...

As anti-globalization and anti-science rhetoric become central to right-wing agendas the study of... more As anti-globalization and anti-science rhetoric become central to right-wing agendas the study of food allows social scientists and humanities-oriented scholars to rethink their posture towards both. After "question everything" becomes a fact-free, alt-right, call to arms, we are forced to learn new lessons in how radical doubt could be a socially dubious thing.