Madaline Rae Gerring
Posts by Madaline Rae Gerring
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The Paths to the Plate project focuses on the impact of immigrants on Michigan’s foodways, asking three basic questions. 1. What did immigrants to Michigan eat? 2. Where did they get food from? And 3. How has their food made an impact on Michigan? Between myself and my fellow intern, we split the work by ethnic group. I focused on arab, latino, and black immigrants, as well as the already present indigenous foodways. I’m starting my senior year this fall so I assumed there would be a lot of required reading, and there was a good amount, but not nearly as much as I had anticipated. I feel like as an anthropology major I’m used to twenty-plus pages of reading per assignment. Research, both physical and digital, took over my summer, finding references through google scholar or the library website, reading articles or e-pubs. I checked out probably eleven books total this summer: more in three months than my last years of college combined.
After this "collection phase" came the notetaking, analyzing each passage and determining whether it would contribute to the project. I mostly summarized readings for my future self, highlighting aspects or quotes that I felt exemplified the argument that immigrants have impacted Michigan’s foodways. It was during this phase that we also started searching for and documenting images that could be included in the final exhibit. Most of the images I submitted were from the Library of Congress or the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive in the Special Collections of Hatcher Graduate Library. I had the absolute pleasure of getting to visit the archive twice this summer, both times with the goal of gathering images and reading anything exclusive to the archive.
I’ll admit that the work wasn’t always fun. As dedicated to my craft of cultural research as I am, it gets tedious to sit behind a desk for hours on end, looking at article after article, word after word: your time is spent, and in this day time is precious. It takes tough skin to investigate the various ways people wrote about immigrants to the United States, especially black and brown immigrants. While we have many accountings of the kinds of businesses and economic value immigrants were bringing to the state of Michigan from white journalists and anthropologists, we also have books and journals written by immigrants from that time. Their first-hand knowledge of recipes, timelines, and traditions spoke in stark contrast to the way anthropologists of the time documented these same people. As our information become more contemporary, the language changed, incorrect or ignorant language fading little by little, thanks to the work and contributions of immigrant communities and of black and brown anthropologists.
After this "collection phase" came the notetaking, analyzing each passage and determining whether it would contribute to the project. I mostly summarized readings for my future self, highlighting aspects or quotes that I felt exemplified the argument that immigrants have impacted Michigan’s foodways. It was during this phase that we also started searching for and documenting images that could be included in the final exhibit. Most of the images I submitted were from the Library of Congress or the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive in the Special Collections of Hatcher Graduate Library. I had the absolute pleasure of getting to visit the archive twice this summer, both times with the goal of gathering images and reading anything exclusive to the archive.
I’ll admit that the work wasn’t always fun. As dedicated to my craft of cultural research as I am, it gets tedious to sit behind a desk for hours on end, looking at article after article, word after word: your time is spent, and in this day time is precious. It takes tough skin to investigate the various ways people wrote about immigrants to the United States, especially black and brown immigrants. While we have many accountings of the kinds of businesses and economic value immigrants were bringing to the state of Michigan from white journalists and anthropologists, we also have books and journals written by immigrants from that time. Their first-hand knowledge of recipes, timelines, and traditions spoke in stark contrast to the way anthropologists of the time documented these same people. As our information become more contemporary, the language changed, incorrect or ignorant language fading little by little, thanks to the work and contributions of immigrant communities and of black and brown anthropologists.