AN    INTERNATIONAL     JOURNAL     OF
CULTURAL  AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Volume 47, no. 2 (Spring 2008)
SPECIAL ISSUE: "TRASH FOOD"

THE VITA-MIGAS OF TEPITO

Alfonso Hernández
Centro de Estudios Tepite os

Translation by Laura Roush
El Colegio de Michoacán

Migas, now a hearty dish in some Mexico City restaurants, originated as scrap food in Tepito, a barrio of the city. Made of pig bones, stale tacos and stale bread, migas have become iconic of Tepito and its people. The residents historically maintained themselves and their neighborhood's viability by rehabilitating discards -appliances, clothing, and food. Surrounded by new upscale residences and under pressure to succumb to urban development, Tepiteños have shown defiance and successfully resist such encroachment. (Barrio, Mexico City, recycling food, appliances, and clothing).

A MEANS OF SURVIVAL, A MARKER OF FEASTS: MUSHROOMS IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST

Sveta Yamin-Pasternak
Johns-Hopkins University

While the price of wild mushrooms in North American restaurants and stores ranges from high to unaffordable for people with limited financial means, wild mushrooms for rural low-income households in places as diverse as Eastern Europe, parts of Africa, and the Russian Arctic are an important part of the diet, especially during food shortages. In Chukotka, in the far northeast of the Russian Federation, wild mushrooms are a source of nourishment in everyday consumption, and were important for survival in times of food scarcity. Depending on social context, mushrooms there have multiple meanings, ranging from emergency food for the hungry to the mark of a festive table. (Mushrooms, Chukchi, Slavs, Yupik, Chukotka).

ELEVATING THE LOWLY DUMPLING: FROM PEASANT KITCHENS TO PRESS CONFERENCES

Jennifer Jordan
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Dumplings may be a simple food prepared in Central European kitchens and the object of publicity campaigns to draw culinary tourists to particular regions. Around the world, dumplings can be both a celebratory meal and a way to stretch meager ingredients with tiny bits of meat tucked into larger quantities of cheaper ingredients like wheat flour or potatoes. The Austrian dumpling exemplifies some of the ways that relatively cheap ingredients become both strikingly symbolic and profoundly filling. Scholarly attention to dumplings promises insights that connect the cultural and the culinary, and the many ways that simple foods are also complex. (Food culture, dumplings, Austria, regional promotion).

UDDERS, PENISES, AND TESTICLES

Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University

Sexual and lactating organs of animals are both foods and symbols. Because the organs are visible when the animal is mating or nursing, their shape is unmistakable, and their symbolic potency clings to them, even after slaughter. Cooking them might mask or magnify these qualities. This article reports on the means employed in different communities to render these organs as comestibles. (Cooked penis, testicles, udders, symbolic associations).