Author: Tony Waters

by Chunyan Song

In 1999, on my first American grocery shopping trip at Safeway in Tempe, Arizona, I marveled at the size, shape, and color of the bell peppers, carrots, eggplants, apples, grapes, and cauliflowers. They looked too big, too round, too bright, and too perfect to be real. I had to touch them and feel them to convince myself that they were not fake. Behind the too-perfect-to-be real presentation of American produce in supermarkets is the genetically modified (GM) food industry and food marketing system.…

by Chunyan Song

Although many Americans have to be on restricted diets due to religious or health reasons, many others voluntarily avoid certain foods because material wealth and food abundance grant them the opportunity to pick and choose. When I first came to the U.S, I was struck by how limited Americans’ food choices were. As a popular saying goes, Chinese eat everything that flies except the airplane and everything with four legs except the table.…

We Are What We Eat (An Introduction to Six Essays!)

by Chunyan Song

“Tell me what you eat, and I shall tell you what you are.”

—Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarian, The Physiology of Taste (1825)

America has opened my eyes to a variety of diets that I had never even known before my immigration from China to the United States seventeen years ago. It seems that most Americans I have encountered are either on one type of diet or another due to weight concerns or allergy issues.…

By Chunyan Song

California State University, Chico

Introductory Note to Series

Chunyan Song is my good friend and colleague at California State University, Chico. She emigrated to the United States from China in 1999 to study for a PhD in Sociology, and marry her husband Josh. She eventually ended up at Chico State where we have taught together for many years. The following six essays are her reflections on the 17 years she has spent eating in the United States—everything from a daily Burger King, to gluten free.…

Kurt Vonnegut just got published in the Chicago Tribune, even though he has been quite dead for the last nine years. So it goes. The title of the article is “The Secret Ingredient in my Books is that there Never has been a Villain,” even though he wrote about things like atomic bombs, The Holocaust, and the firebombing of Dresden. But the new newspaper article is not about these depressing things, rather it is mostly about the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago where his M.…

This post part of my continuing “Walkabout in Thailand”, after leaving my regular position at Chico State in northern California in January 2016. The subtitle for this series might be: “free unsolicited advice for university administrators.”

One of the reasons for this walkabout was frustration with the Chico State bureaucracy. Officially, Chico State is about busting through “silo walls,” and encouraging inter-disciplinary work and research. But in practice silos abound.…