This Is the Place

The smell of roasting pork convinced me. I was visiting the Gastronomy program to interview for the role of Director in the winter of 2016. When my job talk was finished, the kindly people of the program took me on a tour of the offices. A sublime smell of roasting meat permeated the rooms. Unable to ignore it, I had to ask, waving my hand in the air, “What is it? What’s going on here? What smells so good?” In the teaching kitchen, students were working on a Columbian Exchange feast, a meal featuring foods involved in the early intersection of Indigenous Central-American and Spanish cultures. The feast was the product of a collaboration between Gastronomy students, Culinary Arts students, and students from the Anthropology Department. They were cooking up their research and learning from and with each other.

 

I knew then and there that I could be happy in this place. Here the details of program administration and the complex work of teaching happened not just contiguous to, but in concert with, cooking and (my growling stomach suggested) eating. The very space in which we work is constantly imbued not only with alluring aromas but with sensory connections to other places and times. Now in my fifth year as director, I know for certain what I only guessed then: this is a place for serious magic.