Food can be used to promote tolerance in an increasingly fractious world.
My work explores ways in which food and culture transcend differences.
In 1978, as a grad student, I traveled to Moscow with stars in my eyes. The Cold War was raging, but my head was filled with the romance of Russia.
I worked for a year as a guide for the USIA, tasked with explaining the glories of American agriculture to Soviet citizens, who spent hours every day standing in lines just to get basic food on the table.
The grimness of Soviet daily life was inescapable. My job was stressful, and after being roughed up by the KGB, I was about ready to give up on everything Russian—the language, the literature, the Stanford fellowship.
What saved me, fortuitously enough, was food.
Even though it could be dangerous for Russians to consort with Americans, I found them to be the most welcoming, hospitable people I'd ever met—and some of the most creative in the kitchen, turning scraps into savory dishes.
When I got back to the States, I turned the hospitality and hardship of that year in Russia into my first cookbook. The book was a love letter of sorts to Russia. It’s still in print after thirty-plus years, now as A Taste of Russia.
After grad school, I started teaching at Williams College in Massachusetts. I loved the classroom and research, but I couldn’t forsake food and the kitchen. So I led a double life, as an academic and as a food writer.
Once a month I drove to Cambridge for meetings of the Culinary Historians of Boston. I was so excited for one meeting—lunch at Julia Child's house—that I left home in my slippers and didn’t realize it until I was halfway across the state, too late to turn back. “Oh, that’s lovely, dearie,” Julia Child said to me when I confessed. “I wish I were wearing my house slippers too!
My cookbook led to wonderful opportunities. I consulted for the Firebird Restaurant in NYC and for the legendary, madcap Warner LeRoy of the Russian Tea Room.
I felt a little madcap myself trying to straddle the divide between the sensual, popular world of food and that of academia.
I got to be the “Stoli girl” for a couple of years, doing PR for Stolichnaya Vodka, as well as food editor for Russian Life magazine. I also wrote another cookbook, The Georgian Feast about the spectacular food of the Republic of Georgia.
But I kept pushing, working hard to make a place at the scholarly table for food studies.
In 2001, I founded Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, to bridge the divide between academic inquiry and popular writing about food.
Gastronomica proved that substance can be sexy, and that pleasure isn’t empty.
In 2012, just before I stepped down as editor-in-chief, the James Beard Foundation named Gastronomica Publication of the Year.
Through my work on Gastronomica, I became ever more interested in the social issues surrounding food. I consulted for the Republic of Georgia (an AgVANTAGE/USAID project on Georgian agriculture), for Norway (the European Union Northern Dimension Initiative), and for the Council of Europe, a think tank for the European Union. Our aim was pretty utopian. We believed that if people could recognize the attributes and tastes their own culture shares with others’, perhaps there would be less hatred in the world.
These days I continue to think about ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance in an increasingly fractious world. Which means that I'm thinking about Russia again.
In 2015 I was named editor in chief of the cutting-edge magazine CURED, published by Zero Point Zero Production. The magazine, though short-lived, led me to focus on the art of food preservation, which in turn led to my latest cookbooks. Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore (2020) explores the foodways of the Russian North, which rely heavily on fermenting, salting, culturing, and curing. And now I’m writing a series of six small books on all manner of preserved foods, with coauthors Cortney Burns and Richard Martin. The first two volumes, Preserved: Condiments and Preserved Fruit, appeared in 2023; Preserved: Drinks and Preserved: Vegetables came out in 2024. The final two volumes on Dairy and Grain will be published in Spring 2026.
In 2022 I published a companion volume to Beyond the North Wind called The Kingdom of Rye: A Brief History of Russian Food (2022), which offers a narrative journey through a thousand years of Russia’s culinary culture. Most recently, in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I’ve begun working on a new narrative, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, that will explore my ambivalence about this monstrous, magnificent country while trying to answer the larger question of what Russia is—what we can say that is true about this inscrutable place.
If you want to dive deeper into my world of food, culture, and culinary diplomacy, enjoy my BOOKS.
Biography
Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, named the 2012 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She has published widely on literature, culture, art, and cuisine and has organized several exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age and Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500-2005, both at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. In addition to serving as Editor in Chief of the James Beard-nominated Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, she is the author of eight cookbooks.
Darra is Series Editor of California Studies in Food and Culture (University of California Press) and Editor in Chief of The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. She has consulted for the Council of Europe as part of an international group exploring ways in which food can be used to promote tolerance and diversity. She was the national spokesperson for Stolichnaya vodka when it was first introduced to the US. Darra did her undergraduate work at Vassar College and holds a PhD from Stanford University.
She currently serves on the Kitchen Cabinet of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and on the Advisory Board of the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.