Curbside grocery pickup. Contactless pizza delivery. Comfort baking. As with so many other things, our relationship to food is changing during COVID.

Today on the show, WORT assistant news director Jonah Chester has a wide-ranging discussion about these changes with Lucy Long, director of the Center for Food and Culture, who clarifies how food is both a window to other cultures and a mirror into our own.

Over the course of the hour, they cover topics like “comfort food,” stockpiling in the early days of the pandemic, increasing awareness of food justice and food workers’ rights, the uptick in Americans buying from CSAs and farmers markets, the rise of the local, modified holiday food traditions, and how “culinary tourism” continues at the kitchen table even when we can’t travel.

Lucy Long teaches courses in American culture studies at B0wling Green State University. She is the founder and director of the Center for Food and Culture and the author or editor of many books, including Culinary Tourism (University Press of Kentucky, 2004), Comfort Food: Meanings and Memories (with Michael Owen Jones; University Press of Mississippi, 2017), and Honey: A Global History (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Cover photo by Comfreak from Pixabay