Portmanteaus

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Portmanteaus

#PORTMANTEAU

HYBRID

MISH-MASH

MASHUP

FRANKEN-FOODS

There’s this chain of high-end salad bars called Mandy’s and, like Pluto’s in California and Salad & The City in Amsterdam, Mandy’s specializes in salads that are made to order. That said, I’ll admit, when many of the options for lunch-on-the-run focus so heavily on grains and meats, having a hefty dose of crunchy vegetables sure seems nice. GoogleMaps indicated that there was a Mandy’s near my house, a mere 5 minutes walking distance. Just hang a right at the end of my block.  

Except, I could not find it.

No store front in the vicinity displayed the block-letter seafoam-and-mauve Mandy’s sign. 30 minutes later, I’m still circling the same four blocks like a madwoman. (Never mind that, by this point, I could have gone to the supermarket and back and prepared myself a week’s worth of pre-portioned salads.) At this time, I’m more intent on solving this puzzle than eating an overpriced bougie salad. Dammit.  

Dear reader, I’m an advanced GoogleMaps dependent and, given a GPS, I can triangulate my location to a T. What I didn’t realize was that Mandy’s, a salad bar, was located inside another store. Talk about nested establishments.

Montreal has this thing where coffee shops and eateries are embedded inside other non-food stores. How this works on the legal front, I have no clue. But within a one-block radius from me, there is a clothing store with separately owned coffee shop inside it, there’s another trinket store with coffee shop taking up the front half, and there’s a coffee shop inside a children’s ballet studio. Then, there’s Mandy’s inside that other clothing store.

What is it with cross-merchandising [clothes + coffee] or [clothes + food]? Is this doubling up on the semantics of luxury? Is toting around intricate designs in latte art a prerequisite for grabbing a pair of jeans or sending off Little Milly to ballet lessons? Convenient, sure. But, like my exasperated state when I was searching for Mandy’s, these hybrid spaces are tailored for the fashionista/ballet-mom who chances upon the foodstuff, not the foodie/gastronome hungry for a sip or a bite. Which is fine. I’m not pouting at unfairness; I’m more befuddled by the mishmash of capitalist intents and its uncanny similarity to how drugstores and hypermarkets (e.g. Walmart, Target, Amazon) now sell food as well.

Part of the reason why I adore my particular neighborhood is for its tenacious stronghold of single-focus food businesses. There are two butcheries, two bagelries, a produce store, a craft beer market, three bakeries, and a fishmonger, all within one block or two from my apartment. (All we need is a cheesemonger, and I’ll be set #kthxbye.) There’s an inherent delicacy to singularity and uniqueness, a delicacy off of which these single-food businesses thrive. The mom-and-pop shops of yester-times may not be the posterchildren of convenience, but when everything becomes available everywhere, the resulting experience becomes inherently diluted. A decade ago, matcha lattes were a thrill at that one, quirky art-cafe in Long Beach (shout out: VyA!); now that it’s available everywhere, meh.

But, breaking down barriers and (as was the case with Mandy’s) literally being wall-less with other establishments opens up opportunities for creative spark. Food, in its infinite ability to adapt to the times, makes for an exciting platform for hybridizing and mixology. 

This notion of hybridity hits me at the same time that my Instagram feed presented me with the pho-ritto: a burrito with vermicelli noodles, slices of gently simmered beef, cilantro, mint, basil, and, of course, sriracha. Incredulousness aside, I started thinking about other food portmanteaus and their linguistic equivalents:

[spoon + fork] = spork
[breakfast + lunch] = brunch
[donut + croissant] = cronut
[Lager + Margarita] = Lagerita  

Or, even something that we at Pasta Madre frequently joke about when writing deadlines are looming:

[procrastination + baking] = procrastibaking

…of which I am absolutely guilty. In a food world that is egregiously pushing innovation and cutting-edge product design, mashing together ‘old’ food tropes in order to produce 'new’ food phenomena is insidiously commonplace.

What other food-related portmanteaus are in your world? And, perhaps more interesting, how did this mashup come about? How do portmanteaus blur the lines between distinct foods? How are food mashups held in public perception? To what extent does a food’s hybridity enable or hinder that food to be eaten, desired, or sought after? If you could create the perfect food mashup, what would it be?

Taking the idea of ‘portmanteau’ in all its meanings, this prompt explores the linguistic and material smashing together of distinct foods. Some preliminary ideas to think about:

  1. The German iconoclast currywurst, for example, came about when available spices/condiments during post-war food shortages were thrown together.

  2. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but necessity is also being touted as the go-to rationale for genetically modified foods. (The justification goes, “How else are we going to feed a population of 9 billion?”) Thus, franken-foods are the not-so-cheeky, not-so-innocent versions of hybridity and portmanteau. How do franken-foods animate our perceptions of food?

  3. The mashing together of foods assumes that the resulting product is somehow ‘better’ than the constituents on their own. What are the additive effects of mish-mashing foods together and what is lost? To what extent is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

 

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Nest

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Nest

#nest

nesting

settling in, getting comfy

making home

nesting with food

nested foods and layered foods

I could never get the Danish ‘y.’ Cross between the Germanic ö and the French e, the Danish pronunciation of y always confounded me.

One year ago, I was living in Copenhagen, living amidst the very stuff of hygge-- a term like schadenfreude and terroir that does not have an adequate English equivalent-- which loosely relates to the comfort and warmth of a home. But hygge extends beyond the home in a more general form of coziness. I remember cafes and bars suddenly celebrating outdoor seating this time last year, with any threat of chill quickly precluded with sheepskin throws and wool blankets. Raybans, check. Mikkeller, check. Now, a little something to throw on my lap…

But hygge resonated with me beyond just blankets and candles. One aspect of hygge is to surround oneself with things that one loves. In other words, nesting.

“Nesting, then, isn’t just home; it is making home.”

Having lived in 4 countries (across 3 continents) in the past 2 years, I’m realizing that I relegate nesting to a lesser priority. I quickly settle for the basics: a bed and a wall socket to recharge my physical and virtual selves. Case in point, 9 months in and the walls in my current apartment are still bare.

For both humans and fowl, nests are hodge-podge exercises in making the most of our surroundings. It’s the repeated attempts at looking for meaning in unlikely places, so twigs and strings transform from debris to building material. A bricolage of a home is made up of that mug from the local diner, that contraband pint glass, that revived plant you found on the sidewalk last trash day. Nesting is both extremely particular yet also predicated on what’s nearby and obtainable.

Nests and all of its parts reflect back a particular time, place, and identity. Reacquainting with items you’d kept in storage, for example, may no longer reflect who you are, your values, or in what you carry meaning. Nests of yester-times may not fit in with who we are today. Nesting, then, isn’t just home; it is making home.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I noticed that the first areas with which I acquaint myself is the kitchen. Maybe my lizard-brain is to blame here, but I make home through kitchen shenanigans. Nesting in the kitchen orients me and gives me a sense of belonging. My nesting is through cooking, grocery shopping, and cooking some more until I’ve felt my way through this kitchen-nest called my home.

How do we use foods to nest and ‘make home’ for ourselves? Which foods, in particular, are part of your nesting reflex? Extending the proverb, “home is where the heart is,” how or what defines and locates your kitchen? What was the process by which you nested in your most recent kitchen?

Taking the idea of nested/nesting in all it’s meanings, this prompt explores the process of making home, how one surrounds oneself with the things one loves, and finding meaning in the unlikeliest of places while nesting. What is the art of nesting and how does nesting define who and where we are?

Some other things to think about:

  1. We are nested organisms, in a Russian doll sense. We are bodies within bodies. We’re made up of microbial and human cells at a ratio of one to one. How does that impact your concept of eating?

  2. This is the time of year for artichokes and onions. Building on the nested doll idea, how are foods already inherently nested? Think also about nested food containers or nested mixing bowls: what are other foods/kitchen things that are layered and nested?

  3. How does food change in/out of the nest? What foods are associated with phenomena like ‘empty nest syndrome’ and what are foods associated with having left a nest?

  4. For all you linguists out there: what are other food nouns that are made into verbs? Generic examples like googling something or friending/defriending have become commonplace. But what about words specific to food and cooking? Could ‘eggify’ become shorthand for ‘to put an egg on it’?

How else do foods, nests, and nesting intersect?

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Extreme

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Extreme

#extreme

extremities

extreme opposites

extreme climates and geographies

foods in extreme conditions

-est foods

Montreal issued a frostbite warning. Mind you, it’s mid-March and temperatures tonight will be -30*C with windchill. Hell, I’m used to Marches that are studded with crocuses and daffodils waving in the cool-but-tolerable breeze. No. Not, frostbite.

I used to scoff at frostbite, and partition that off in my mind as an extreme medical condition that only happens north of the 50th parallel. That said, a ten minute walk the other day—sans gloves, to and from the post office—rendered my fingertips quite useless while I was trying to open my front door.

In extreme circumstances, dexterity? Not so much.

I am reminded that we lose the most heat from our extremities, in part, because they are the furthermost. In a literal sense, our head, hands, and feet lose the most heat. This reminds me of how we associate comfort food and warmth with our hands (like the cliché close-up photo of hands holding a bowl of warm soup or mug of steaming hot chocolate). I'm also thinking of that lawsuit surrounding warning labels: “Careful, the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot.”

While we must care for our extremities, extremes are also something to be avoided altogether. Extreme ideologies or extremists-at-large point to a distant danger that is just too ‘out there.’ Extreme points of view can be off-putting. Extreme tastes can be equally so.

Extremes are polarizing by definition, yet we’re strangely attracted to them. The strange sensationalism surrounding ‘extreme foods’ is really an exercise in marketing and shock value, where superlatives rank foods along arbitrary parameters like most foul-smelling (durian), most poisonous (fugu), and most expensive (white truffle).

Why do we pay attention to these extremes and how do they define us? How does food survive in extreme conditions, and how can that give us clues about how to live in extreme circumstances? How do we tend to our outermost extremities to care for our innermost? And, how do we counter extremes without evoking another extreme?

Taking the keyword “extreme” in both maxima/minima directions, this prompt takes a wide-lens approach to be inclusive of all things utmost, all things least, and everything in between. Some potential interpretations to get the juices flowing:

  1. Cold extremities are indicators for deficiency: Cold hands point to poor circulation and, idiomatically, ‘cold feet’ are synonymous with unmet potential or a failure to launch.

  2. What foods characterize extreme environments (e.g. outer space, Iceland)?

  3. What would extreme dining circumstances look like? (because, apparently, this exists…)

  4. What foods do you crave when you’re the furthest from feeling centered?


How else do food and extremes intersect?

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Solid

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Solid

Food as sites of resistance

Solidarity foods

Solid foods

Foods that coalesce

I recently made a batch of maple mead --that is, mead made from fermenting maple syrup instead of honey-- to present at a conference. Mind you, for all its laxness and European flair surrounding alcohol, Montreal has clenched claws when it comes to making/selling alcohol. Trying to serve homebrewed anything can be a bureaucratic nightmare.

Not to be too subversive, but I needed this maple mead to go unnoticed within the confines of an academic conference. A dead giveaway would’ve been having a separate cup. Logistical parameters aside, I decided to change the physical state of my mead and disguise it the form of a gelée.

I decided to transform my food into a solid.

Trying to achieve solid-states can be precarious, like when ‘splitting a gel’ suspension, when gels do not ‘set’ properly, or when entities fail to come together. The magic of bread-baking, for example, occurs when a finicky dough is baked into solid form.

Solids signify a surefootedness, like standing on solid ground. Yet solids can also be limiting: solids are inflexible, impenetrable, and overly structured. When it comes to partial or ephemeral solids, like frozen desserts or the delightful mess that is cream-filled burrata, a textural dimension brings joy that isn’t apparent in its liquid versions.

On a more conceptual level, what brings things together in a way that successfully coalesces? How does this transformation bring about positive change? How do solidity and food intersect? What makes up solidarity foods? How can foods become sites of resistance?

Taking the keyword “solid” in all its attendant meaning, this prompt takes a wide-lens approach to be inclusive of all things solidifying: from literal solid-state foods to the concept of food solidarity. Some potential interpretations to get the juices flowing:

  1. How our food system is built atop a solid base of (exploitative) migrant labor, as evidenced by the recent #adaywithoutimmigrants activism.

  2. Food Not Bombs, a food activism organization, and their epithet: Solidarity not Charity.

  3. The transition from liquid foods to solid ones for infants and the infirm.

  4. The Italian GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale), which is the Community-Supported Agriculture equivalent, and how the nod to ‘solidale’ pushes back against capitalist hypermarkets.

How else do food and solidity intersect?

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