Category Archives: Chicago Foodways Roundtable

Preserving Family Heirloom Recipes

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Join us on Thursday, April 3, 2025 @ 7 PM, via Zoom

Presented by Valerie J. Frey

Heirloom dishes and family food traditions are rich sources of nostalgia and provide vivid ways to learn about our families’ past, yet they can be problematic. Many family recipes and food traditions are never documented in written or photographic form, existing only as unwritten know-how and lore that vanishes when a cook dies. Even when recipes are written down, they often fail to give the tricks and tips that would allow another cook to accurately replicate the dish. Continue reading →

Food in the Midwest: More Interesting Than You May Think

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Join us on Thursday, February 20, 2025 @ 7 PM, via Zoom

The history of the Midwest is remarkable for many reasons, not least of which is the diversity of its population, and therefore of its regional cuisine. Everyone contributed to what was developing,  from the Ojibwe harvesting wild rice in Minnesota to Belgian hoteliers in Chicago inventing new dishes. There were Cornish miners in Michigan, Bohemians in Nebraska. Continue reading →

Leftovers A History of Food Waste & Preservation

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Presented by Eleanor Barnett, PhD
Podcast

A third of all the food we produce goes to waste globally, and if all this needlessly discarded food were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after China and the US! How did we become such a wasteful society? What can we learn about building a sustainable food future by looking to the past? Continue reading →