Category Archives: Chicago Foodways Roundtable

Feeding the Art Deco Spirit

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Join Us on Monday, October 16, 2023 @ 7 PM Central via Zoom!

Café, bars, restaurants, Cover Félix Jobbé-Duval Café, bars, restaurants, Cover Félix Jobbé-Duval Paris: Librairie de la Construction moderne, 1930

Café, bars, restaurants, Cover Félix Jobbé-Duval Café, bars, restaurants, Cover Félix Jobbé-Duval Paris: Librairie de la
Construction moderne, 1930


A central aspect of the culture and lifestyle of the 1920s and 30s was the creation and consumption of food.  You could exist in an Art Deco world where everything from the soup to the nuts was inflected with this style. As a pervasive mode, Deco shaped a total environment and food and drink were an integral part of this.  The lecture will focus upon some of the more striking results of this encounter.

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A Tour of Windy City Mushrooms

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featuring their growing rooms and 
tasting of their new fungi food products

Presented by John James
Co-Owner/Head of Sales/Mycologist

Windy City Mushroom was founded 3 years ago in 2020. With the start of the pandemic, healthy resources became scarce, and mushrooms were out of stock in nearly every grocery store and co-op. Chicago needed a sustainable option for local consumers, thus Windy City Mushroom was born. Located in the Ford City neighborhood of Chicago, we pride ourselves on growing the finest premium gourmet mushrooms Chicago has to offer at an affordable price. Continue reading →

Flora, Fauna and Foodways

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Presented by Nancy Webster, Archivist
Highland Park Historical Society

Podcast

Recipes recorded orally by Native Americans and written by local pioneer settlers demonstrate sustenance and diet using native flora and fauna.  Using exclusively 19th century or earlier resources, an exhibit and presentation of these natural and cultivated food sources were created‌.  The images of the Jesse Lowe Smith Image Collection’s documentation of flora and fauna provided the inspiration to explore diverse natural food sources being documented. Continue reading →

Chinese Cuisine in America: Stories, Struggles and Successes

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Tour lead by Soo Lon Moy,
Former President

Highlighting the struggles, resiliency, and entrepreneurial spirit of Chinese Americans, the exhibition chronicles the complex and often conflicting nature of Chinese Americans in America tying in its immigration history to the popularization of Chinese cuisine from chop suey to dim sum to spicy hotpot. Continue reading →

Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir

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Presented by Chef Iliana Regan
Podcast

As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land’s different mushroom species appear—even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area’s birds. Continue reading →