Butch Bakery website screengrab for gendered food terms

Crimes against language: A guide to gendered food terms

We may have replaced stewardesses with flight attendants and firemen with firefighters, but that’s ok because food is getting its man on these days. It’s the “manification” of food? Not to be confused with that “mancession” we’re slogging through. So cute, you just want to pat him on the head. This slow creep of gender-specific, nonsense words, makes it easy to ignore the underlying gender […]

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Roman Vishniac Exhibit at Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam; photo by the Persian-Dutch Network

Roman Vishniac’s photography: The impoverished life that wasn’t quite

A few years ago, I was at a lecture on Jewish immigration where someone asked why Soviet/Russian Jewish immigrants were so smug about their academic credentials. The response? Academics was just about the only thing they had to feel good about, since, as a group, Russian-Jews were not well accepted by the established Jewish community. The lecturer went on to talk about the differences between

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Cover for The I Hate to Cook Book by Peggy Bracken

The kitchen-bot revolution 2—And a robo-chef in every kitchen

(This is the second of two posts on “Mombot.” In my first post, I talked about the gender dynamics of kitchen-bots and found that there was surprisingly little to say about it, compared to other models of service robots that have been developed.) The New York Times headline that first grabbed my attention—“Just Like Mombot Used to Make“— got me thinking about how a kitchen-bot

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The Jetsons with their robot housemaid

The kitchen-bot revolution 1—this ain’t your mama’s kitchen

(This is the first of two posts on “Mombot.” It may not be quite the gender apocalypse that is the catwalk fembot, but the possibility of a kitchen robot raises some interesting issues about who is, and who should, be doing the cooking in our sustainability obsessed food culture. The next post will be up in a few days.) About a year ago, I wrote

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Soviet and Jewish and stateless

1980. I was just barely two years old, but already a stateless refugee when my family arrived in Canada that winter. Six months earlier, we’d left the Soviet Union, travelling first to Vienna and then, by train, Rome. That year, we were among the 50,000-odd Jews who’d been permitted to leave the USSR. We were part of a wave of emigration that took place between

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