Buttermilk and cornbread take doctoral student Deah Berry-Mitchell back to childhood. Called Cush Cush, her grandmother would mush them together and spoon feed it to Berry- Mitchell and her cousins as she read Bible verses on their front porch.

“You can communicate so much through food,” says Berry-Mitchell, who is exploring the foodways of enslaved African Americans in Texas as one of the newest food history graduate researchers. “On that front porch with my grandmother, I felt safe. That Cush Cush was like a hug that made me feel loved and all warmed inside.”

Through faculty mentorships, a fellowship, program certificates and a diverse food-based curriculum in anthropology, biology, geography and the environment, history, hospitality and tourism, philosophy, public administration and world languages, UNT is fostering rich food studies conversations and individual student research across disciplines.

Kelly McFarland was immersed into food studies as a bachelor’s student while serving as a research assistant for professor Lisa Henry’s study about food insecurity among college students. Now an adjunct instructor of anthropology, McFarland drew from her UNT graduate research about local farmers and farm-to- food networks in North Texas to design a course about the U.S. food system. Students in the inaugural Fall 2020 course conducted community-based research about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on food and diet.

Philosophy doctoral student Isabelle Bishop, under major professor and The Philosophy of Food Project director David Kaplan, investigates how Western political theory structures globalized industrial food systems to explore how bodies and spaces are affected and conditioned by those systems. Fellow philosophy student Sara Louise Tonge focuses on animals and food systems in political theory.

Joshua Lopez, the inaugural recipient of The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts Fellowship in Food History at UNT, is a contributor to El Paso Food Voices and is compiling oral histories from the Chicanx and queer communities. Other history graduate research examines the Texas pecan industry, the role U.S. First Ladies play in diplomacy through state dinners and how cookbooks transmit and affirm Jewishness.

“We’re really on the brink of something,” says history professor Jennifer Jensen Wallach. “It’s exciting to see the momentum building with these projects. Our students are going to publish books from their research and help advance the study of food.”

Read more about food studies research underway at UNT.