Shared Authority at the Table: Foodways as Public History Practice

Public history is not only about what we know—it is about how we come to know it, and who is invited into that process. Foodways offer a particularly powerful entry point for this work because its experiential, remembered, and shared across generations.

The Food, Family, and Tradition program, developed in collaboration with the Over-the-Rhine Museum, was grounded in the idea of shared authority. Rather than presenting a finished narrative, the program invited community members to co-create meaning through memory, storytelling, and lived experience.

Foodways scholarship reminds us why this matters. Food is one of the few cultural practices that often survives migration, displacement, and archival silence. For me, it appears in the craving for kimchi, or in the comfort and survival bound up in what Anthony Bourdain once called “meat in tube form”—foods that allow me to imagine places I have never known while remaining connected to who I was. For descendants of immigrants and marginalized communities, food becomes a doorway back to identity, a way of asserting presence in histories that have too often excluded them.

Yet food is never neutral. It reflects labor, gender, class, and power. Who cooks? Who profits? Whose food is celebrated, whose food is sneered at, and whose remains invisible? These questions are central to understanding OTR’s past and present.

The program intentionally highlighted Appalachian, German, African American, and Vietnamese foodways—not as isolated traditions, but as interconnected stories shaped by migration and adaptation. Vietnamese families arriving in Cincinnati in the 1970s, for example, often traveled to other cities just to find ingredients that reminded them of home. Those journeys eventually led to the creation of Saigon Market, now a cultural anchor for Southeast Asian communities in the region.

Equally important was how the program gathered knowledge. A community survey invited participants to reflect on food memories, local markets, family recipes, and neighborhood changes. This exchange was not extractive—it was reciprocal. Participants were not simply sources; they were historians of their own lives.

This approach aligns with participatory public history practices that treat memory as evidence and lived experience as a form of expertise. Rather than asking communities to validate institutional narratives, the program asked institutions to listen, adapt, and make space.

Foodways, in this sense, became a living archive—one that resists closure. One that acknowledges the silence. Recipes change and adapt. Memories shift. New migrations add new layers. Public history’s role is not to freeze these stories in time, but to create conditions where they can be shared, contested, and carried forward with care.