Ashley Rose Young Co-authors Essay in Food and Museums

Ashley Rose Young co-authored an essay with Jennifer Jacqueline Stratton entitled, "Terroir Tapestries: An Interactive Consumption Project."

Young and Stratton were co-directors of the Subnature and Culinary Culture Project at Duke University. The Subnature Project examined marginalized and “bizarre” foods through undergraduate curriculum and public history events such as community meals, foraging walks, collaborative art projects, and a speaker series in the fall of 2014.

The essay they contributed to Food and Museums is a case study of one of the sub-projects in the Subnature Project called Terroir Tapestries. In this interactive consumption project, they examined the concept of terroir, applying it to historic urban landscapes in the Southern United States, where a sense of place was profoundly shaped by food production. Terroir Tapestries is an interactive exploration of the past, focused on revisiting the terroir of street food spaces and markets in New Orleans, through the facilitation of encounters between vendors, consumers, and participants' collective interpretation of previously unfamiliar street food. Through food wrapper imagery and inscriptions that were later exhibited at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, participants were able to record their reactions and memories of street food cultures.