Culinary Canvas Series
(Forthcoming)
Edible Tales:
Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning
Edited by Drs. Mila Zhu and Sarah Morrison
Culinary Canvas Series from Myers Education Press
Summary
Edible Tales: Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning invites readers to the table to explore how food stories shape knowledge, identity, ethics, and pedagogy. Drawing on folklore, mythology, cultural studies, and narrative inquiry, this edited volume reframes eating as a public act and teaching as a shared meal, where memory, power, care, and resistance are always on the plate.
Structured as a twelve-course banquet, the book moves from forbidden fruits and mythic punishments to kitchen-table dialogues, classroom rituals, and contemporary visual art. Across chapters, contributors examine how food functions as law and transgression, nourishment and discipline, inheritance and invention. Eve’s bite, Persephone’s seeds, and Gretel’s breadcrumbs are reread as moments where appetite becomes agency. Thanksgiving disasters become narrative laboratories. Off-calendar feasts and midnight breakfasts reveal how everyday rituals sustain resilience in academic and communal life. Olive oil tastings, medieval banquets, pupusa-making, and jollof debates demonstrate how foodways encode histories of gender, class, colonialism, migration, and belonging.
Methodologically, Edible Tales blends scholarly analysis with creative forms: scripts, recipes, stage directions, audio guides, almanacs, and lesson “potions.” The volume models how folklore and food narratives can be mobilized in higher education classrooms. Contributors show how storytelling, shared snacks, sensory memory, and digital food archives can foster trust, critical reflection, and ethical engagement, particularly in interdisciplinary, humanities-based, and social justice–oriented pedagogy. Designed for scholars and educators in education, folklore, cultural studies, food studies, and the humanities, Edible Tales is also an invitation: to instructors seeking innovative pedagogy, to students hungry for meaning, and to readers who believe that stories travel best when passed hand to hand. Come hungry. Leave with stories. Pack the leftovers as questions, and carry them into tomorrow
(Forthcoming)
Recipes of Motherhood:
Families, Communities, and the Power of Food Narratives
Edited by Drs. Mila Zhu and Sarah Morrison
Culinary Canvas Series from Myers Education Press
Summary
What does it mean to mother, teach, and survive in institutions that are never full?
Recipes of Motherhood: Families, Communities, and the Power of Food Narratives brings together scholars, mothers, daughters, and communities to explore how food operates as care, resistance, memory, and method. Across kitchens and classrooms, these chapters trace how everyday acts become sites where identity, pedagogy, and justice are negotiated and remade.
Structured as a shared meal, the volume centers motherhood not as a private struggle, but as a collective, embodied practice shaped by race, class, migration, disability, and institutional power. Contributors draw on autoethnography, duoethnography, testimonio, narrative inquiry, and arts-based research to show how food sustains families while also exposing the invisible labor demanded of academic and working mothers. From fermenting kimchi and baking cakes to making burrata alone or stirring arroz con pollo alongside IEP meetings, food becomes a language for naming exhaustion, resilience, joy, and refusal.
Rather than romanticizing care, Recipes of Motherhood insists on its complexity. Chapters examine academic overwork, ableism, white supremacy, colonial inheritance, and gendered expectations, while also offering counter-recipes: rituals that protect time, practices that honor lineage, and pedagogies rooted in community and cultural knowledge. Kitchens emerge as archives. Tables become classrooms. Recipes function as theory, situated, adaptive, and passed hand to hand.
Recipes of Motherhood invites readers to slow down, set the table, and taste what happens when scholarship is nourished by lived experience. Take what feeds you. Adapt what needs heat. Share what remains. And when the timer rings again, let there be seconds.