In the fourth EHL Brown Bag Seminar of the term, L. Sasha Gora will give a tour of her 2025 book Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada while simultaneously introducing her current research about eating and ecology.
What do recipes, let alone restaurants, have to do with the environment? Eating, as Sasha Gora argues, is always an ecological act. It not only stories the earth, but also shapes it. To study food is, therefore, to study how it is rooted in, or transcends, place. It is to study land and water, how they are worked and transformed, imagined and represented, bought and sold, won and lost, whom they belong to, and who belongs to them.
Featuring a cast of wild plants and introduced animals, Indigenous foodways and Canadian regulations, Culinary Claims blends food studies with environmental history to examine how cuisines reflect social and political issues related to representation and sovereignty, which is to say how food claims land. Based on her award-winning doctoral research at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment & Society, Culinary Claims tells a new story of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance, emphasizing the critical role that eateries play in Canada’s cultural landscape. It, in short, investigates how food shapes our understanding of place and the politics that underpin this relationship.
Register for the seminar and vegan sandwich here
. Note you need to register for the seminar by the 13th of May if you want a vegan sandwich! After the 13th of May, you can no longer register for the sandwich, but you are welcome to come to the seminar and bring your own lunch!
L. Sasha Gora
L. Sasha Gora is an essayist and cultural historian with a focus on food studies, the environmental humanities, and contemporary art. After earning her PhD from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Rachel Carson Center and holding postdoctoral fellowships at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen, she joined the University of Augsburg in 2023, where she is the project director and principal investigator of the Off the Menu Research Group. Her writing has been featured in outlets such as Food, Culture & Society, Global Environment, Literary Hub, Gastronomica, and Eaten, and in 2025 the University of Toronto published her first book, Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada.
