Catarina Passidomo ’04 Authors Paper in the Peer-Reviewed Journal Food, Culture & Society Passidomo explores how food and food narratives can build and reinforce regional and social identities.

By Brian Laubscher
September 27, 2024

Catarina Passidomo ’04, associate professor of environmental studies at Washington and Lee University, recently authored a paper published in Food, Culture & Society, an international peer-reviewed journal of multidisciplinary research.

Passidomo’s article, titled “Gastroimaginaries: a framework for conceptualizing narratives of food and place in the American South,” focuses on the concept of gastroimaginaries, a narrative that uses food as a rhetorical device to define and encapsulate what are believed to be the essential characteristics of a people, place and time.

The article examines how people view their social existence and identify with others to underscore the significance of food-related narratives. These narratives often shape, reinforce or contest regional identities, and signal membership within specific groups or imagined communities.

“The article develops a portion of the theoretical framework for a book project that I’m working on,” said Passidomo. “That project, tentatively titled ‘Gastroimaginaries: Dreams of Food and Place in Peru and the American South’ presents a comparative analysis of the role of food in place-branding in two distinct regions with linked socio-environmental histories. I’m happy to publish some of the preliminary research in Food, Culture & Society, the journal for the Association for the Study of Food and Society, which has a wide reach among food studies scholars and students.”

Passidomo is in her first year as a faculty member at W&L. She spent the previous 10 years teaching Southern studies and anthropology at the University of Mississippi. Passidomo earned a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and anthropology from W&L, a Master of Arts in anthropology from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in geography from Georgia. She specializes in sustainable food systems, human-environment interactions, agriculture and climate adaptations, and food- and place-branding.

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