95: Post COVID Taste Loss with Rebecca Ma

When we think about COVID, we usually think about the short term health effects and terrifying stories from the ICU. However, there’s a lot to learn about the ways that long haul COVID symptoms affect people. Those that experience long term symptoms are sometimes referred to as “long haulers” on Twitter threads, and you don’t see much covered about their health challenges across the media. But with the high rates of infection across the US and Canada, understanding how people will be negotiating these symptoms and recovery is an important element in understanding what comes next for all of us and how to help each other in the recovery stages of the pandemic.

One of the symptoms of long COVID is a loss of taste, smell, and appetite. I’ve heard accounts of this in little snips across Instagram, but wasn’t really sure what that meant, or just how long long COVID really was. My guest this week, Rebecca Ma, is a Masters student of food anthropology in Idaho. She is also a COVID survivor who is experiencing long COVID. Her Instagram account caught my attention a while back, @postcovideatsandsmells, as it is a documentation of her experiences trying different foods after losing taste and smell during her COVID recovery. She discusses how old favourites aren’t as they were, and what new elements of food she gravitates towards through this.

We talk today about her sensory experiences with food post-COVID, and how she uses her knowledge from anthropology to bring these experiences more public through her Instagram account.

Learn More About Rebecca: 

94: Lookout - Food Strategies in a Fire Tower with Trina Moyles

Today’s episode marks a big first for me! This is the first time I’ve been able to have a guest return for a second episode, which I’m so thrilled about. This week, Trina Moyles is back!

If you’re a longtime listener, you may remember her from AnthroDish’s first season, where she spoke about the global experiences of women farmers from her beautiful Women Who Dig debut book. This week, we’re having a conversation around her all new book, Lookout: Love Solitude, and Searching for Wildfire in the Boreal Forest through Penguin Publishing. Lookout came out in March 2021, and I honestly could not put it down. The book is a powerful memoir about her experiences working alone in a remote lookout tower near Peace River, Alberta, and her eyewitness account of the unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north.

Today, Trina shares her experiences as a fire tower lookout and how she navigated storing, growing, and cooking food. Being a lookout is an isolating experience, and she explores in our conversation the little moments with nature and making foods in the tower that taught her more about herself and the world around her. I will not give more away, but I will say, her descriptions of the baking she did at the tower were SO good, and leave you hungry!

Learn More About Trina:

93: How Do Canadians Plan for Better Food Systems? with Dr. Tammara Soma

Here at AnthroDish, a lot of the focus in my conversations with people is around the eating behaviours of communities, or what food preparations say about individuals… but we don’t often get to think about what their food waste behaviours say about them. So what influences how people waste foods? Why do we have so many memes about that half empty and wilted bin of wilted spinach at the back of our fridges?

My guest this week, Dr. Tammara Soma, looks at food waste patterns and behaviours in Indonesia and in Canada. She is the director and co-founder of the Food Systems Lab, and is Assistant Professor at the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University where she conducts research on issues pertaining to food system planning, community-based research, waste management and the circular economy. Her dissertation investigated the factors that influence urban household food consumption and food wasting practices in Indonesia, and the ways in which food systems consideration can improve urban planning decision-making.

Today, we’ll be exploring what influences people’s food waste, and how food systems planning methods can be used to better contribute to our food planning and security in Canada.

Learn More from Dr. Soma! 

92: Season 7 Launch! (Solo Episode)

It took a while, but I'm back for the 7th season of AnthroDish! Starting off as usual with a solo episode, giving some quick updates about what's been going on since season 6 wrapped in March 2021, some huge personal changes (I'm finally a Doctor!), and some reflections on what sorts of energy and themes I'm bringing in this season. 

Regular interview episodes will be back as of next Tuesday, and I can’t wait for you to hear them!

91: Fast, Easy, Cheap Veganism with Sam Turnbull

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Something we’ve been focusing on this season is unpacking what makes food accessible or inaccessible – be it money, gender, race, or their intersections. Veganism is an arena where there is a lot of time-consuming and money-draining products, and particularly so when a lot of discussions around how to be vegan are white-centered. My guest this week, Sam Turnbull, works to bust the myths around veganism’s inaccessibility by creating simple plant-based comfort food recipes (with 10 ingredients or less) that are inexpensive ($10 or less) and quick (in 30 minutes or less). Sam lives in Toronto and is the author of the popular vegan blog, It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken, and has over 70k subscribers on her YouTube channel of the same name.

Sam’s got a brand new cookbook out this week through Appetite called Fast, Easy, Cheap Vegan, where she’s focusing on 10-ingredient comfort food dishes like creamy basil gnocchi, citrus and coconut custard cups, and other recipes that can be whipped up in no time in ways that work with what you already have in your pantry. She’s on the show today to talk through her process of creating her new cookbook and her tips to creating a fuss-free, stress-free kitchen experience for those of us who are experiencing some burnout around meal preparation and planning.

Learn More About Sam! 

90: How Has Purity Culture Shaped Eating Disorder Experiences? with Rebecca Wolfe

“”In our culture, food is sin, as is taking pleasure from it. When you pour that onto this [Protestant] environment that is already so cruel to bodies, disembodiment is encouraged, and women are constantly surveilling their own body to see how it is perceived by this male gaze, and trying to anticipate that, making it simultaneously attractive yet steering way clear of being sexy, because that’s to be sinful. It creates this impossible double bind.”
— Rebecca Wolfe
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If you grew up in the early 2000s, you might remember the American push for True Love Waits, abstinence only-sex education, and purity rings being sported by celebrities like Jessica Simpson or the Jonas Brothers. Known as Purity Culture, this Protestant evangelical movement emphasizes sexual purity through abstinence… but beyond sex, how has the culture shaped how women understand their bodies, experiences with food, or informed the broader American diet culture?

My guest this week is Rebecca Wolfe, who is currently a doctoral candidate in the department of Social and Behavioural Sciences at UCSF. She is interested in the intersection of race, class, gender, religion, embodiment and eating disoders. Her current work is focused on the impact of the Protestant, Evangelical movement known as “Purity Culture” on the development and manifestation of eating disorders in people assigned female at birth and raised within the movement.

Learn More About Rebecca: