Feb. 9, 2026
What should we eat? As basic nourishment, food is part of daily life everywhere. But food is also inextricably linked to culture and as such, the questions of eating right quickly become complex.
In search of a broader understanding of food and culinary cultures, Joshua Schlachet, faculty member in the Department of East Asian Studies, developed a new project that expands on more than a decade of research into the history of Japanese food culture to create a global framework for examining food and culture.
“This project will try to recenter the conversation on global healthy eating on humanistic terms,” Schlachet said. “Questions of what to eat and why require humanistic answers.”
The 2025-26 recipient of the Dorrance Dean’s Award for Research & Entrepreneurialism, Schlachet is awarded $20,000 for his project, “Eating Right Everywhere: Towards a Unified Program for Culinary Humanities.”
Part of the Fearless Inquiries Project, the Dorrance Dean’s Award for Research & Entrepreneurialism recognizes faculty and staff in the College of Humanities whose work is groundbreaking, and that dramatically demonstrates new ways of thinking in, through, and with the humanities. The future-focused DARE Program encourages research-oriented initiatives that are fantastic yet achievable, and that build on past failures and successes to imagine new approaches to improving our increasingly galactically aware planet.
The Eating Right Everywhere Initiative unites cutting-edge research in health humanities and cultural studies with perspectives from nutritionists, industry professionals, and community stakeholders to reimagine healthful consumption in a global, humanistic framework. The project integrates public humanities scholarship with curricular development and global partnerships in a bold, sustainable, evidence-based initiative.
Schlachet, a historian of early modern and modern Japan, specializes in the cultural history of food and nourishment, and teaches the popular course “The Culture of Food and Health in Japan.” His first book, Nourishing Life: Cultures of Food and Health in Early Modern Japan, will be published in April by the University of Hawai'i Press.
But Schlachet has long sought to build a bridge from his own work toward a holistic and multicultural theory of food and health. This first-of-its-kind project conceptualizes a global approach, rooted in particular places or times, but putting those specifics into conversation with each other to consider the cultural implications of food in the broadest sense.
The project will combine academic voices from different global regions, but also diasporic and indigenous communities, along with nutritionists, dieticians, chefs, restauranteurs and other industry professionals. Tucson, recognized as the nation’s first UNESCO City of Gastronomy in large part because of its culinary heritage, is a fitting location to launch not only the project, but other cutting-edge approaches to culinary humanities, Schlachet said.
The project has three pillars: Academic, which will include a research symposium on campus next year, with participants contributing to an edited volume; Programmatic, which will establish a cluster of culinary humanities faculty and develop new undergraduate courses; and Collaborative, centered on community engagement events on eating right, indigenous foodways and sustainable agriculture, and talks or seminars showcasing the work of culinary humanities faculty.
Schlachet said he often thinks of the famous quote, “First we eat, then we do everything else,” attributed to food writer M.F.K. Fisher. And food is a fundamental precursor to everything else we do, but from a cultural perspective, it’s so much more.
“This is a great place to develop collaborations with food studies in a way that will recenter cultural studies approaches to human experience and food as both deeply personal and global,” he said.
