Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family and Belonging

In her new book, Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family and Belonging, Or Rosenboim explores the history of modern displacement by retracing micro-histories of family migrations from Samarkand and Riga to the Middle East in 1860-1960. She reconstructs long-lost migration routes and retraces the food that migrants cooked on the road, to explore questions of identity and belonging, that have shaped not only individual lives but also global order. By weaving these stories into the larger narratives of contemporary history, Rosenboim offers a new perspective on the history of the modern world.

As a child, Or Rosenboim’s knowledge of her family history was based on the food her grandmothers cooked for her – round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, stuffed vine leaves, herby green rice with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and aubergine in tomato sauce. She knew that her family had a complex past but it was only reading her grandmothers’ recipe books after they both died that she began to explore that past for the first time. The result is a vivid chronicle of displacement and escape, retracing the complex network of journeys her family took from Samarkand and Riga to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in search of safety and a better life, punctuated by the food they ate and cooked along the way. Today, though, these journeys, and this long tradition of migration, would be almost impossible.

This evening will be a book presentation, followed by a discussion on migration, history, memory, and food, with scholars Alma Igra and Matthijs Lok, moderated by Marta Morvillo.

About the speakers

Or Rosenboim is Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bologna. Her research explores the history of international thought in the twentieth century, focusing on ideas of world order. She is interested in the intersection of migration history, ideas and food, and founded The Migrants’ Supper Club in London. She has published extensively on American and European visions of global order after the Second World War, including her award-winning first book, The Emergence of Globalism (Princeton, 2017). Air and Love is her second book.

Alma Igra is a historian of food and global order. She wrote about the science of nutrition and international politics in the 20thcentury. Alongside her academic work, Alma has published essays and creative non-fiction about food, politics and culture (World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Petel), and wrote a food blog for vegetarian recipes.

Matthijs Lok is a Senior Lecturer in modern European History at the Department of European Studies of the University of Amsterdam. His specialisation is the political, cultural and intellectual history of modern Europe in a global context since the eighteenth century, in particular topics on the intersection of history, politics, philosophy and memory. His main interest concerns the role of ideas in political change and ‘counter-narratives’ of political modernity and globlisation. In 2023 his latest book, Europe Against Revolution, came out with Oxford University Press.

Marta Morvillo (moderator) is Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the interface of EU law, constitutional law, and expert governance and seeks to understand how law can contribute to reconciling technical and democratic sources of legitimacy in societally salient policy fields such as economic governance and risk regulation.

Image: Paul Cézanne, Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, 1893-94. Oil on Canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Stephen C. Clark, 1960.