Sideshows featuring amazing feats and astonishing freaks became an industry in the United States in the 19th century. But these traveling caravans have been on the endangered list in recent decades. Collecting the artifacts and celebrating the artistry of this vanishing industry has proven addictive to James Taylor ’73, interdisciplinary studies.

Taylor’s magazine about the sideshows – James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed! On & Off The Midway – has been featured prominently in The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun. His collection of sideshow memorabilia was the backbone of Baltimore’s late, lamented American Dime Museum, and it can now be seen as you sip a beer at one of Washington D.C.’s hippest taverns: the Palace of Wonders.

UMBC Magazine asked Taylor why he loves the sideshow – and keeps its manifold wonders in the public eye.

Why do I love sideshow and its talent: all the sword swallowers and magicians and knife throwers and jugglers and ventriloquists and fire breathers and human blockheads?

There’s an easy answer: Because it’s a kick, a rush, a thrill. Tell me anyone doesn’t get a bit of an adrenaline surge watching Zamora the Torture King launch into his body-skewering and literally electrifying (himself, that is) act? I once watched two guys – big as linebackers, the pair of them – pass out stone cold, falling over at the ankles while watching Zamora’s act. Another time, I watched a young girl, staring hard at his final stunt, sit and weep, her eyes never leaving his. Who wouldn’t be shocked and amazed at that show?

But there’s a more complicated answer, too. It might seem strange to most folk. It’s all about the love that these performers have for their craft and their audiences.

Whenever I deliver my “writing in the real world” spiel to a classroom of students, I tell them that you have to decide first what you love, and then whether you can (or even want to) make a buck off it. I don’t mean to be crass, but this is America: You better be makin’ the moolah, or you’re just un-American, some poor loser.

That’s a particularly brutal – and unlovely – life assessment for many creative folk in this country. But I make that judgment because I’ve seen that interplay of love and money at work – up close, alive, livin’ and breathin’, right in front of me – in the lives of the people who still work the midways. It’s a sight I’ll remember till the longest day I live, as the old-time sideshow guys used to say.

These oddball jugglers, hula hoop manipulators and fire breathers will tell you flat out that they’re in it for the money… which they’re not making. They’re starving to death. They’re limping along at best. Many of them can’t figure out how they’re going to make it to the next show.

Most people would ask: “Then why do you keep doin’ it?”

One of the best answers was told to me by showman Mark Frierson many years ago. When he mounted and trouped out his first show, Frierson told me he had so much fun while he made his money that he couldn’t believe that what he was doing was legal.

Not that there aren’t trials. Sideshow folk talk endlessly about how horrific things are now or were in the past. My ma’s late boyfriend, carnival owner Jerry Farrow, owned a monkey show back in the ‘50s, a show with an assortment of monks, all of which escaped from the barn he’d housed them in, all of which ran riot throughout Glen Burnie for about a week, and all of which were shot dead by police before Jerry’s – and Glen Burnie’s – nightmare ended. A horrifying story by today’s standards, not so in the 1950s when I grew up. And in the telling, it remained one of Jerry’s most uproarious tales, a tale of near financial ruin for him but always hilarious despite that.

The wild stories are verbal armor against more truly horrific circumstances they face almost every day. But what you hear even more than that in these over-the-top, half-fabricated-for-entertainment-effect tales – the carnival folk call them “jackpots” – is the obvious love and the outrageous passion that these show people have for the work they do.

Take the late Jeanie Tomaini, a performer born with literally nothing below her waist. In her heyday in the 1930s and ’40s, she was billed as “the World’s Only Living Half Girl.” Put “on show” by her desperately poor parents, and later “adopted” by an evil stepmother from the orphanage where Jeanie’s father had abandoned her after her mother died, Jeanie only escaped the stepmother’s clutches when she married fellow freak performer Al Tomaini, “the American Giant.” Of course, they were billed as “the World’s Strangest Married Couple.”

When I met her toward the end of her life, I asked her what it meant to be a freak act in the sideshows. After hearing all that life drama, I asked her how she’d sum up such a life. Jeanie looked me dead in the face and with a grin said: “I had a ball.”

That’s why I love this weirdness that doubles as entertainment. I love knowing there’s a business, a world, where people so love what they do – entertaining us – that, even though they often pretend otherwise, they would work just for the thrill of thrilling us.

And while it may seem strange, weird, bizarre, exotic or unusual to you, love can look all of those ways sometimes, now can’t it?

When Laura Pasquini ’98, visual arts, started her studies in art at UMBC, she thought she wanted to be a museum curator, creating exhibits that set great art in narrative contexts.

Pasquini did end up working at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., one of the most prestigious museums in the United States. But she did so in way that’s making a difference for thousands of young people and their families by opening up the Corcoran’s magnificent collection and the gallery’s other assets for learning.

As the director of the Corcoran’s Youth and Family Programs, Pasquini has revamped and revitalized the gallery’s approach to education with the aim of “empowering kids to confidence.” Most notable among her achievements is the growth in Corcoran ArtReach – an after school program that collaborates with community centers to reach 150-200 disadvantaged students a year.

In one evaluation of the program, a parent called Corcoran Artreach “the best youth arts program in the area.” And this success has also brought Pasquini recognition, most recently as the winner of the 2009 UMBC Outstanding Alumni of the Year award for a graduate in the visual and performing arts.

Pasquini points to a junior year internship at UMBC in the university’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture as a key moment in choosing a career in arts education, one which she says “changed my career and life outlook.”

Working in conjunction with Arbutus Elementary School, Pasquini designed a program to introduce and integrate students into the world of art that included talks, tours of the UMBC Fine Arts Gallery and the creation of original works of art by students. The important thing, Pasquini recalls, was to find and reinforce connections between art and the students’ experiences.

Her enthusiasm for the project steered Pasquini away from an intended career as a museum curator. “I realized I didn’t want the academic, the behind-the-scenes,” she recalls. “It awakened a world I didn’t know was out there – a world of possibilities.”

After taking a master’s degree in teaching at the Corcoran, Pasquini ended up working at the gallery full-time. She quickly worked her way up into her present position as director of Youth and Family Programs, where she drew upon her UMBC experiences to spark a renewal in the Gallery’s Corcoran ArtReach program – which brings the gallery’s art to disadvantaged children in the Washington, D.C. area.

ArtReach works in partnership with community centers in District neighborhoods. Pasquini and other members of the Corcoran Gallery develop curricula specifically geared towards each individual community, complete with lesson plans, slides of Corcoran art exhibits and a brief outline of each work.

ArtReach students also get a chance to explore the Corcoran itself, and the program augments individual coursework with monthly family workshops that incorporate parts of the gallery’s exhibits collection into broader contexts. Pasquini points to “Creatures of the Deep” workshops that the program offered last October in concert with the gallery’s “Sargent and the Sea” exhibit. These family workshops used John Singer Sargent’s paintings as a springboard for an examination of sea creatures, providing a fun, kid-friendly science lesson communicated through art.

Pasquini says that exciting student interest is the key element in ArtReach’s success. “Art has value and meaning,” Pasquini insists. “It isn’t supposed to be dead on the wall. It isn’t about a lecture – it’s about the experience, about making a learning connection [for the students] between what they saw on the wall to what they see in their own lives.”

The culmination of the ArtReach experience is a chance for students to create their own works of art using techniques and knowledge gleaned in their classes. The work is both displayed in community galleries and professionally framed and hung (with accompanying silkscreen text) in the Corcoran Gallery of Art itself.

Pasquini says that ArtReach has become “a place of learning through visual learning, creating an experience for people that brings [art] to life… It empowers kids to talk about art. It ignites curiosity and higher thinking skills. Seeing [the students] gain confidence in themselves and their art…it’s incredible.”

— Holly Britton ’11

The magazine’s staffers have had their taste buds tickled and their bellies filled as we put together an issue that focuses on food. (Excuse us if we’ve put on a few pounds in the process.)

We also have not been starved for outside attention as a university or a magazine. Check out our “News” section (pages 6 and 7) for stories about Time magazine’s recognition of UMBC president Freeman A. Hrabowski, III and the bevy of awards that UMBC Magazine already has picked up in its first months of existence.

But I want to spend a few moments articulating a particular hunger that we have at UMBC Magazine that needs to be satisfied. A craving, really.

Feedback from the readers of UMBC Magazine.

In the coming months, we will be seeking out such feedback in formal ways, including a reconvening of the original focus groups that helped shape the initial vision of the magazine two years ago and a survey that we’ll be sending out randomly to a wide cross-section of readers.

But we really want readers to talk to us in other ways: especially with ideas for stories, letters to the editor, and submissions to our class notes section.

The first two elements are easy enough. We are delighted when we hear about an alumna or an alumnus whom a reader thinks we should profile, or a memory that a reader thinks would make a great article. And we are eager for any thoughts you have about the magazine in general or any stories in particular – positive or negative. Our decision to increase our type size between Winter 2009 and Summer 2009, for instance, was directly related to reader feedback.

Class notes, however, are a different issue. Traditionally, they are a vehicle to let your former classmates know about career achievements, marriages and new arrivals to your families. And we want all those submissions.

But we’re also hoping that you’ll share other thoughts and memories with us in the class notes: Have you run a marathon? Taken up a new hobby? Just returned from a fabulous trip? Let us know about it. You can submit a class note on our website, or send it along to UMBC Magazine, UMBC, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250.

Thanks again for reading! See you again in spring!

— Richard Byrne ’86

UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III takes your questions.

Q. You are well-known for your unending energy. Many students and alums marvel at it and wonder: What is your secret? Do you have any advice for staying energetic and healthy while maintaining a busy work schedule?

— Julia Tillman ’07, Modern Language and Linguistics

A. Balance in life is so important. I am thrilled to be moving towards my 40th wedding anniversary and my 40th reunion from college. So I’m reflecting this year about what’s important in life. And what I’m thinking about more and more is balance.

That has everything to do with positive energy and creating a spirit of optimism and hope. Don’t allow things like financial difficulties to lead to depression and negative thinking, because it doesn’t help. It’s important to be realistic. But it’s also important to believe that where there’s life, there’s hope.

Laughter is the elixir. Laughter can be so rejuvenating even in the midst of great difficulties. I believe humor and positive energy go together. If you hear a room with laughter, you’ll hear a room where people can be far more productive. If everybody’s gloomy and there’s a self-pitying environment, you just don’t get as much done.

I also get such positive feedback from students, faculty and staff every day. People who are proud of UMBC and proud to be a part of this community. I am energized. I think we energize each other.

Q. This semester, the UMBC campus held a series of discussions and lectures marking the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow’s 1959 essay “The Two Cultures.” What’s your view on the relationship between the sciences and humanities at UMBC?

— Richard Byrne ’86, English, Editor, UMBC Magazine

A. In my speeches and talks, I like to quote Daniel Pink and his book, A Whole New Mind, about left and right brain thinking.

…Ours has been the [information] age of the “knowledge worker,”…but that is changing… We are entering a new [conceptual] age…animated by a different form of thinking and a new approach to life… Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is sequential, logical, and analytical. The right hemisphere is nonlinear, intuitive, and holistic… Today, the defining skills of the previous era – the “left-brain” capabilities that powered the information age – are necessary but no longer sufficient. And the…“right-brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning… increasingly will determine who flourishes and who flounders… [P]rofessional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind.

This speaks to a need for people to be broadly educated, and to be able to put their lives in context. Whether they are planning to be an artist or a scientist, they need to understand the history of ideas, appreciate ethical thinking, and being able to think about the role of technology in society – including the growing relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence. These are all questions that educated people will have to grapple with for a long time into the future.

So I believe that a liberal education is more important than ever. Teaching students how to think critically and write clearly and express themselves orally with confidence will be increasingly important as we find ourselves challenged by new problems.

More and more, leaders on the political side and the scientific side need to recognize what different disciplines bring to the table as we try to solve these problems. The more grounding leaders have in different disciplines, the more comfortably they can discuss the integration of perspectives.

People are starting to understand, too, that it’s not enough to be trained in one discipline. The most interesting discoveries will come through interdisciplinarity and collaborations across disciplines and across institutions.

That’s the point Daniel Pink is making. The logical analytical approach is just not enough. Innovation and creativity have a lot to do with being able to get beyond a traditional approach and connect ideas that may seem distant from one another in interesting ways.

Judge Dana M. Levitz ’70, theater and Alicia Wilson ’04, political science, have more in common than legal careers. Both are also winners of UMBC’s Outstanding Alumni of the Year Award (Judge Levitz in 1993, and Wilson in 2009).

Levitz was a member of UMBC’s first graduating class. He retired from a long and distinguished career on Maryland’s Circuit Court last year. Wilson is an associate at Gordon, Feinblatt, Rothman, Hoffberger and Hollander. She was a Sondheim scholar and the recipient of a prestigious Harry S. Truman scholarship.

How did studying drama help you become a good trial lawyer, Judge Levitz?

Judge Levitz: I think the vast majority of college students who think they want to be lawyers major in political science…. Political science has nothing to do with law school or the practice of law. I’m not saying that it’s not worthwhile. It’s certainly as valuable as any other liberal arts major – other than theater, in my opinion. But there’s no advantage to it… What did you study?

Wilson: Political science. (Laughs.)

Judge Levitz: See? (Laughs.) Theater was a phenomenal preparation. When I started at UMBC, the major was called “speech and theater….” You took not only courses in speech, giving a speech, but also in oral interpretation. How do you read something? How do you take a script or a document and read it for dramatic effect…There were courses in performance…. You have to read, understand the motivations of a character, the emotions, and convey it to an audience. What better preparation could a trial lawyer have than that? It literally is the ideal preparation.

How did liberal arts help you prepare for law school?

Wilson: Political science exposes you to so much of the world. It shapes your views of those issues that you want to advocate for, and that you become passionate about, because you gain knowledge of the intricacies of those issues.

What was it like in the early days of UMBC?

Judge Levitz: My wife and I started UMBC the first day it opened. We were two of the original 600 students in September 1966. There were three buildings built…. It was all mud. They put down wooden planks so you could walk from the parking lot to these three buildings.

But the great part of it was that everybody knew everybody… and since they had the vision of what this was going to become… they brought in some really high powered professors to start the departments. And the neat part about being the first students was that we were always the senior class… and we always had the top professors throughout our four years…. I found one of my bills and it was $250 a semester.

The UMBC campus in that era reverberated with social and political issues of the day. What about your generation, Alicia?

Wilson: Before 9/11 we were a different generation. I think 9/11 made us more aware of the significance of the actions we take on a daily basis and how they impact the world. And also gave us a greater awareness of how the world views us… and our responsibility not just to those we pass on the street or see on a daily basis but our responsibility to people that we never see. And people who may not yet be born. We have an obligation to make an informed decision on how we live daily. That fired a lot of my generation up to promote change and feel like we had the power to do so.

So what attracted you to attend UMBC?

Wilson: Dr. [Freeman A.] Hrabowski. His passion for this school and for the students really inspired me. Knowing that I would have somebody who made a conscious effort to know my name, learn about my background, and try to help me achieve my dreams was so appealing that once I came to UMBC… I didn’t want to go to any other school.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Arbutus UMBC

UMBC is a community that is surrounded by two other communities – Arbutus and Catonsville. But many who work and study at the university don’t know much about their neighbors.

In August, Arbutus did its part to change that dynamic by welcoming UMBC back to campus with snazzy black-and-gold “Retriever Believer” banners, emblazoned with the names of local businesses and hung along the town’s main drag. Arbutus’ Hollywood Theater even put the welcome up on its marquee.

The initiative was spearheaded by Terrence Nolan ’82, political science, president of the Arbutus Business and Professional Association. “UMBC represents multimillions in state payroll as well as millions in student purchases,” he observes. “That’s a huge economic growth pull for Arbutus that in 35 years has never actually come to fruition.”

Arbutus has also taken up other outreach initiatives in concert with the Greater Catonsville Chamber of Commerce, and its president, George Brookhart, including a survey of the UMBC community on its views about its neighboring towns.

“First, we had to identify what the students, faculty and staff’s needs are,” Nolan says. “And then focus on what Arbutus can do to make that happen.”

Nolan also cites a bus tour of both communities for incoming freshman during fall 2009 orientation as a big success. He adds that Arbutus is well past the planning stages to provide an even quicker link between UMBC and its businesses via a bike and walking path. Approval and funding await other two other communities’ completion of similar plans.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Prized Profession

UMBC Magazine may be a relatively young publication, but in two recent competitions, our peers have already taken notice of the new kid on the block.

The first issue of the magazine – Winter 2009 – received an Award of Excellence in the 39th Annual University & College Designers Association Design Competition. The contest recognizes the best of the exceptional design work done to promote educational institutions at the college and university level.

UMBC Magazine’s first two issues – Winter 2009 and Spring 2009 – also garnered two awards in the 2010 Council for Advancement and Support of Education District II Accolades competition, which honors a range of materials published by colleges and universities in support of their mission.

UMBC Magazine took a bronze medal in the category which judged four-color magazines in their entirety. The magazine also took home an Honorable Mention in the category of staff writing, including features on UMBC “artist-in-residence” Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher’s collaborations with the Imaging Research Center, a profile of American Studies professor Ed Orser, and other feature articles.

CASE’s District II is the largest geographic unit of the worldwide organization, comprising more than 700 colleges and universities in Delaware, the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, West Virginia and the Canadian province of Ontario.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Time Keeper

UMBC alumni know that the university’s president, Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, is one of the most highly-regarded figures in higher education leadership. But that notion recently received some concrete acknowledgment from one of America’s leading newsweeklies.

In the November 23, 2009 issue of Time magazine, Hrabowski was ranked among “The 10 Best College Presidents” in a special education package published by the magazine.

“This recognition reflects the campus’ success and the high quality of the academic experience here,” says Hrabowski. “It’s an honor for each of us to be a member of the UMBC community.”

Among the impressive company that UMBC and its president are keeping? The head of the University of California system (Mark Yudof), the presidents of three major public research universities (E. Gordon Gee of The Ohio State University, Mary Sue Coleman of the University of Michigan, Michael Crow of Arizona State University), three leaders of elite private schools ( John Sexton of New York University, Scott Cowen of Tulane University and Ronald Liebowitz of Middlebury College) and two innovators tackling challenges at the state and community college level (Juliet García of University of Texas at Brownsville and Eduardo Padrón of Miami Dade College.)

Hrabowski used the national platform to talk about UMBC’s national reputation for diversity and excellence in science and engineering, but also pointed out its role as a liberal arts institution. “I often say to people that yes, over half of our students are in science fields, but the other half are in [liberal] arts,” he told Time. “We’re working to build a university that has first-rate research across all disciplines.”

— Richard Byrne ’86

Socks, Squirrels and Songs

You’re UMBC’s Office of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving. You want to motivate the university’s alumni to participate in a new “GOLD Challenge” program to get 1,000 new graduates of the last decade to give at any amount before June 30, 2010.

Start with a sock puppet. Throw in a song. Then get busy social networking.

The GOLD Challenge campaign launched in December with a video starring Professor T. a. Skwirl, one of a pair of sock puppet squirrels fashioned by Jenny O’Grady, director of alumni and development communications, and Erin Ouslander ’03, visual arts, designer for the university’s creative services team, over a November lunch hour.

“We were looking for something all alumni have in common,” O’Grady says. “No matter when you attended UMBC, everyone remembers the squirrels.”

The first ad focused on Timmy, a student who’s coping with the high costs of college and needs a helping hand from young alumni. Using a modified Subway jingle to tell Timmy’s story, UMBC’s a capella singing group Mama’s Boys provided the human talent. Thus was a campaign aimed at raising money for student scholarships launched on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

O’Grady is proud of the results – achieved with maximum ingenuity and minimum outlay. “We did it with zero budget,” she says.

Look for more videos featuring squirrels and other UMBC a capella groups – as well as the stories of current scholarship recipients – in coming months. And check out the first one at the GOLD Challenge’s Facebook fan page at www.facebook.com/umbcgoldchallenge.

— Richard Byrne ’86

Wanna be a celebrity culinary entrepreneur like Ace of Cakes star Duff Goldman ’97? UMBC’s Outstanding Alumnus of the Year in the Humanities for 2009 offers a few hints: Don’t sweat the numbers. Don’t get complacent. And prepare for some hard knocks.

By Ana Marie Cox
Images courtesy of Charm City Cakes

Look at the numbers and Jeffrey “Duff”Goldman ’97, history, is a business whiz of the first order – a thriving entrepreneur whose successful cake making business was launched into the stratosphere by a hit reality show.

But as any viewer of Food Network’s Ace of Cakes can tell you, the 34-year-old celebrity cake maker has become a financial success and certified phenomenon in the exploding media niche of televised cooking without compromising his scruffy, scrappy look and ethos – tattoos, goatee, baggy jeans and all.

Catching up with Goldman on tour for his newly released book, Ace of Cakes: Inside Charm City Cakes (William Morrow Cookbooks), it seemed a good moment to ask him to play professor for a day. What would be his advice to a class of business students looking to adapt his life lessons into a crash course of entrepreneurship?

1. Lose the Fear

Goldman’s first lesson is, if nothing else, a great attention-getting device. “I’d take everyone out in the parking lot,” he says after some thought, “and make everybody punch somebody else in the face.”

How’s that, again? “Well, it’d be fun, first of all,” he says. Beyond the shock value of the experiment, though, Goldman points out there’s an enduring – if painful – wisdom to be won from any parking lot beatdown.

The lesson goes back to Goldman’s own coming-of-age woes in junior high. “It used to be the scariest thing, getting punched in the face,” he recalls. But after being on the receiving end of his first major fist-to-face encounter, Goldman gleaned a crucial insight: “All of a sudden, I was over my fear and I was able to fight better.”

It’s a benefit he sees accruing to his class of fledgling M.B.A.’s-cum-pugilists. “There’s something about losing your fear [and] being able to do something without worrying about failing… if you’re worried about failing, the chances are you will,” he says.

Fearlessness has served Goldman well. He started Charm City Cakes in 2000, baking pastry in his Baltimore apartment after a decade and a half in the restaurant business left him feeling like he “didn’t have balance” in his life.

What he really wanted was to be in a band, he reminisces. But he also needed to make a living. He hatched a plan, and rehearsed it to himself: “Alright, here’s what I’m gonna do: make cakes, out of my apartment, guerilla style… and be in a band,” he says. He planned on baking cakes for 10 months out of the year and touring during the other two.

Almost 10 years later, Goldman’s band – “…soihadto…” – has a record deal and toured for two months in 2009 and into 2010. It will be an eight-week working vacation from the multi-million dollar business that Charm City Cakes has become.

And Goldman’s 15 employees? They get two months vacation as well. “Paid,” Goldman says. “We seem to attract the kind of people that need [that time] to take off and do whatever.”

2. Slap Some Color on It

The baking side of Goldman’s baking/band business plan has attracted a lot of business, a lot of attention and a lot of money. Plus, the runaway success of Ace of Cakes – now in its fourth season on Food Network – allows Goldman and colleagues to turn down most of the orders that come through the transom. They’re often too busy baking cakes for, say, a Harry Potter premiere. Or the cast of Lost. Or Michael Jordan.

As Goldman warms to the idea of his own business class, he has another important lesson to impart: “Go paint some stuff.” Preferably public property, he adds. Preferably in the middle of the night. Preferably in letters three feet high. “When you do something, and really throw caution to the wind,” he observes, “it makes taking on a new venture not as scary.”

Goldman was an ardent graffiti artist in his youth. He recalls being chased out of train yards, cops at his heels. And just as the hidden lesson of face-punching is fearlessness, so the lesson he takes from graffiti boils down to a business-worthy slogan: “Never get complacent.”

“That’s the worst thing in the world,” Goldman continues. “In business, in entertainment, in anything in your life, is to get complacent. Never get complacent, never ever ever. That’s when ratings go down.” Avoiding complacency isn’t just about not getting caught. It’s about getting better.

“Things can always get better,” he says. “We’re not the best cake decorators on the planet, but we’re pretty goddamn good, and when we do stuff, we’re always like: ‘How can we make this better? How can we make this more accessible, how can we make this edible?’ We’re constantly perfecting and changing the way we do things.”

3. Get a Good Number Cruncher

Goldman’s quest for perfection doesn’t rule out practical considerations, though. Hence the third lesson in Goldman’s emerging curriculum: “Choose a good accountant.”

It’s an important step for any business, and Goldman admits that he didn’t get it quite right at the beginning. “My first accountant would just yell at me: ‘You have to do the business part! You have to do the business part!’ And I would say, ‘Hey, man, I’m just a cake decorator.’”

Eventually, Goldman found a more understanding numbers guy who has let him take care of the creativity and the cakes. “I found the ones with the nicer offices and the friendlier staff,” he says. “It’s almost like when you go to Chinatown, if you go to a restaurant and there’s no white people in there, chances are the food is really good. Look for an accountant who looks like he’s got his finances in order.”

4. Right = Not Wrong (101)

Goldman circles back quickly to the quality control side of things, with a deceptively straightforward fourth principle of business success: Don’t do it wrong.

He lays out this lesson as a Zen koan. “I had kind of an epiphany,” Goldman says. “At a restaurant, the service was great and the food was really good and there was a cool vibe. I get up and go into the bathroom and the bathroom is beautiful. Really nice bathroom. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I’m kind of always sizing thing up, whether it’s a cake or a business.”

Goldman emerged from his pit stop, he says, with a simple realization: “Succeeding in business is not difficult. The way to do things right is to not do them wrong. I know it’s a really simple, stupid idea but I came out of the bathroom with this idea.”

Goldman interrupts his epiphany in the rapid-fire free-associative manner that fans of Ace of Cakes will readily recognize: “That’s the name of my class! ‘The way to do things right is to not do them wrong.’” 101. Or something of that sort. “There’s no get rich quick; if there was, everyone would be doing it.”

5. Sure, Hire Your Friends

It turns out that one critical key to not getting things wrong is solving a critical issue facing most company managers: Finding the right kind of employee.

Any viewer of Ace of Cakes knows that this is yet another instance where Goldman has stood conventional wisdom on its head. The show’s opening features a catchy little summation of Goldman’s career that ends with the declaration, “So I decided to make cakes my way, and hired the most talented people I know: my friends.”

Sure enough, even a casual viewing of the show gives a glimpse of a workplace full of inside jokes, affection and camaraderie. Thus lesson five in the Goldman plan: Go ahead and hire your friends.

“I think most Harvard M.B.A.s would probably say: ‘Don’t hire your friends, you don’t want to deal with the nonsense.’ And I can understand why. I think you have to have a certain kind of friend and a certain kind of business,” says Goldman. “But our business has grown so organically… I have a lot of friends, and I haven’t hired them all. I’ve only hired the ones that have a knack for making beautiful stuff. For making nice cakes.”

6. Keep it Loose. But Keep it Tight.

This organic process feeds on itself, Goldman insists. His already close-knit team tends to select for people who aren’t intimidated by personal banter in close quarters, and who tend to pick up quickly on inside jokes.

Conversely, Goldman says he’s also developed a heightened sensitivity to people who could introduce disputative or disruptive vibes into his hyper-collegial workplace. So, lesson number six: Make sure the person you hire belongs on the team.

“Like when they were looking at Terrell Owens for the Ravens, I was, like, ‘Oh no, that’s horrible, he’s a team killer,’” says Goldman. “I’ve played a lot of sports and in a lot of what I do, I’m more like a coach than a business owner. Who’s going to work? Who’s going to step up? Who’s going to have the team’s best interest at heart? Especially now that we’re all famous and stuff.”

7. Happiness Rules. For You. For Everyone.

Of course, before hiring one’s friends and building a team, one needs a strong sense of mission. That’s not just found in the casual corporate-branding sense of the term, but via what Goldman calls a “philosophy of cooking.”

Goldman’s final lesson? Do whatever you do not just because it makes you happy, but because it makes other people happy.

Goldman says he’s still a little shocked when he thinks back to his years in culinary school and realizes that “nobody ever asked me why I wanted to cook – and that is a huge part of cooking. If you don’t love [cooking], it’s the worst job in the world.”

A lot of people who become chefs because of what they’ve seen on cable – whether it’s his show, Top Chef, or The Next Food Network Star – are destined to be bitterly disappointed. “One thing that’s very dangerous is that the Food Network and Bravo and all these shows glamorize being a chef,” Goldman says. “If someone wants to become a chef with the goal of getting on TV, it absolutely, 100 percent, will not happen. Period.”

A more appropriate goal, Goldman insists, is “being an awesome chef. That’s the only goal you can have.”

But experience has taught him even that’s not enough. “You have to ask yourself, why do you want to be an awesome chef? You want to be an awesome chef because you want to give people joy. You want to give them that piece of magic that you have brought to them. That you have brought to your kitchen… To be a chef is to want to please people. I had a job where I was making $14,000 a year but I knew people were enjoying my food, and that was all I needed. Well, that and the food I stole out of the locker.

“Now, having worked in the business for as long as I have,” concludes Goldman, “my greatest joy is not just creating, but creating and seeing the look on people’s faces when I give them something…. Seeing that reaction and knowing I’ve made someone smile. And that mortgage payment or that problem at work or that problem in their love life or whatever it is has gone away, just for a second. Because I made ’em a cake. I love that.”

* * * * *

With Dr. Timmie Topoleski, Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Back in 1958, when the late Japanese food magnate Momofuku Ando developed his first package of ramen – a dried noodle requiring boiling water and a simple flavor packet to deliciously “activate” in your lunch bowl – little did he know he had created what would become a staple of college culinary life. He probably also didn’t realize the wavy bricks held yet another potential use: noodle bridge.

In honor of UMBC Magazine’s very first food issue, we asked UMBC mechanical engineering professor Dr. Timmie Topoleski to consider ramen as a legitimate building material. If you build a ramen bridge, how much weight could it handle?

— Jenny O’Grady

Step 1:  Set a Reasonable Goal

How big should the bridge be? How much weight should it bear? Why build it? (We’re chalking the last one up to “scientific curiosity.”)

For this project we decided to build a ramen bridge that would hold any or all of the following: 1) a True Grit puppy toy, 2) a cow femur (used in Topoleski’s real-life research on wear and resistance in artificial joints), or 3) as many packets of ramen as possible, weighing three ounces apiece.

Step 2:  Test the Structural Integrity of Your Materials

Uncooked ramen comes in solid bricks measuring around 4 by 3.5 by .75 inches. (Appetizing, right?) As Topoleski discovered, the bricks aren’t as randomly constructed as they might seem at the bottom of your lunch bowl. In fact, each has a noodly cuff on one end, perfect for joining to another brick.

Kept uncooked, ramen makes for a fairly predictable building material. So, how best to arrange it to make the strongest bridge possible? I-Beams? T-Beams? Flat or end-to-end? Considering the wavy pattern of dried noodles, Topoleski decided to try a two-tiered alternating hinge, similar to what you might find in brick wall construction.

Step 3:  Determine the Best Method of Bonding

Knowing the obvious option of using uncooked ramen bricks, Topoleski also considered wetting the noodles and reshaping them to dry in another form. However, given the time constraints of a guy who is not only a popular professor but also involved in numerous campus groups, we all decided to keep things simple – and dry.

“What we need is something that will penetrate and interdigitate with the fibers [of the noodles],” he decided. Elmer’s glue? Takes too long to dry. The silicone he uses in his joint research? Much too expensive. Hot glue? Cheap, strong and fast-drying. Eureka!

Step 4:  Bridge Construction

Armed with a baggie of hot glue sticks and enough ramen to feed sixty college freshmen, Topoleski started gluing…and gluing…and gluing until he had what we called “the seven ramen bridge.” Using his “spot weld” plan cost approximately one stick of hot glue per weld, so for a structure seven ramen bricks long and two high, he used a little more than a dozen sticks for mortar.

Step 5:  Test, Test, Test

Now for the fun part: loading weights on top of the bridge until it breaks. As Topoleski explained it, engineers learn as much from failures as successes. Good thing, considering how quickly ours collapsed.

Balancing the span of ramen across a gully approximately two feet deep, we first tested the seven ramen bridge with the 20-ounce True Grit stuffed puppy. When that broke in half after around 10 seconds, Topoleski used the fallen halves of the bridge (three and four spans each) to test again, this time piling packets of ramen noodles as high as possible. When those also broke, he tried a tiny two-span bridge, which held the dog and the hefty cow femur for nearly 30 seconds. Seems that shorter is sturdier in the case of ramen.

“For an off-the-cuff experiment, it’s not too bad,” said Topoleski. “We definitely learned this is not the best way to make a ramen bridge!”

Results

1) The seven ramen bridge held one 20-ounce True Grit stuffed puppy or seven packages of ramen (21 ounces total)
2) The three ramen bridge held 25 packages of ramen (four pounds, 11 ounces)
3) The two ramen bridge held one 20-ounce True Grit stuffed puppy and a 2.7-pound cow femur

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMoF2ESESac]

UMBC alumnus Father Leo Patalinghug ’92 finds the divine in cuisine and competition. His quest may yet make him one of America’s best-known Catholic priests.

By B. Rose Huber
Images courtesy of Grace Before Meals

Rev. Leo Patalinghug ’92, political science, says he never gets nervous when he hosts his popular online cooking show, Grace Before Meals. But even he might confess to having a bit of anxiety at a taping of his show that was also filmed by the Food Network last June.

As a rule, Patalinghug concentrates intensely on whatever task is at hand. He often grows impatient, for instance, if he needs more than one take for a segment of the show.

That keen focus on the immediate is likely why Patalinghug didn’t notice Bobby Flay – star of the network’s hit show Iron Chef America – lurking just to his left as he cooked, waiting to challenge the priest to an impromptu culinary contest for his other show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay.

When a producer finally alerted the priest to Flay’s presence on the set to propose a steak fajita contest, Patalinghug finally recognized one of the Food Network’s biggest stars and exclaimed: “My sweet Jesus! What in the heavens are you doing here?”

Patalinghug recovered quickly, at least for the camera. He simply looked back into the camera lens and deadpanned: “Food Network, you lied to a priest!”

When the priest accepted Flay’s Throwdown challenge, the heavens seemed to open up in a cloudburst of people, cameras, lights and activity. Flay’s assistants emerged to help him. Iron Chef Flay – a master of Tex/Mex cuisine – broke out his famous spice rub.

Patalinghug recalls that his hands were shaking, so he started cutting onions for his fajitas. But within no time, Patalinghug and Flay bantered as they cooked.

“You know who taught me how to cut? Mother Theresa,” the priest enthused as he prepared his dish. “When I was a seminarian, I’d go into the soup kitchens, and Mother Theresa said, ‘OK, brother, your job is to cut vegetables.”

Patalinghug whipped up a sweet steak fajita infused with Asian flavors as his entry. Flay took a spicier route and created a red-curry marinated skirt steak fajita. Then, almost as suddenly as the challenge was issued, the fates of both chefs’ dishes were in the hands of two local food writers that the Food Network enlisted as judges.

As the judges critiqued, Patalinghug pulled out a rosary and began praying.

“Do you want one?” he teased Flay. The Iron Chef asked what number “Hail Mary” he had reached. Patalinghug admitted that he had lost count.

Eventually, the judges rendered their verdict. Patalinghug’s fajita had scored higher than Tex-Mex virtuoso Bobby Flay’s. The priest beamed as the crowd cheered and Flay offered his congratulations.

The contest with Flay aired nationally on the Food Network this past autumn, raising the national culinary profile of the telegenic 39-year-old priest even higher. (He already has a schedule bursting with public appearances centered on cooking and Grace Before Meals.)

But the televised throwdown with Flay also showcased other elements of Patalinghug’s personality: his love of competition, his quick wit and his devotion to God and the Roman Catholic Church.

The latter devotion, says Patalinghug, is the most important of all. Indeed, television show and public appearances and a lifetime of competition in everything from the martial arts to break dancing, he insists, is all about connecting people with God through what he calls the “greatest gift of all” – the family.

“We have so many blessings in life,” he says. “It seems that my life’s calling has been to help people recognize those blessings, beginning with the gifts on the table and the people with whom you share it.”

Keep It Simple

Cooking isn’t Father Leo Patalinghug’s only passion.

As an ordained Catholic priest, of course, God is passion number one. Patalinghug lives in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he directs the Pastoral Field Education program for future priests at Mount Saint Mary’s Seminary.

But through the years, Patalinghug has also found time to become a black belt in karate, a champion stick-fighter, and a competitive break dancer.

Patalinghug’s spiritual journey has literally taken him around the world – from his birthplace in the Philippines to his years at UMBC as an undergraduate to a stop in Italy, where he studied to be a priest at the North American College in Rome.

As the youngest of four children, Patalinghug says he spent a great deal of time in the kitchen with his mother, who was a self-taught cook. The family had moved to the United States from the Philippines, and having fewer amenities than before, his mother had to learn her way around the kitchen. She often put Patalinghug to work, stirring a pot or chopping vegetables.

It was in Italy, however, that Patalinghug saw the power of food and what it could do for togetherness. At the North American College in Rome, he and his peers were required to have a meal together each day. “Even though we were classmates, the meal times made us brothers,” Patalinghug says. When he returned to America after his studies, he decided to bring the positive benefits of his seminary meals to the families in his parish.

His experiences in using food as an ingredient in his ministry inspired Grace Before Meals – which has grown quickly from a blog to a recipe book to the online cooking show. The show’s premise is simple but profound. In a world of fast food, reality TV and jam-packed schedules, bringing parents and kids together for meals is a way to facilitate real communication. Good meals, Patalinghug argues, can make better families.

Patalinghug blames fast food and fear for the disintegration of the family meal. Fast food was supposed to help families spend time together, he observes, but Americans have abused its convenience. “Like other gifts that have come our way, such as the internet and even love and relationships and sexuality,” he argues, “we are abusive with it, so I think we bought into it.”

Fear of happiness is another factor, he continues. “I think there is this fear in people,” Patalinghug says. “They don’t believe, and I use that word very pointedly, that God wants them to be happy and to have a peaceful, loving relationship with each other.”

Patalinghug has honed his culinary skills and his message over countless meals prepared and eaten with families in the parish. Often, they are seeking the priest’s counsel and advice. Sometimes, he finds that family members have trouble speaking with one another. “I just tell them, let’s talk about these things, and in the process, I’ll make you a pretty darn good meal,” Patalinghug says. Most of the time, he adds, it works.

The meals that Patalinghug urges families to prepare and eat together are not fancy. He uses simple tools and simple ingredients in familiar places, which he says makes meals satisfying and memorable.

Taste buds are not the only thing a good meal can satisfy, Patalinghug observes, pointing out that Jesus imparted many of his most important teachings over meals.

“Sometimes, when people hear the word ‘religion’ they hear different things depending on where they’re at in their faith,” he says. “But when you get down to the academic definition, food means ‘to bind’ in Latin. It’s religious because it brings people together.”

When we share meals with others, he says, we share stories. Many faiths have narratives and celebrations linked directly with food, all of which have been passed down through the ages. Most holidays of any sort have meals at the center, he observes, and Patalinghug hopes that Grace Before Meals helps families look at their meals together like holidays.

Hobbies and Holiness

Patalinghug says that when he was ordained, he gave God everything – including his hobbies. And cooking is not the only hobby that followed this priest into his ministry.

Patalinghug’s older brothers, for instance, sparked his early interest in martial arts. He began studying at age 8 and held a junior black belt in his hands by the time he was 12 years-old. When he was 17 years-old, he opened a karate school with his brother as he pursued – and won – international championships in full-contact stick fighting. Patalinghug still uses martial arts when he teaches youth groups and engages in other work with adolescents.

Break dancing – a popular artistic form when Patalinghug was growing up in the hip-hop happy 1980s – was another hobby in which the future priest excelled. He started break dancing with a group of friends at Columbia Skate Land. Despite the fact that they didn’t look the part (“We were all Filipino kids,” he says. “Our fathers, all American doctors.”), Patalinghug’s crew was good enough to dominate local contests -including the 1983 Maryland Break Dancing Competition.

But it was only in his sophomore year at UMBC that Patalinghug decided to take his hobbies – and his life – in a more spiritual direction. UMBC had impressed him as a place where faculty wanted students to “actually learn something,” and Patalinghug dove into a number of extracurricular activities, including singing in UMBC’s Camerata, working for the Student Government Association, and a stint as a disc jockey (“Leaping Leo”) for UMBC’s radio station.

Patalinghug was also deeply involved in local Catholic churches, serving as the music director for his home church and as a youth minister at another church. And he was beginning to sense that he might have a vocation to the priesthood, spurred on in part by conversations that he had with friends out on the patio between UMBC’s University Center and Chemistry building.

He recalls that space as a “hideaway hut” for him and his friends, whom he dubs the “philosophers” of UMBC in that era. “We were just college kids hanging out.” He remembers, “I wasn’t afraid to chat things out with them and have healthy discussions about life.”

Challenging religion courses in his curriculum also led him to ponder his future. Deep questions welling up inside him found answers that led Patalinghug to a higher power, and though he examined a number of religions, it was Catholicism in which he found peace.

“Many of the people were not happy with the Catholic Church at the time, and I remember finding myself defending the teachings but enjoying the debate and appreciating the fact that they offered the debate,” he says. “I found a real comfort in Catholic tradition.”

Patalinghug entered the seminary a year after graduation. He spent much of that year in prayer. “I was scared to death,” he says, “I didn’t understand it at the time.” He was ordained in 1999 and served as a parish priest for five years in Westminster before becoming a faculty member at Mount Saint Mary’s in 2007.

Food, Faith and Future

Watch a few episodes of Grace Before Meals and you get the sense that Patalinghug will do anything to break the ice of familial stress with food – and even a stiff drink or two.

In one episode, Patalinghug arrives at the home of a family that will soon host a party for one hundred people. Humorous quips and a concoction dubbed the “Orange Dew Drop” – Patalinghug’s tasty version of a traditional screwdriver – get the party started early.

“Jesus is going to have to multiply food, and to get us started, we’re just going to make ourselves a little drink,” he jests. He also involves family members and a neighbor in the process, asking them about their favorite drinks. Together they share stories and laughs, as they sip on Father Leo’s cool and colorful drinks. “You can see just how easy it is,” he says. “The food is just the means, not the ends, and that’s important. It’s just a means.”

With increasing fame (he already has a publicist to help him handle it all), what the future holds for Patalinghug is still up in the air. He insists that he’s coping through a combination of prayer and modesty. “I think God is very honest with me in telling me what I can and can’t do,” he says, “I don’t have the messiah complex; I know I can’t solve the world’s problems. I make dinner once in a while, it’s no big deal.”

In the near term, if the Food Network or another channel calls him, Patalinghug seems eager to bring the message of Grace Before Meals to a wider audience as he teaches at the seminary and works with youth groups.

Where he’d like to go ultimately, of course, should be no surprise.

“Hopefully Heaven,” Patalinghug says. “That’s the direction I’m trying to live, and if God wants me to move in different directions, I’m not in bad company.”

* * * * *

UMBC American studies professor Warren Belasco has pioneered food studies’ explosive growth in the classroom and the larger culture.

By Phoebe Connelly

“You did not go into food as an academic in 1972,”  Warren Belasco told an audience of fellow scholars in Oxford, Mississippi this past October with a smile. “That was not something you did.”

So how did a professor of American studies at UMBC who did so end up as one of this country’s most prominent researchers on food and culture? In his 30 years at UMBC, Belasco has not just pioneered a discipline that has now captured the popular imagination. He also has helped define what we mean when we talk about food studies. His latest book, Food: The Key Concepts, is an introductory textbook for students of the burgeoning discipline.

And just why was he showing the oral historians of the Southern Foodways Alliance – an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi – slides of his 1970s dinner of soybean stroganoff?

To hear Belasco tell it, his own journey into food studies mirrors the path that the topic has taken to wider acceptance in the academy and in cultural discourse. It’s a personal tale in which his own diet and a fascination with how the mechanics of everyday phenomena (cars, Coca-Cola, drive-ins) fit into wider patterns of cultural discourse.

“Our tastes,” Belasco writes in Food, “are as telling as our distastes.”

Food has always been a key element in America’s melting pot culture, but its ability to speak to the culture of everything from business to politics has placed the topic squarely in the sights of scholars who are seeking ways of examining how we live.

For instance, Belasco gave his October talk at the second annual Viking Range Lecture, which is named for, and funded by, the manufacturer of high-end, commercial-grade ranges marketed to home cooks.

Belasco told that Mississippi audience that he “backed into [food studies] through something else.” In his case, it was research into leisure automobile travel in the United States during the early 20th century and the rise of motel chains which led to the publication of his first book, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945, in 1977.

When he first interviewed at UMBC, the then-dean greeted the news of his scholarship on the roadside food chain Howard Johnson’s with a derisive, “that sounds like fun.” Belasco says he “knew immediately I was on to something that was not safe in academics.”

Belasco’s nose for the wider cultural patterns in everyday phenomena eventually led him straight to his own plate. As a graduate student at the University of Michigan in the 1970s, high meat prices forced Belasco to drop meat from his diet. He also discovered Francis Moore Lappé, whose influential 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, put forth the case for vegetarianism as a means of dealing with global food shortages.

Making connections between his personal diet and the planet led Belasco to examine the alternative food culture of the 1960s and 1970s. He watched as that subculture surged into mainstream, and his first scholarly book on food, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took on the Food Industry (1989), examined how goods like herbal tea and granola went from signifiers of radical culture to grocery store staples.

Belasco was not the only scholar focusing on food in the late 1980s. The Association for the Study of Food and Society began holding an annual conference in 1987. The association began publishing a journal – Belasco is the associate editor – in 1996.

Belasco also worked his academic interest into pedagogy, first offering a course dedicated to food studies as a senior seminar in the American studies department in 1985. In 1990, that same course became a regular offering for UMBC undergraduates.

In 2008, he published Food: The Key Concepts, a slim introductory volume to food studies. (The best part of American studies texts may be their indexes – in Food you can find listings for Hank Williams as well as “free lunch.”) Belasco dedicated Food to his students, and says it’s the interactions with his classes that make the work rewarding.

Food culture’s emergence into the scholarly and cultural limelight may mean an increase in funding, or the odd phone call for an op-ed, but does it mean that food studies have carved a permanent niche in academia?

“At this stage we are at the level of individual courses,” Belasco says. It has become an accepted focus for professors. (Gone, he says, are the days where you were advised to wait until after you had secured tenure to tackle food studies.)

Perhaps more interesting is where his students are taking the discipline. Quite a few of them, he observes, have ended up not in the classroom, but in the kitchen.

Belasco’s most famous former student is Duff Goldman ’97, who started Baltimore’s Charm City Cakes, and became a foodie star with his Food Network show Ace of Cakes.

Goldman and other students who have studied with Belasco may have the cooking and the commerce down, but the UMBC professor says that there is value in examining the phenomenon for its other societal effects. “I feel like I’m giving them a political background they probably aren’t getting in cooking school,” Belasco says.

Belasco’s analysis of the intersection of food and wider culture has only deepened in subsequent years, moving from studying cultural shifts in consumer taste to a meditation on how human beings have used food as a means of charting our desires and fears.

In his 2006 book, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, Belasco argues that “the struggle for the control of the food supply is an old tale, to be sure, as are so many of the stories we tell about the future.” The food supply has been used as a rationale for westward expansion, a dream of a dazzling technological future, and a portent of uncontrolled population growth.

Belasco argues that to truly be a savvy consumer in a world where we are simultaneously encouraged to eat exotic, natural and super-supplemented meals, we must recognize how food is, and has been, marketed as a vehicle of hopes. Culinary innovations have always been sold with a combination of “false dichotomies, inappropriate analogies, questionable assumptions and dubious calculations,” he says.

It is a verdict that should give pause to those who are hitching their hopes on the locavore or “slow food” movements that are exciting interest at the moment.

Slow food movement advocates argue in favor of locally-sourced cuisine, the preservation of regional agriculture and food customs, and call for consumers to resist industry and intense processing. The movement was founded in Italy in the late 1980s, and the first United States chapter was formed in 2000. The turn toward local food goes hand in hand with the return of concern over industrial food, explored most famously by Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

“In some ways it’s just another wave of interest brought about by worries in the present, and also, marketing and the refinement of consumer capitalism as people expand their tastes and turn to food as an area of discrimination, even more so than they have in the past,” Belasco says. Still, as he points out in Meals to Come the “‘gee whiz’ almost always trumps the ‘bummer.’” As much as the current food movement may appear to trade on the horrors of industry, it’s the appeal of down-home goodness that is successfully sold in the market. There, too, is a danger of culinary backlash. Belasco points to the criticism Michelle Obama has received for her work around improving diet, such as starting a White House garden and working to open a weekly farmer’s market blocks from the Oval Office.

Belasco is turning to his own back yard for inspiration for what comes next. He works in Baltimore, but since 1979, he has lived with his wife in Washington, D.C.’s Takoma Park. He took a sabbatical for the 2008-2009 academic year to focus on his next work, a food history of Washington, D.C.

Belasco considers himself to have “fingers in both cities.” Local food studies means defining the food shed – the combination of cuisine, suppliers and traditions that help define the ways people consume food. Belasco says Washington offers a unique take because it is a city of visitors.

“So much of Washington’s food culture is political, particularly among the rich,” Belasco says. The joke about food in Washington may be the culture of high priced dinners funded (at least until 2007 ethics reform) by lobbyists seeking the ears of politicians.

But he also observes that gastronomy continues to have a place in diplomatic relations. The tradition of the White House state dinner for visiting dignitaries continues (and is so recognized as a social event that President Obama’s first dinner was crashed by two would-be reality television stars).

Belasco traces political dining back to Thomas Jefferson, the second president to take up residence in the new capital. Three to four nights a week Jefferson would gather groups of as many as twelve guests to feast and discuss politics. While he may have tended toward French cuisine, by necessity, he sourced everything locally. “It was an interesting attempt to set a tone for the new republic,” Belasco says.

Gardening has its place as well. Slave gardens at the turn of the 19th century provided the income that allowed individuals to buy their freedom and get their start as independent purveyors of food. This seed capital helped cement the rise of the black middle class in Washington. “It’s not an original insight,” Belasco says, “but it’s another way of thinking about Washington.”

If the nation’s capital is a city of visitors, Belasco argues that Baltimore is a city of homebodies. “Baltimore is a city of local associations and affiliations,” Belasco says. He has formed a working group on food issues in Baltimore with a handful of other UMBC professors. Belasco reached out to Tony Geraci, who runs Baltimore’s school lunch program about getting UMBC students involved in efforts to transform the school lunch program, to feature fresh, locally grown food.

Geraci took over the lunch program in 2008. A chef by training, he helped transition New Hampshire’s school lunches to include locally sourced produce. His goal is a scalable, farm-to-fork model for creating school lunches and getting kids excited about food. “To teach a kid how to cook, there’s math, there’s science, there’s art,” Geraci told the Baltimore City Paper. “There’s music, when you integrate the cultural aspects. You teach it all, but you use food as the platform.” Belasco is not surprised to see food becoming the common language. “There are not that many people working on food, but there are a lot of people working around it.”

Food may have secured a place in the academy, but what happens next on our plates is still an open question. “In many ways meat is the real crunch problem of the future,” Belasco says. There is growing demand as western tastes for meat-centric meals spread. “The hopeful side of me says there will be more and more attempts to figure out how we can have our hamburgers and eat them as well.”

* * * * *