Hello everybody! My name is Corinne Philbin, and I am a rising senior at Moravian College. I will be publishing a series of ten blog posts centered around food sustainability and its relationship to the Bethlehem community, in partnership with Festival UnBound. These posts will lead up to the Festival in October, and be posted every 2-3 weeks. I decided to embark on this journey because of a previous research project I did last summer with Christopher Shorr, associate professor of theatre at Moravian and the adviser to the Moravian College Theatre Company, titled “Flavor of Bethlehem: A Celebration of People and Food.” I wanted to delve deeper into this research and figure out another way to share my work with the community. I decided to specifically analyze all the various ways in which Bethlehem is sustainable in relation to food, while still highlighting the relationship between food and the Bethlehem community, as this ties closely to the mission of Festival UnBound. The Festival explores what our city has become now that the steel industry is no more, and how we define ourselves. It is focusing on the Strength in Diversity, Health, Environment, and Interdependence, and the Importance of Youth (touchstone.org). I believe that my research throughout this project over the span of four months will tie in nicely with the Health and Environment categories of focus, as well as the overall central idea of community.

Before I delve deeper into the specifics of food and sustainable methods in Bethlehem, I want to first contextualize the history of food and community as a whole. Food is one of the main components of any culture, and Bethlehem is a melting pot of all different ones, from Moravians, to Pennsylvania Dutch, to Hispanic, and everything in between. Recipes are passed down from generations and continue to be a concrete staple in everyone’s day to day lives. According to Roland Barthes, one of the authors of Food and Culture, food is a system of communication, with each area of the world specifying their food staples based on what is most available to them, and sharing it with the rest of the globe. The very idea of food being a contributing factor to culture is something that is traced back to the beginning of human civilization, and the developments made to this art are simply astonishing. We have evolved from a society of hunters and gatherers, a time before fire was used to cook meats and plants. When humans began cooking their findings, the social impact encouraged commensalism, or eating with others, according to Catherine Perles in Food: A Culinary History. This commensalism still remains a strong bonding ritual between people. People cook for others, go out to different restaurants, and find joy and enjoyment from sharing food with another person or group of people. Francis Joannes describes in the same text that early civilizations would host banquets and welcoming dinners for guests, and it was symbolic to drink from the same cup or share salt. In ancient times, the concept of cultural foods and recipes was beginning to take shape. Whatever foods and ingredients were indigenous to a specific region would remain staples in their recipes; for example, legumes such as chickpeas and lentils were prevalent in early Egyptian cooking, and still are today. In the Early Middle Ages, raising livestock, vineyards, and vegetable gardens paved the way for different ingredients such as pork, onions and other salad plants, and cheese, that are staples of most of our society’s diets. As civilization expanded, so did outsourcing for various foods and spices. Trading routes were established between countries to bring and trade culinary staples. Eating together was and still is considered a unifying, symbolic action as well, and still remains in our society. Families eat dinner together, special events such as birthdays and anniversaries are often celebrated by a fancy dinner date. There are thousands of developments in the production and evolution of food, but it seems to all revolve around the central idea of culture and community.

Whether you’re cooking up your great grandmother’s recipe for the best Italian marinara sauce, or your own perfected chocolate chip cookies, food is directly linked to culture and community. There is such a vast array of knowledge and hidden facts that can never be simplified into ten blog posts, which is why I will be narrowing the scope to just Bethlehem. In the next ten blog posts, I will be researching and contextualizing the history of food in Bethlehem, and how the culinary staples of the community came to be. I will also be highlighting the sustainable methods that have recently sprung up in terms of food and consumption, continuously keeping the message and scope of Festival UnBound in mind. This series of posts is meaningful not just to me, but hopefully for the Bethlehem community. I think it is important to shed light on the efforts made by community members to keep their cultural traditions alive, as well as highlight some methods of sustainability that people might not be aware of. No matter what your background, identity, or ethnicity, you will be able to find something to relate to in this project. Food is one of the main areas of life that connects all of us, and I feel that it is sometimes overlooked, or undercooked!

Feel free to leave any comments or suggestions for things you may want me to delve into, as I am open to any and all opinions and viewpoints! I hope that this introduction intrigues you to keep reading and looking forward to more information on this topic! Thanks so much for reading!

~ Corinne Philbin