LMC professor Lisa Yaszek is featured in a recent article from Food and Wine Magazine about the role of spice in science fiction. Yaszek explains that spice is one of the genre's most distinctive food tropes because it is both a regionally distinctive and internationally mundane aspect of everyday life that helps authors build worlds that are both familiar and unfamiliar all at once. While early science fiction authors foregrounded high-tech, unspiced foods to show how far food preservation had advance from the middle ages to the end of the 19th century, contemporary authors from around the globe often foreground spices and spiced foods in their stories to celebrate distinctive economic and cultural identities.

For more detail, please see the full article at http://www.foodandwine.com/news/spice-science-fiction.