Explore Foodways

Food tells us much more than what people like to eat.

It can tell us how people live, work, travel, gather, celebrate, worship, compete, preserve a harvest, feed a family, welcome a stranger, survive a difficult season — and carry traditions from one generation or one part of the world to another.

Foodways are the many ways human life shapes what — and how — we eat.

This growing Cooking With Kimberly index explores food through those patterns of everyday life. A single recipe may belong to many foodways at once because food rarely has only one story.

Explore Foodways

Start with the way people are living, working, gathering or eating.

Explore farming and harvest traditions, fishing and coastal life, pastoral and herding cultures, wild food and foraging, work and camp meals, faith and observance, hospitality, migration and diaspora, street and market food, sport and recreation, celebrations, preservation, family tables and many other ways food becomes part of human life.

Foodways Overlap

A meal doesn’t have to belong on only one shelf.

A pot of food cooked at a hunting camp might belong to hunting, outdoor cooking, camp food, preservation, regional cooking and family tradition. A cooler packed for a softball tournament might belong to sport and competition, travel food, family foodways and practical make-ahead cooking.

That overlap is useful. Each shelf answers a different question about the food.

Cooking With Kimberly is organized for discovery, not exclusivity.

People, Place & Food

Foodways and geography are deeply connected, but they aren’t the same thing.

Mountains, rivers, coasts, climate and agriculture help determine what food is available. People then decide how to grow it, gather it, preserve it, cook it, share it, celebrate with it and carry it elsewhere.

To explore countries and the landscapes that help shape their food, visit Explore the World Through Food.

Explore World Cuisines & Food Geography →

A Living Record of How We Eat

Foodways aren’t frozen in time.

People move. Families change. Technology changes kitchens. Work changes. Ingredients become available in new places. Traditions are preserved, adapted, combined, forgotten and sometimes rediscovered.

Some foodways are shared across enormous regions. Others may belong to a particular community, occupation, faith, family, season or moment in history.

As we revisit the thousands of recipes, cooking shows, stories and memories in the Cooking With Kimberly archives — and continue creating new ones — this index will keep growing with them.

Where a tradition belongs to a particular people or community, we aim to identify and credit it as accurately and specifically as we can. We’ll also keep researching, learning and correcting the library when better information becomes available.

If you notice a foodway we’ve missed, a distinction that deserves greater specificity, or something we’ve categorized incorrectly, you’re welcome to contact Cooking With Kimberly.

Follow a way of life you’ve never considered. See what people packed for work, cooked after harvest, ate on the road, served to unexpected company, preserved for winter, carried across an ocean or shared after a game.

You may come looking for dinner and discover an entire way of life.

Be a Champion in your Kitchen, and Eat Deliciously!