NFC Distinguished Lecture | "Salt, Stories, and Other Survival Skills"

About the talk...

The story is the spice, it’s the seasoning, the salt, says one chef. It is stories that flavour food—something to think about every time a recipe instructs you to “salt to taste.” But salt does not season food alone. Salt spikes the water. It lines the rocks. It thickens the air. Salt behaves and misbehaves in terms of where it shows up, and how much of it. Just as climate change is largely a story about water—too much in some places, too little elsewhere, and temperatures that are too high—salt traces environments past, present, and future. Braiding together salt, stories, and other survival skills, cultural historian and writer L. Sasha Gora will present a lecture about preservation, time, and environmental futures. Please join as at a reception to follow the lecture.

About the speaker...

L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian with a focus on food studies who probes the relationship between eating and ecology, between restaurants and representation. She leads the Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment research group at the University of Augsburg. Dr. Gora's current project, Making Fish, archives Atlantic codscapes, culinary extinction, and the ghosts of appetites past. She published her first book Culinary Claims: Indigenous Restaurant Politics in Canada (2025) and is currently working on her second monograph Tuna: A Global History.

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