Smithsonian Food History Weekend
Constitution Avenue, NW Between 12th and 14th Streets
Food History Weekend 2022 will honor the efforts of community advocates who are working to conserve, share, and celebrate their ancestral food traditions in various communities across the United States.
The weekend will feature the annual Smithsonian Food History Gala on Thursday, October 13th, during which culinary historian and cookbook author Grace Young will receive the 2022 Julia Child Award presented by The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts. Young, the eighth recipient of the award, is a tireless advocate for the preservation of American Chinatowns and all their cultural, economic, and gastronomic riches.
On Friday, October 14th, Grace Young will present a special daytime program at the museum, free and open to all. As part of the museum’s “Cooking Up History” series, Young will speak about and demonstrate her decades-long pursuit to preserve Chinese culinary traditions. Sharing the ancestral knowledge she documented for her cookbooks, The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen, The Breath of a Wok, and Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge, Young will prepare her father’s cashew chicken recipe during the hour-long, live cooking demonstration and conversation. Young will also speak about the integral role that Chinatowns played historically and today across the country and how they are endangered and in desperate need of support from the broader American population.
The museum will also host an “Objects Out of Storage” event, inviting visitors to take a closer look at objects and documents donated recently by Young. Other objects from the museum’s collections that illuminate the rich and diverse cultures of Chinatowns and Chinese American communities across the United States will also be available.
