Edible Tales: Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning

Description: What if the syllabus were a menu?
What if learning began with a bite?

Edible Tales: Folklore, Myths, and Food Narratives in Higher Learning invites readers to the table, literally and intellectually, to explore how food stories shape knowledge, identity, ethics, and pedagogy. Structured as a twelve-course banquet, the book moves from forbidden fruits and mythic punishments to kitchen-table dialogues, classroom rituals, and contemporary visual art. Across chapters, contributors examine how food functions as law and transgression, nourishment and discipline, inheritance and invention. Eve's bite, Persephone's seeds, and Gretel's breadcrumbs are reread as moments where appetite becomes agency. Thanksgiving disasters become narrative laboratories. Off-calendar feasts and midnight breakfasts reveal how everyday rituals sustain resilience in academic and communal life. Olive oil tastings, medieval banquets, pupusa-making, and jollof debates demonstrate how foodways encode histories of gender, class, colonialism, migration, and belonging.

Methodologically, Edible Tales blends scholarly analysis with creative forms: scripts, recipes, stage directions, audio guides, almanacs, and lesson "potions." The volume models how folklore and food narratives can be mobilized in higher education classrooms as rigorous, embodied ways of knowing. Contributors show how storytelling, shared snacks, sensory memory, and digital food archives can foster trust, critical reflection, and ethical engagement, particularly in interdisciplinary, humanities-based, and social justice-oriented pedagogy.

Designed for scholars and educators in education, folklore, cultural studies, food studies, and the humanities, Edible Tales is also an invitation to instructors seeking innovative pedagogy, to students hungry for meaning, and to readers who believe that stories travel best when passed hand to hand. Come hungry. Leave with stories. Pack the leftovers as questions, and carry them into tomorrow.

Perfect for courses such as: Food Studies; Folklore and Mythology; Cultural Studies; Narrative Inquiry / Qualitative Research Methods; Curriculum Studies; Interdisciplinary Humanities; Anthropology of Food; Education and Social Justice; Gender, Culture, and Society; Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Brief description: Dr. Mila Zhu is Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and Coordinator of the EDUC Program at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, where she also serves as Founding Director of the Center for Interconnected Curriculum and Networked Learning (ICoN Learning). Her research centers on Ludic Scholarship, integrating game-based learning, play, and narrative into educational contexts. As series editor of Ludic Scholarship: Games, Learning, and Innovative Pedagogy, she advances work that merges gamification, ludology, and pedagogy. Her book, StrataPlay Methodology: A Lorekeeper's Game Design in Postqualitative Inquiry, anchors the series by modeling multi-layered, game-inflected approaches to research. Building on this foundation, her current projects extend into health-science-informed XR learning design focused on resilience, mental fitness, and ethical decision-making.

Before joining Southeastern, Dr. Zhu lived, studied, and taught in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, experiences that inform her global perspective on curriculum and teacher education. A grand winner of the First Asian Youth Piano Competition and an active freelance musician, she integrates musical practice into pedagogy, infusing teacher preparation and curriculum theory with interdisciplinary inquiry across the arts and multicultural education.

Dr. Zhu was named to Oklahoma Magazine's 2025 "40 Under 40," recognizing her leadership in shaping the future of education. She is the recipient of Southeastern's 2024 Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Outstanding Research and Scholarly Activity and the 2023 Faculty Senate Recognition Award for Excellence in Teaching. These honors reflect her commitment to bridging rigorous scholarship and compelling storytelling and to partnering with pre-service teachers and underserved communities to advance inclusive, high-impact learning across contexts.

Review Quotes: "In treating food as a social semiotic, Zhu and Morrison join a great tradition, alongside the likes of Roland Barthes, of pulling the curtain (or should I say the tablecloth) back on society's relationship with food. Just as Barthes (1961) understood food to be a myth, "a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior" (p. 21), this collection of edible tales leaves the reader convinced that food has always been a part of mythologies that create social scripts and concrete metaphors for understanding the abstract concepts of life. But more than metaphors, each contribution metonymically stands in place for a story that predates us all yet invites us to be modern-day characters in the narrative. Historians will remind us that food has facilitated and sustained all revolutions. This book is a revolution for needed radical and fundamental change in higher learning . . . and it is so tasty at the same time."--Dr. Steve Daniel Przymus, The University of Rhode Island