Darra Goldstein (born April 28, 1951) is an American author and food scholar who is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita at Williams College.
She is the founding editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, which won the 2012 James Beard award for Publication of the Year, and she served as its editor-in-chief from 2001 to 2012.
[6] Goldstein currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, Dean Crawford, a writer and professor of English, emeritus at Vassar College.
[2] At Stanford, Goldstein proposed writing a dissertation on food in Russian literature, but she was told it was not a serious, academic topic; instead, she wrote on Nikolai Zabolotsky, a Russian poet whom Goldstein describes as “brilliant.”[11] During graduate school, she was research assistant to Bertram D. Wolfe, a founder of the American Communist Party who by the end of his life had become a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.
Goldstein took a year off from graduate study in 1978–1979 to work for the USIA[12] in the Soviet Union, touring with the exhibition "Agriculture USA.
[14] Throughout her early career, Goldstein's academic research in Russian art and poetry remained separate from her growing interest in food.
[8] Goldstein recalls Feeding Desire as “one of the most wonderful projects I’ve ever worked on.” In particular, she was enthralled by the silver place settings by Claude Lalanne; each piece was cast from a different form in nature: flowers, bumblebees, caterpillars.
[26] Goldstein believes that “food can be a wonderful tool to promote understanding, but too often it’s used divisively, as a source of conflict instead of sharing.”[8] In 2008, she went to Israel to see whether recognition of common foodways could lessen the divide between Israeli Arabs and Jews, but political tensions and issues of culinary appropriation of dishes like hummus worked against reconciliation.
[8] With the growing visibility of Gastronomica, Goldstein rose to become a prominent voice in food studies while continuing to publish cookbooks and teach at Williams College.
[28] In the spring of 2017, Goldstein retired from her professorship at Williams College, becoming the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, emerita.
At the 2017 Williams College Commencement, President Adam Falk said the following of Goldstein: "You introduced students to the language, literature, and intellectual history of Russia, providing many of them a rich, immersive experience of post-Soviet Georgia.
[30] Goldstein broadened her scholarship by publishing Fire and Ice (2015),[31] a cookbook of classic Nordic home cooking that was nominated for awards in 2016 by both the IACP and the James Beard Foundation.
[37] In 2020, Goldstein published Beyond the North Wind: Russia in Recipes and Lore, a cookbook that explores the "true heart of Russian food"––home cooking from pickles to preserves, infused vodka to hand pies.
[39] Goldstein articulates the cookbook's aim as follows: "I wanted to immerse myself in the Russian land and remember and reflect on what it gave to people.
[14] At the time, she was dismayed that her highly interdisciplinary research would reach such a small audience after its publication in the scholarly Slavonic and Eastern European Review.
[5] In addition to publishing scholarly articles, Goldstein used prose, poetry, photography and painting to address a wide range of topics in food studies, including pressing societal issues such as poverty and nutrition.