Food is having a cultural moment. As America marks its 250th anniversary, new cookbooks celebrate endangered culinary traditions, UNESCO calls recipes “living heritage,” and chefs are rediscovering centuries-old techniques. But preserving food culture takes more than cooking—it takes preserving the books, handwritten recipes, community cookbooks, and stories that carry this knowledge from one generation to the next. That’s the focus of this week’s Future Knowledge episode with Katie Livingston.
Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.
From church cookbooks and handwritten recipe notes to the rise of food blogs, Katie explains how recipes capture regional traditions, social values, and forms of knowledge that are often overlooked by traditional preservation efforts. The conversation examines how domestic culture—particularly culture created and maintained by women—has historically been undervalued despite its importance as a record of lived experience. As cooking increasingly moves online, Katie also considers the risks of digital ephemerality and what may be lost when personal archives give way to disappearing websites and search-engine-driven recipes. Together, Vida and Katie explore how preserving food culture helps us preserve the stories, communities, and histories embedded within it.
Vanishing Culture is a special six-part series from the Future Knowledge podcast, produced by the Internet Archive and Authors Alliance, exploring what happens when our shared cultural heritage disappears, and what we can do to preserve it. View the full series.
The series is inspired by the Internet Archive’s new book, Vanishing Culture, a collection of essays by scholars, artists, librarians, and preservationists examining why culture disappears in the digital age, and what can be done to save it. Together, the book and podcast offer complementary perspectives on one of the defining challenges of our time: preserving humanity’s cultural record in an increasingly fragile digital world.