From Julie

Hi Ian (et al.)

I apologize for the delay in responding. I'm finally giving full-on attention to a book I began 3 years ago and I'm reluctant to break momentum. I admit that I only skimmed the draft, although I like what I saw. Excellent coding and formatting. I concur with the need for a more direct and brief introduction and I'm thus going to throw my weight behind (all fat metaphors these days) the move to jettison the lengthy quotes about blogging and place them in another paper. I bet that I'm not the only person who gave much more thought to the substantive posts and would rather see them kept intact. And the work is intended, in fact, to be a review of food scholarship first and foremost.

With that in mind, it occurred to me while trying to fall asleep last night that an easy solution to the introduction is to refer back to the original invitation and paraphrase it. As Ian first characterized it he invited the particular cast of characters to participate in this third review because they a) had not really been included in the other two though have been writing on these issues; b) had been cited briefly and Ian seemed to think a response was in order; or c) had something to say about the topic even though maybe weren't "food scholars" per se. What emerged thereafter was an organic conversation, albeit sometimes a disjointed one, among those who agreed to participate. What follows in the rest of the article represents the emergent conversations.

So, I'm thinking something like this in the intro: one paragraph on food studies as an emergent field, constantly being defined and redefined through the people that participate in it and what they bring to the field from other fields (which is all true!). This paper, both reflects and extends that impulse; a second paragraph that recapitulates the original invitation and what its purpose was - who was invited and why, pretty much cribbed from the original; And then a third paragraph on the process: how it led to such an organic conversation, as it were, which did in fact bring in perspectives that the other two reviews hadn't touched as much (both the politics/positionality and the visceral) - and then some summary statement about blogging.

The conclusion can then say something about how the process of this article, which both widened and relaxed the conversation about food might be used as a model in food movements themselves. (Ok, that's where I'd go with it, so maybe that's too much me). but something that refers to how a different sort of process leads to different sorts of places intellectually and communicatively.

Hope this is helpful.

Julie