Sharing Food Traditions Across the Globe

Many years ago, the Saveur contributing editor Shane Mitchell found herself on assignment in Oslo, and reluctant to leave her hotel. “I was frozen—at the time, it felt like I was in such a strange place,” she says. But she was desperately hungry, and the need for a meal pulled her from her room and into the city.

“Food is a universal; we all have to eat,” Mitchell says. For the past decade, Mitchell and the photographer James Fisher have traversed the globe, seeking out and documenting food traditions. As she writes in the introduction to her new book, Far Afield, each of its ten chapters chronicles her interactions with “people who are firmly rooted in their culture and landscape, in some of our most isolated or marginal communities, where keeping the food chain vital remains a daily chore.”