LECTURES

Boston has recently received kudos for its young and talented chefs, its local provisioning, and its chow-hound-friendly ethnic neighborhoods. It hasn’t always been thus. Anthropologist and author Merry White will recount how Boston’s foodways evolved from puritanical repression into the bright light of today’s menus. Julia Child helped, but so did the impact of profound social change. To East Boston, today home to many people of Hispanic descent, to the North End, styled and branded as Italian, and to Armenian Watertown and other “street-car suburbs,” we now make pilgrimages for food, and on the way, learn some history of social and ethnic change in our old city.