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ROY VŨ, a history professor at Dallas College North Lake Campus.
Episode 3035 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature an interview with Professor Roy Vu who will discuss his book Farm to Freedom. Andy Pham, a good friend of this podcast will introduce and interview Professor Vu about his new book.
ROY VŨ is a history professor at Dallas College North Lake Campus and an advisory board member for Foodways Texas and Keep Irving Beautiful, where he is the 2018 recipient of the Sadie Ray Graff Education Award. His previous books include Our Finite Bounty: An Anthology of Sustainable Topics and Feasted Landscapes: Sustainability in American Topics. He lives in Irving, Texas.
Home gardens, in addition to providing sustenance and satisfaction, embody a sense of self identity. In this groundbreaking work on Vietnamese foodways, Farm-to-Freedom: Vietnamese Americans and Their Food Gardens brings to light how the Vietnamese diasporic population in Texas uses gardens literally and figuratively to set down roots in a new country.
These gardens, often hidden in plain sight, establish the seat of Vietnamese immigrant culture, according to author Roy Vũ. They can also offer Vietnamese Americans an empowering pathway to forging a new homeland duality by retaining ties to the foods and environs they drew comfort from in Vietnam.
Farm-to-Freedom uses the concept of emancipatory foodways as a lens into gardens that serve a semi-palliative purpose by succoring the experienced tragedies of war and exile for Vietnamese immigrants and Vietnamese Americans, which arguably adds another dimension to the importance of the home garden. Vũ covers topics including but not limited to culinary citizenship, food democracy, culinary justice, and food sovereignty. Farm-to-Freedom reveals how these gardens not only provide those who tend them a greater sense of security and agency in an unfamiliar land but also give them the means to preserve and expand Vietnamese cuisine for themselves while simultaneously enriching food culture in the United States.
With a wealth of original oral histories, community-based recipes and poetry, and photographs of home gardens in suburban and urban settings, Farm-to-Freedom provides a deeper understanding of the Vietnamese diaspora in Texas for scholars, professionals, and general readers alike.
Listen to Episode 3035 and discover more about Professor Vu’s book Farm to Freedom.
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