The idiom, "the more you know, the more you know you don't know," is acutely applicable in the realm of foodways. New relationships, studies and texts are forthcoming every year. With this in mind, I cast my net wide to see what variety of materials I could snag. I gauged the accepted authority of a source when the same title appeared consistently. I would then find the title, or order it from Inter Library Loan (Thank you Simmons ILL!) to inspect it personally.

One of the major challenges in the field of foodways, food studies and other variations of the theme is a lack of clear-cut subject headers - you will find results scattered under social sciences, history, arts, folk studies, international studies.

Food Studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes a wide thin slice across the arts, humanities and sciences. Topics related to food have long been present in many fields of study, but have remained separate from each other. Because food's place in culture, history, and the environment is a large and significant one, food and concerns about it have an impact on many areas of human life. Food Studies gathers together knowledge about food as it occurs anywhere in established disciplines, not in order to relocate sub-topics from their present fields, but in order to consider their relationships and connections.

My methodology for gathering these references were manifold:

• Previous knowledge of good sources, as I already had a vested interest in this topic prior to the assignment

• Browsing the stacks at the Beatley, Boston Public, San Francisco Public, among other libraries.

• Online catalog searches in WorldCat, Hollis (Radcliff library -Schlesinger Culinary collection), Mirlyn (U of Michigan - Longone Center for Culinary Research)

• Databases such as Academic Search Complete, ARBA (American Reference Books Annual), EBSCO Host, LISTA (Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts), Social Sciences Full Text, Social Sciences Full Text

• Using bibliographies of materials I already accepted as valuable

• Listservs: Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS)

• Experts in the field: Linda Watkins (Simmons Librarian), Meg Ragland (Simmons Library, Food Researcher), Lynn Olver (Food Timeline Founder), David Kaplan (Philosophy of Food - U of N. Texas)

• Searching blog tags and social bookmarks from fellow del.icio.us users

• Random coincidences occurring in normal life while my attention is fine-tuned to all things food throughout the duration of this project