Pauline Adema begins her book about garlic and Gilroy
– the first of its kind – with a line everyone here can vouch
for:
”
You smell Gilroy before you see it.
”
Pauline Adema begins her book about garlic and Gilroy – the first of its kind – with a line everyone here can vouch for: “You smell Gilroy before you see it.”
She should know. The New-York based food whiz who prefers to be called “Polly” has seen Gilroy dozens of times, beginning in the mid-’90s, when she attended her first Garlic Festival to conduct research for a dissertation on food and identity she completed in 2006. Communities communicate through their food preferences, she said, and nowhere is that more apparent than Gilroy.
“I was just really captured by the community of Gilroy, the volunteerism, the huge success of the festival and the impact the festival has had not only in the local community but also in the festival industry, which seems to look at Gilroy as the model of success,” Adema said. “The city has created this fun, entertaining, marketable identity around this single food item, which is not even indigenous to the area, and the more I attend, the more I interact. It’s so rich culturally and anthropologically that I just continue to be drawn back.”
The city council seized on Gilroy’s marketable identity last year when it hired Articulate Solutions for $73,000 to generate the city’s catchy maxim – “A community with a spice for life” – and a new logo complete with garlic bulb. The company’s also designing an intricate network of paths throughout the city. Katherine Filice, the company’s creative director, described the garlic-geared project as a defining process that highlights Gilroy’s niche in America.
That’s what Adema, 44, wanted to highlight, and with a masters degree in folklore and a Ph.D. in American Studies, she knows her stuff. The Buffalo native serves as a staff folklorist for the Dutchess County Arts Council in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and also teaches at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. And if you need research on a particular chow, or if a company or municipality wants to find their own stinking rose, Adema does that, too.
The public doesn’t see much of this work, though, so to make her passion more palatable to the masses, Adema turned her stack of academic research and years of personal experience into a 196-page book teeming with local sources, colorful anecdotes and plenty of black-and-white photos.
“As I was working through my dissertation, I didn’t want this to just be something that goes into the archives because what’s happening here is really important and noteworthy,” Adema said.
Aside from a handful of cook books and travel publications that mention Gilroy in passing, Adema’s work, Garlic Capital of the World: Gilroy, Garlic, and the Making of a Festive Foodscape, appears to be the first published book exclusively about Gilroy and garlic, and it came from someone 3,000 miles away.
“I’m totally flabbergasted that someone outside our area would do all that,” said Historical Society Chair Connie Rogers. “My goodness.”
The distance between New York and Gilroy made writing difficult at times, Adema said, but throughout the year she visited Gilroy during non-festival months to absorb the community at its regular pace and to speak with local luminaries at the city, the Visitor’s Bureau, the Economic Development Corporation and the Chamber of Commerce, among others.
Christopher Ranch Managing Partner Bill Christopher, whose father, Don Christopher, helped bring Gilroy national fame by co-founding the festival in 1979, said Wednesday he had not heard about Adema’s book but he looked forward to reading it.
“I’m sure it will give garlic and the festival exposure and explain what’s going on here,” Christopher said.
Adema will attend the festival again this year and she hopes to promote her book through the University Press of Mississippi, which published her work last month. The printing house contacted her after hearing about the developing book, which surprised Adema at first. But a book’s a book, she said, and as a published author, she may also receive another invitation this summer to watch the festival’s Great Garlic Cook-Off backstage. Last year she hung out there while Laurie Benda of Madison, Wis., won with her walnut-garlic tart with garlic-infused creme and chili syrup.
“That was my favorite,” Adema said of the festival’s flagship event. “Otherwise, I’ll have to say the garlic ice cream.”
