A Hawai'i Author Traces Kyoto Food Back to Its Producers
Viola Gaskell, a Hawai’i-based author and photographer, spent her reporting time on the farms and in the workshops rather than at the tables. Kyoto Farm to Table arrives from Trope in November 2026.
Kyoto is one of the most written-about food cities in the world, so what is left to say about it? Almost all of that writing stops at the restaurant door, and Gaskell went the other way. Working with Japanese food writer Momoko Nakamura, she interviewed more than 30 producers and restaurateurs who grow, catch, ferment and cook the city’s food, and built the book around them.
What the Book Covers
The through line is what Kyoto grows and why it tastes the way it does. Kyoyasai, the city’s distinctive local vegetables, gets its own treatment, as does the pure water the region is known for, which shapes everything from tofu to broth.
Around those ingredients sit the traditions of washoku and a younger movement pushing Japanese food toward something more sustainable. The people in that movement are the point of the book. Farmers, fishermen, tofu makers, chefs and restaurateurs each get room to explain what they are doing and why.
More than 200 photographs carry the reporting, which for a photographer-author is closer to primary evidence than illustration.
Some of it reads as trade reporting. One chapter follows Toshiharu Uratani and his father sorting the morning catch for auction at Wakasa Bay, and the economics around them have moved hard. Warmer water and ocean acidification have shrunk some populations while others swelled, so saba, the Japanese mackerel prized for its fat, has declined while the leaner sawara has proliferated. Saba has become expensive, imports have climbed, and Japan now brings in more than 100,000 metric tons of mackerel a year. The flight path between Japan and Norway has picked up a sardonic nickname for it, the new Saba Kaido, after the old overland route that carried fish from Fukui to Kyoto.
A supply chain that once ran a few dozen miles now runs through Oslo, which is a long way to go for a fish Kyoto used to catch down the coast.
The Hawai’i Connection
Gaskell is based in Hawai’i, and she draws a line between the two places that is worth hearing. Both blend long-standing Native traditions of ecological balance with a modern farm-to-table push, and both are working on food self-sufficiency for reasons that are practical rather than romantic. An island that imports most of its food has a direct interest in how another culture built a local supply chain and kept it.
That comparison is one of the subjects she has offered to discuss, alongside how understanding Kyoto’s farms and markets changes the way a visitor eats in its restaurants.
Availability
Kyoto Farm to Table runs 256 pages and is published by Trope in November 2026, priced at $50 and open for pre-order now. Review copies are available through the publisher, and Gaskell is available for interviews.
About the Author
Viola Gaskell is an author and photographer based in Hawai’i. For this book she worked with Momoko Nakamura, a Japanese food writer, reporting across farms, fishing communities, kitchens and workshops in and around Kyoto.