Keywords: Food Sovereignty, Food Security, Food Systems, Taste, Post/Colonialism, Migrations, Mobilities, History and Stories, Borders, Food History, Gender Issues
Area Coordinators: Simone Cinotto
Keynote speaker: Amy Bentley, New York University, USA
Call for paper: open
Food History critically discusses how humans have foraged, hunted, grown, transformed, preserved, transported, distributed, consumed, and wasted their food, illuminating the political, economic, cultural, and social choices they have made to feed themselves, and how those choices have shaped our contemporary food systems and cultures. Food History is a history of mobility, and as such is necessarily transnational and global history: before the invention of settled agriculture, Homo Sapiens spread around the world by following herds of animals, eating away forests, and responding to climate change. Many of them, such as pastoralists, are still nomadic in their pursuit of food, and millions migrate in search of a better diet. Modern empires, competing with each other for power by securing vast and valuable supplies of food ushered in, particularly after 1492, the global circulation of plants, animals, minerals, and germs someone calls the Columbian Exchange, others Biological Imperialism or Mass Biopiracy. Farmers and cooks across the world have selectively “immobilized” in their physical and human landscape some of these plants and animals and created cuisines, which are agricultural and culinary codes written in taste and distinction. The violent and exploitative global system of food exchange that imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism have shaped has created immense inequalities in the access to food; the labor provided to food chains; and the self-determination of communities as per their rights to land, seeds, and food sovereignty. The panel look at how Food History have addressed these questions and where it should move from here.
Accepted papers (news soon)