Panel 1: Food/Drink/Sin – Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre
When, what, and how much to consume? Whether explicit or implicit, these questions shape cyclical religious fasts and feasts and underlie quotidian practice. In their observance, these rules and rituals…
Panel 2: Paradigm Shifts in Communicating Information – Room A
The "discovery" of food as an academic subject and well as increasing prominence in popular culture and discourse has created new technologies, organizational structures, and venues for talking about and…
Panel 3: Finding Home – Room C
Finding familiar foods when one is away from home, especially when part of a diaspora community, can challenge the outsider to find new ways of enacting innate rituals to maintain…
Panel 4: Sovereignty and Control – Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre
Those in control set the menu. Whether reflecting on deprivations, the loss of autonomy through monotony, or using food to celebrate treaties, this panel probes food as an effective tool…
Panel 6: Gastro-Ethnography – Room C
These (partially) observational studies explore dining rules and rituals as expressions of life skills, whether metaphoric or literal. The Holocaust survivors (over)feed grandchildren to ward away acute hardships, the Oxford…
Panel 5: Rules for the Almost-Taboo – Room A
Some food rules are designed to keep us healthy: hygienic codes to avoid cross-contamination or the proliferation of harmful microbes come to mind. But what about food "rules" that are…