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 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 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…

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 8: Racialized Environments – Room A

Discourses around what we "should" eat can be metonyms for larger cultural issues. In the case of meat traditions versus vegetarianism/veganism, racial, religious, and social justice tensions lie just under…