Food and Power

Food & Power (Oxford Symposium 2019) was a vivacious gathering, and the debates were heated. The Jane Grigson lecture came from Joanna Blythman, on the differences between the natural, homely world, and that of commerce, resulting in food 'pyramids', for example how a traditional diet of fish and seal fat, the Innuit diet, can be seen to be the top of a pyramid shape, with the carbohydrates and fatty processed foods they sadly consume now forming the wide base. From Brexit food security to hunger strikes, feminist restaurants in 1970s Chicago, to lower class diners in Belle Epoque France, the symposium formed both opinions and new impressions.

Vidya Balachander is a food journalist and researcher based in Dubai. Over the last nine years, her work has explored the intersection of food and anthropology, particularly its relationship with politics, society and culture.

Janet Beizer is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, specializing in French literature and civilization with a strong penchant for all aspects of Francophone food culture. She is finishing a book called The Harlequin Eaters: Leftovers and the Patchwork Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris.

An award-winning investigative journalist and the author of seven books on food issues, Joanna Blythman was named 2018 Food Writer of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers.

Paul Brummell is a career diplomat, who has served as UK Ambassador to Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Romania, and High Commissioner to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean. He is currently head of soft power and external affairs at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Voltaire Cang is an academic researcher based in Tokyo. He researches and writes about Japan's 'intangible' heritage, including food and other cultural practices and traditions.

Janet Clarkson is a general practitioner and lecturer at the School of Medicine at the University of Queensland, Australia. She writes regularly on culinary history and is also the author of Pie: A Global History.

Siobhan Dooley is a PhD candidate in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. Her research, which is supported by the Wolfson foundation, focuses on the significance of food and foodways in anglophone writing about South Africa.

Specializing in the Renaissance, Allison Fisher earned a PhD in art history from Canada's Queen's University.

Len Fisher is a scientist, author, and broadcaster who won a spoof Ig Nobel prize for using physics to work out the best way to dunk a biscuit. He was a finalist in the recent Global Challenges 'New Shape' competition to find new approaches to resolving global challenges, many of which are related to food.

Scientific Director of the International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease in Paris, France, now focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic response, Paula Fujiwara's interests range from the culinary and political history of Japanese Americans to Victorian and Edwardian etiquette books, cookbooks and household manuals.

L. Sasha Gora is a cultural historian and writer with a focus on food history and contemporary art (often separately but sometimes together). Since 2015, she has been teaching at LMU Munich's Amerika-Institut.

A sociologist, action researcher, and Fair Food tomato enthusiast, Melissa C. Gouge conducts engaged research to transform power relations commonly found in traditional scholarship as a Research Affiliate at the Center for Social Science Research at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

Jennifer Holm is an Assistant Professor of French at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. She studies representations of food and eating in contemporary French literature and film as well as the cultural and political implications of French gastronomy.

Jennifer Hostetter is an Instructor at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management. She also runs her own catering and cooking class business. Her writing focuses on the history and culture of food, especially within the context of punishment.

Trained in analytical chemistry and sensory analysis, Arielle Johnson worked as the Research and Development Scientist at Noma and is currently the Science Officer on Alton Brown's Food Network show Good Eats.

Since 2018, historian Alex Ketchum has been the Faculty Lecturer of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies of McGill University. Her research focuses on the role of technology, food, feminism, and environmentalism in twentieth-century social movements in the United States and Canada.

Dorota Koczanowicz is professor of cultural studies at the University of Wroclaw, Poland. She publishes on aesthetics, arts, food and culture.

Leszek Koczanowicz is professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities (Poland). He specializes in the theory of culture, social theory, and cultural aspects of politics. His recent publication is Anxiety and Lucidity: Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest.

Michael Krondl is a food writer, culinary historian, cooking teacher, and artist. His books include The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice and Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert.

Christopher Laurent is a cultural anthropologist based in San Francisco, California. His current research focusses on the intersection of Japanese cuisine and ethnic minorities in Japan.

Don Lindgren is an antiquarian bookseller specialized in printed and manuscript cookery. His business, Rabelais Inc., acquires, researches, and sells rare books, manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials related to culinary history and culture, and performs appraisal and institutional placement services for collections and archives. In 2019 he published the first part of a multi-volume exploration of the American community cookbook, researched and written with Mark Germer, titled UnXld: American Cookbooks of Community & Place.

Lecturer in Medieval History and in Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages at the University of Bari, Andrea Maraschi writes about various aspects of food in medieval society.

Jacob Matthews recently graduated from Columbia University with a degree in French and Francophone Studies.

Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy, Mark McWilliams has served as Editor of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery since 2011.

Frieda Moran, PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, is currently researching the cultural history of food safety in Australia.

Simona Moti received her PhD in German Studies from the University of California-Irvine and currently teaches at the Sacramento Waldorf School. Her research focuses on food studies and postcolonial approaches to Central European literature and culture.

Giulia Nicolini is a researcher specialising in food systems at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.

Féilim Ó Cuireáin is a professional chef who has been working in kitchens across Ireland, the UK, and Europe for the past five years. During this time he has also been involved with projects working about food justice and distribution for homeless and isolated communities. His most recent work has been working with refugees and migrants so they can teach cookery classes to the public.

Samantha Presnal is Center for Humanistic Inquiry Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in French at Amherst College. She mines archives, dissects texts, and attempts period recipes to bring to light what people cooked and what it meant in turn-of-the-century France.

Christian Reynolds is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Food Policy, City University, London. He researches the economic and environmental impacts of food loss and waste, and focuses on the shift towards sustainable diets and cookery.

Charity Robey writes for the Shelter Island Reporter, Newsday, and the New York Times covering the food, culture, and history of Eastern Long Island. A programming chair for Culinary Historians of New York, she lives in New York City and Shelter Island, New York.

Or Rosenboim is historian of international thought and Director of the Centre for Modern History at City, University of London. Her research explores ideas of world order, empire, and globalism in the twentieth century.

Laura Shapiro is a journalist and culinary historian. Her most recent book is What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories.

Richard Warren Shepro is an international lawyer who also teaches at the University of Chicago. A scholar of French and other food history, he is the author of four previous papers for the Symposium and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Koby Song-Nichols is a PhD student in Chinese diasporic history and food studies at the University of Toronto and University of Toronto Scarborough. With a soft spot for dishes like sweet and sour chicken balls, chili chicken, and chop suey, his current research examines how Chinese Canadian and American communities have shaped, negotiated, and experienced multicultural life in North America through food.

Carolyn Steel is a London-based architect, academic, and writer whose work explores what it means to see the world through the lens of food. She is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World.

David C. Sutton is a literary and archival researcher, Director of Research Projects in the University of Reading Library, member of the governing body of the International Council on Archives. His books include Figs and Rich Food, Poor Food.

Svetlana Tcareva is a PhD candidate in the Slavic Languages and Literatures Department at Yale University. Her research interests include Soviet literature, food studies, horror, and embodiment. She is currently working on her dissertation about gross corporeality and monstrous consumption in Soviet literature and film between 1920 and the 1940s.

After obtaining a Master's in Fine Art in 1998, Carolyn Tillie promptly enrolled in cooking school. Combining her education in the arts and gastronomy, Carolyn works as an exhibiting artist, curator, and food historian who specializes in researching, creating, and presenting food as an art form.

Nick Tosaj is a professor of history at John Abbott College, a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, and a lover of carbohydrates. His research focuses primarily on bread, wheat, and staple foods in the modern French empire.

Anne Urbancic, the Mary Rowell Jackman Professor in the Humanities at Victoria College, University of Toronto, specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature which, to her delight, has led her to the fascinating cookbooks and foodways of Italy in that period.

Nina Vizcarrondo earned her undergraduate degree at New York University in Food Studies. She is a chef and food truck owner in Alaska with a passion for addressing food justice issues.

Alice Mulhearn-Williams is a freelance writer and PhD student in History at NUI Galway. She is researching the sensory history of Ireland's Magdalene laundries.