Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Storm In A Teacup: Fragility And Resilience Of The Dutch Tea Industry, Annette Kappert, Lysbeth Vink

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper explores how the Dutch tea industry, shaped by colonial ambition, wartime scarcity, and domestic ritual offers a unique cultural lens for examining crisis and resilience. From the exploitative structures of the Dutch East India Company to the quiet strength of tea rituals during the Hunger Winter of 1944–45, tea serves as both a historical commodity and a symbolic thread running through Dutch cultural memory. At the heart of this exploration is the idea of honouring imperfection: embracing the cracks left by conflict, dislocation, and scarcity rather than concealing them. Drawing on the metaphor of tea leaves; fragile, fragmented, …

Feast And Famine: Food, Crisis, And Hope In The Grimm Brothers’ Kinder– Und Hausmärchen, Rebecca Zani

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper examines how the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (final edition, 1857) encode hunger as a structuring condition of both narrative and social order. Furthermore, it explores how these tales articulate the fragile and often unstable nature of abundance, from the perspective of food studies. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, the study highlights the predominance of a restricted alimentary lexicon centered on staple foods (such as bread, wine, beer, milk, and porridge) reflecting a subsistence economy rather than a state of plenitude. By situating these narrative patterns within the longue durée of recurring food crises in preindustrial Germany, the …

Does Modernisation Of Traditional Dishes Lead To Their Destruction? The Case Of Baklava, Banu Özden

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The modernisation of traditional dishes presents a tension between culinary creativity and the preservation of cultural heritage. Using baklava as a single case study, this paper investigates whether such modernisation leads to the destruction of traditional foodways. Drawing on a qualitative study with seven Turkish chefs, the research finds that innovation does not inherently threaten baklava’s identity. Instead, preservation depends on maintaining the dish’s essential technique—multiple layers of paper-thin pastry—while allowing flexibility in presentation and narrative framing. Participants agreed that baklava’s strong cultural foundation renders it resilient against fusion experiments and deconstructed forms, provided its core qualities remain intact. However, …

Chronicles Of Despair And Hope: Food Wars On The Frontline Of Motherhood, Gemma M. Carney

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

In this paper I use first-person literary accounts of the hope and despair experienced by women when feeding infants and young children. In Soldier Sailor, Claire Kilroy offers a vivid depiction of attempts to get healthy and nutritious food into an evasive toddler. In her memoir, Making Babies: stumbling into motherhood, Anne Enright dedicates two whole pages to the word “haNang.” The word portrays endless crying of her breast-fed baby if she ate anything other than brown rice. These visceral depictions of mothers’ experiences of feeding children raise interesting questions for gastronomic studies. Some of our most treasured childhood food …

What My Grandma Ate, What My Grandma Wrote: Culinary Memory, Migration, And Changing Foodways In A Cretan–Turkish Household, Sedef Özgönül Donuktan

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper explores the difference between daily eating habits (what is “eaten”) and handwritten recipe notebooks (what is “written”) within a Cretan-Turkish kinship network influenced by migration and resettlement. By combining oral history interviews with five women and analysing 242 notebook recipes, the study shows that these handwritten books are not just passive records of daily meals. Instead, they serve as selective domestic archives shaped by a “festive bias,” standardisation, and social value. The research indicates that while routine meals (such as stews) depend on embodied, unrecorded knowledge, the notebooks mainly contain special dough recipes using modern industrial ingredients like …

A Sisyphean Carrot In Waiting For Godot, Thierry Dubost

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

In Waiting for Godot, Beckett employs a variety of strategies to expose what it means to be human. Among them, one notes a recurring emphasis on eating scenes that reflect a lurking existential crisis illustrated by the characters’ failure to follow expected standards of commensality. In this respect, if one refers to Brillat-Savarin’s maxim “Tell me what kind of food you eat and I will tell you what kind of man you are,” one could start from physiological features that are given pride of place in the play to ponder over the importance of unexpected forms of nourishment as revealing …

Objects Of Wartime Resistance And Food Scarcity, Nathalie Cooke

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper considers closely three missives crafted by individuals suffering life- threatening duress during wartime incarceration, one during World War One, and two during the Second World War. Only one of these three survived beyond wartime. All three examples involve food: messages embroidered on or about the sourcing of daily bread or describing dishes that were available only in memory. Nevertheless, the very act of crafting objects to carry communications beyond the dire circumstances in which these prisoners of war found themselves embodied hope and defiance. While acknowledging and describing the very different contexts of each of these examples, I …

Crisis, Hope And The Headline: Agenda Setting In England’S Covid Food Story, Dayna Brackley

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Panic buying during Covid was a crisis of perception as much as supply. This paper builds on the mixed method content analysis of 209 articles and accompanying images from six high circulation English newspapers, March to July 2020, setting it in the context of calls for civil food resilience and the UK national food strategy. The research shows how the press framed food access, responsibility and risk at a pivotal turning point. Sensationalised language appeared in 89% of articles, 68% carried negative sentiment, and 64% of analysed images showed empty shelves. Supermarkets were the dominant voice, quoted in 62% of …

Gospodina: Performing State Motherhood And Alimentary Survival Gestures Of The 1980s Socialist Romania, Rares A. Craiut

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

GospodinA is an artistic research project exploring the domestic politics of food, care, and survival during the last decade of socialist Romania. Between 1980 and 1989, a period marked by chronic shortages and state-controlled food policies, daily cooking became an act of crisis management. The project investigates how gestures of cooking, queuing, preserving, and urban foraging constituted both invisible labour and quiet resistance within a system that sought to regulate bodies and appetites. Drawing on archival materials (state food propaganda, cookbooks, magazines) and oral histories collected from those who lived through this period, GospodinA re-enacts incomplete or improvised meals—“meals that …

Ukraine’S Wine Identity Is Being Shaped By War, Richie Brady, Vasylysa Yilmaz, Victoria Makarova

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has inflicted irreparable damage to Ukraine and its wine industry. Wineries have been invaded, occupied, and looted. Facilities have been deliberately destroyed, vineyards mined, and warehouses targeted. Increasingly, details regarding attacks are withheld by winemakers for security reasons. Infrastructural attacks, such as on Odesa’s seaport and electricity power-supplies, have furthered logistical and operational issues. Staffing difficulties have grown as men are drafted into the army or emigrate. Pressure on the industry has also increased as exports have decreased while imports have increased. Yet, Ukrainian wine has been described as thriving and as a metaphor for the …

Where Art Meets The Table: Food, Art, And Culture At The Intersection Of Crisis And Hope, Ciza Zoya

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Food is more than sustenance; it is a carrier of memory, identity, and power, shaping both belonging and exclusion. In contemporary art, food has emerged as a critical medium through which these tensions can be explored. This paper argues that food- based art operates at the intersection of crisis and hope, revealing how everyday practices of cooking, sharing, and eating both reflect social hierarchies and create possibilities for connection. Drawing on anthropological perspectives, contemporary art theory, and the author’s own artistic practice, the paper examines how food functions as a social structure shaped by gender, class, caste, and colonial histories. …

“It’S The End Of The World As We Know It” And I Feel Hungry: Food In Dystopian And Utopian Fictional Futures, Deirdre Murphy, Maureen Costura

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

In dystopian fantasy fiction and the more recent subgenre of hopepunk, representations of food—growing and scavenging it, preparing and eating it—reveal distinct but evolving perspectives on the collapse of human societies facing environmental, political, and economic disasters. As we examine these bodies of literature, contrasts abound. There is never enough food in dystopian fantasy. What is available is bland, repetitive, and dubiously nutritious. Trauma around food is ongoing. Scavenging highlights the anxiety of diminishing resources, while consumption is either solitary and lonely, or shared among small and struggling groups where meals only contribute to abiding grief. In all, food insecurity …

A European Narrative Of Redemption And Hope In The Wine Sector: Fra I Monti – A Case Study, Francesco D'Ausilio

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The paper focuses on the story of the Fra i Monti winery in Terelle, a small village located in Italy's Comino Valley, in the province of Frosinone, about 110 km southeast of Rome. This is a paradigmatic territory of agricultural Italy, where between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, industrialisation and urbanisation shaped the figure of the “metal- mezzadro,” half factory worker and half farmer in the fields, leading to the progressive abandonment of the countryside because it did not offer a secure salary and to the relentless disappearance of farming and wine-making traditions. The paper addresses the theme of …

Dream Pastries Of Despair And Wines Of Optimism: An Analysis Of Food And Drink As Emotive Narrative Devices In Dungeons And Dragons’ Curse Of Strahd, Carina Mansey, Mickey Cripps-Wells, Obie Tanner

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The collaborative fantasy tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons has gained heightened popularity in recent years. However, the role of food and drink as narrative devices that shape player emotions has received limited scholarly attention. This paper addresses this gap by examining the official adventure module Curse of Strahd, which guides players through the gothic horror setting of Barovia, a realm within the “Domain of Dread.” In this bleak and nightmarish landscape, players encounter foodstuffs designed to evoke feelings of fear, disgust, and longing, while experiencing fleeting moments of hope through acts of perceived charitable reprieve and symbolic resistance amid …

How To Feed A Hungry Home: Re-Homing Architecture Through Material And Place-Based Food Practices, Sinéad Lim

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This research reframes the contemporary housing crisis as a homing crisis, suggesting that the issue extends beyond inadequate supply to a disruption of dwelling, belonging, and place. It identifies a parallel fracture within architectural practice, where increasing abstraction, digital mediation, and globalised material systems have distanced architects from embodied making, site, and relational exchange. To explore how architecture might be re-oriented toward practices of re-homing, the project adopts a practice-led methodology informed by food-based systems, where material, place, and labour remain inseparable. Two immersive residencies form the core of the research: one at a rural cookery school in Ireland and …

Revisiting The Siyez Case: Can We Take A Lesson From Its Exploitation, Learn From The Sorgül Wheat Project, And Hope For A Better Future For Ancient Wheat Landraces?, Aylin Öney Tan, Ebru Baybara Demir

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Revisiting the siyez case: Can we take a lesson from its exploitation, learn from the Sorgül Wheat Project, and hope for the better in future? Türkiye is home to the earliest varieties of wheat, some of which are still cultivated or grow wild in remote landscapes of Anatolia. Siyez (Triticum monococcum) has been a staple crop for thousands of years. However, over time, other wheat varieties took over, dominating the market with their higher yield. Siyez was no longer considered commercially valuable and was only grown by peasants for their own consumption or as livestock feed. However, a few decades …

“The Last Fish”: Environmental Collapse And Food Crisis In Pink Slime (2024) By Fernanda Trías, Pepa Lago

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

At the end of Pink Slime (2024) by Uruguayan writer Fernanda Trías, the unnamed narrator/protagonist eats tuna from a can and drops the empty container in the river, where it “floated for a moment until the water found its way in and dragged it to the bottom.” This scene mirrors the opening of the novel, when a fisherman releases back into the water a fish “so slight that it made no noise as it broke the surface. The last fish.” The presence of the fish, first as a live being and then as a preserved, shelf-stable foodstuff, frame the dystopian …

Hat Hand Boot: An Essay In The Form Of A Shared Meal, Emerald Wise, D'Arcy Newberry-Dupré, Niyanta Sharma, Wesley Hauler

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This paper is three-fold. The first section enacts a process of “fielding,” generating what might appear as a genealogy of practitioners, but is rather an interdisciplinary collection of precedents, that when drawn into relation, constitute a field—defined by yet redefining each precedent. The field that is drawn into relation here uncovers a compulsion toward planetary healing in the post-war period—a compulsion that appears to have been reactivated today. Each of the practitioners that are touched on have, in some way, whether intentionally or not, played a role in healing our connection to the moment, to ourselves, and to our environments …

Hospitality And Its Discontents, Alice Julier

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Amidst the many food system crises facing us in the 21st century – from famine as a war strategy to the retrenchment of public funding for food aid and food security – the question of hospitality might seem trivial.  That said, public hospitality – service (and care) through the provision of food in commercial sites outside the home – is deeply connected to the inequalities that shape who is entitled to food, sustenance, and support in societies driven by global capitalism.  Service, the “house” in which commercialized hospitality lives, is one of the largest and poorly renumerated sectors of employment …

“Can You Describe It?”: A Teacher-Researcher’S Reflections On Crisis And Hope, Christy Shields-Argelès

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Drawing on experiences as a Franco-American food anthropologist and enseignant-chercheur, this paper reflects on crisis and hope through two encounters: Jenny, a novice anthropology student navigating culture shock in a Parisian café, and René, a newly retired Comté farmer learning descriptive tasting on a sensory panel, the jury terroir. Reframing crisis as a threshold – a liminal space of encounter between different systems of meaning – the paper proposes thick description as a methodology for dwelling productively within such moments. Hope, in turn, is understood not as naïve optimism, but as the opening of new perceptual and relational perspectives …

The Restaurant Pressure Cooker: Surviving Volatile External Threats, Mark Traynor, David S. Martin, Andrew Moreo

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Restaurants in the United States operate amid political and economic disruptions and mounting crises threatening their viability. These disruptions include changes in immigration enforcement, tariffs, labor laws, inflation, COVID-19 aftereffects, ongoing labor shortages, rising operating costs, and household living expenses, all of which reduce consumer demand. These forces disrupt staffing, increase input costs, strain supplier reliability, and alter service models. This ongoing study explores how restaurant managers interpret and respond to these pressures to maintain operations. The project considers the current operating environment as a source of disruption and crisis within modern food systems, linking these shocks to specific managerial …

“Good” Food And Crises In Civic Engagement: The Need For Foodways Pedagogies In Communication Studies Classrooms, Ashli Q. Stokes

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The study of foodways has been embraced as a heuristic pedagogical tool in higher education, with courses such as “Taco Literacy” springing up on campus. Communication Studies, too, sees food as more than ingredients, creating a system of meaning, shaping identities, and helping people navigate and negotiate their daily lives. This presentation argues that experiential food studies pedagogies offer one example of how to foster civic engagement, part of the pedagogical core of the communication discipline. At a fraught time in public discourse, foodways pedagogies are needed urgently to help build civic knowledge that shapes views about public issues, increases …

Wars, Hurricanes, And Volcanoes: Community Cookbooks And The Politics Of Disaster Relief, Maria Paz Moreno

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The community charitable cookbook originated in the United States after the Civil War. Since then, this model of fundraising has become popular both in the United States and around the world, often adapted to suit different purposes. Although community charitable cookbooks are traditionally put together to benefit various social causes, they sometimes go beyond the purely charitable to serve other goals, like preserving cultural traditions, promoting social change, or sustaining collective identity within diasporic communities. My paper focuses on community cookbooks created with the goal of fundraising for disaster relief. I will examine not only their charitable motivations, but also …

Crisis And Hope On The Page: Cookbooks And Culinary Resilience In 1980s Poland, Marzena Keating

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

The 1980s in Poland were defined by shortages, rationing, and the constant struggle to provide meals under conditions of scarcity. Cookbooks published during this period promoted resourcefulness, substitution, and waste avoidance, embedding frugality into everyday cooking. As Kazimiera Pyszkowska notes, “the crisis-induced rationing of certain products and portions that are sometimes insufficient for the body's needs can easily result in significant nutritional deficiencies if food is not managed wisely” (Economically and Deliciously, 1984, 3). Strategies once born of necessity—creative use of leftovers, preservation techniques, and rational management of food—now find echoes in global efforts to reduce waste and build sustainable …

The Rubble Of Words: Food As A Device For Silence In A Time Of Polycrisis, Jennie Moran

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

On the night of 03 August 2024, Adam Kelwick, the imam from the Abdullah Quillian Society Mosque in Liverpool crossed police lines and presented anti-immigration protesters with burgers and chips prepared in the mosque kitchen. This took place in the aftermath of the Southport stabbings and the worst outbreak of civil disorder in Britain for more than a decade. “We decided to deal with those people who came to protest against us in a way which we hoped could open up hearts and minds. We wanted to cook food for them.” This paper will examine the power of food to …

“...Coco Puffs For Dinner?”: Exploring Factors Influencing Meal Patterns, Food Choices, And Solo Dining Experiences Of International Students In Dublin Through Photovoice And Photo Elicitation, Disha Naik

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Moving abroad to study is, for many international students, a moment of crisis. Established routines are broken, familiar foodways are left behind, and the daily challenges of cultural adaptation, social isolation along with limited resources affect their food choices. Studies have shed light on the effects of cultural adaptation on foodways among international students (Sergile 2023). While some focus on solo dining experiences, this study focuses on factors that influence meal patterns, food choices, and solo dining experiences in international students in Dublin. Using a blend of two visual qualitative methods; photovoice and photo elicitation interviews, the study engaged with …

Oxo Made With Milk: The Trials Of The Colonial Housewife, Igor Cusack

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Colonisation may be seen as an essentially male process, imposing Western notions of household organization and gender on native women and on the colonial housewife. This is all part of the ideology of domesticity which permeated British colonial societies from the late nineteenth century until the independence of African states in the mid twentieth century. In this paper I will examine how food was used to combat various medical crises in British colonial Africa. The paper considers cookery books from South Africa, Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, Kenya, Nyasaland, Ghana and West Africa, focussing on sections entitled “for the invalid,” “invalid dishes” or …

Hospitality In Crisis: Deciphering Food Insecurity Among Migrants From A Derridean Perspective, Alexandra Constantinescu, Naz Ali

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Food insecurity faced by disadvantaged groups of migrants (i.e., voluntary migrants living in low-income households and forced migrants – namely asylum seekers) undermines the nature of hospitality, creating conditions of inhospitableness associated with hunger, injustice, insecurity, and poverty. This study presents a critical interpretation of hospitality in crisis by concentrating on food insecurity resulting from government and non-government food policies in England, that are inhospitable towards forced migrants – contributing to an area of enquiry with limited research in food and hospitality studies. The study draws on the teachings of Jacques Derrida, particularly his philosophical perspective on (in)hospitality/hostipitality, with conceptualisations …

Food In Dinneen’S Foclóir Gaedhilge Agus Béarla, John D. Mulcahy

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Inspired by the work of the late Manchán Magan, this paper examines Irish food and hospitality through the lens of historical lexicography using the 1927 edition of Fr Patrick Dinneen’s Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla as a linguistic “time capsule”. By examining Irish words connected with everyday eating, the paper traces how these words embody resilience, reciprocity, and hope in the face of recurring crises such as famine, emigration, and political upheaval. The paper also draws attention to roles associated with food provision and banqueting, underlining the long-standing importance of hospitality in Irish society. This approach uncovers how hospitality was understood …

Opening Session, Dgs Committee

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Opening Session

Welcome - Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire, Chair, Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Official Opening - Orla McDonagh, Dean, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, TU Dublin

Living the Symposium Ethos - Máirtín Mac Con Iomaire

Keynote Address - Rupa Marya - "Food as Weapon/ Food as Medicine"

Gallagher's Boxty House Student Gastronomy Awards - Pádraic Óg Gallagher and Anke Klitzing - awarded to Sophie Weight and Josephina Quinn

Peter Hertzmann Award for the best paper in Food and Techne: Techniques, Technology and Technicalities - Anke Klitzing - winner announced on the day