CFP for Gastronomica

Call for Papers: “Saving Food”

Gastronomica Vol. 19 Issue 3

The new Gastronomica editorial collective seeks proposals for a forthcoming special issue that explores the many entwined meanings of ‘saving food’ – from preservation to curation to nostalgia to archiving to salvation. Can the many meanings of ‘saving’ help us understand in new ways the intersections of food pleasures, politics, and production and the overlap between activism, cooking, museum and archival practice, and the constant race to cook and prepare foods before they rot?

From wrapping leftovers in plastic wrap to fermenting ingredients to curating museum exhibits to creating seed libraries and archives, we all ‘save’ our food. Beyond preserving, fermenting, freezing, drying, and smoking, does food – its traditions, its materials, and its products – need saving? We often worry that food is being lost – as generations age, as strains of crops are rendered extinct, as the climate changes, and as food industries proliferate. We envision ways of preserving food traditions, regional iterations of cuisines and recipes, ingredients, seeds, products, and more through an astonishing array of strategies from small-scale seed and recipe exchanges, family and community cookbooks, seed banks, and museum collecting. Efforts to ‘save’ food have their long antecedents in the transmission and mobility of food products, recipes, and knowledge. Can those histories provide new understandings for contemporary anxiety about the loss of both bio and culinary diversities?

Can food, as well, save us? How is food mobilized as a strategy of, for example, national and community belonging, a form of urban or economic development, an example of intangible cultural heritage, and, as well, a means to physical and social salvation?

In entwining the many meanings of food as something that is saved and something that saves, this special issue seeks creative written and visual scholarship, reflection pieces, and ‘features’.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Seed saving and banks
Climate change and culinary diversity
Food and nostalgia
Indigenous food practices, their reconfigurations and knowledge transmissions
Museum and archival practice
Food preservation and fermentations
Food and economic, social, and community development
Cookbook and recipe practices
Intergenerational transfer: knowledge, practice, resources (including material and symbolic)
Food and cultural heritage
Food supply chains, freshness, food safety
Food waste, including food rescue and freeganism.