Wendy Wills, Chair, BSA Food Study Group and Conference Commitee

It is very satisfying to know that so many people enjoyed this year’s conference – I’ve had so many emails from grateful, happy, inspired delegates, on top of the many who personally passed on their thanks during the conference that this kind of event exists. I think the conference particularly inspires those from a public health, nutrition or dietetics background who often have little access or time to find out about social scientific research on food and eating. I also hope, though, that academics and researchers from the social sciences found the event useful – in terms of providing a forum and an audience specifically interested in food and I also hope that such colleagues find it useful to discuss their work with a multi-disciplinary audience. Am I right? Please let me know!

By the end of the conference my appetite for reflective, philosophical and theoretical perspectives, rather than the merely descriptive or empirical offerings, was almost sated – though there is definitely scope for further improvement. We, as a network, need to keep digging to debate ‘what it all means’ – theories need revisiting (it was nice to hear mentions of Durkheim though!), new theories perhaps need developing and we need to keep talking to each other to make this happen (not to mention making time to think and reflect….which is getting more and more difficult!).

The conference particularly made me think about whether there is a need to keep collecting new data or whether we need a rigorous exploration of the data that already exists – within our own archives as well as within the national data archive (http://www.esds.ac.uk/) – and the need to share and discuss such data with each other to interrogate all the possibilities for new insights. I also wondered about the reliance within qualitative studies on individual interviews and focus groups – could the same results be achieved through email discussion and social networking with/between participants? I think so… and Sarah Nettleton’s paper on analysing data from the Mass Observation archive (http://www.massobs.org.uk/accessing_material_online.htm) gave me hope that there is rich description to be mined from giving individuals the opportunity to tell us about themselves, in their own time and space. And in these cash-strapped and uncertain times, saving money on data collection, and applying for smaller research grants can only be a good thing.

 I had a niggling concern during the conference that all the wonderful talk and discussion about food systems, farming, urban agriculture and rural livelihoods outweighed reflection on how this ‘joins up’ with the everyday – there were some excellent papers on domestic food practices, for example, but this was not joined up with the other topics I’ve just described – for most people, for most of the time, despite growing awareness of the need for sustainable food systems and some truly excellent local initiatives to improve access to tasty, unprocessed food – food will continue to be bought in large supermarkets. Can this be tackled? Should it be? It makes me nervous to think that a concentration on sustainability and food security will not tackle the bigger picture and that there will be a (further) polarisation between supermarket and non-supermarket shoppers which will particularly stigmatise families from lower social class groups. Food for thought… and I’d welcome some feedback on this – I didn’t (of course!) hear all 60+ papers at the conference so perhaps some of those I didn’t hear tackled some of these issues?

What else did I enjoy at this year’s conference? Sheila Dillon’s reflections during the drinks reception were amusing and insightful and it was a real pleasure to meet Sheila after listening to her for a good many years on BBC Radio 4’s Food Programme. I enjoyed meeting up with old friends and meeting a few new ones; the food! (what did you think?), the refreshing non-alcoholic cocktails (hope you enjoyed my insistence on avoiding cartons of lukewarm orange juice!) and working with Jude and Polly at the British Library – they are an absolute joy to work with and their passion for promoting the social sciences fuels my own. Whilst an awful lot of effort goes into making these conferences happen – I get to work with an amazing, supportive committee – I can’t wait to start planning the 2012 conference!!

Plan B organic farm is less than an hour’s drive (outside peak traffic) from the centre of metropolitan Toronto. As its name implies, it intends to be around when everyone understands that Plan A is failing. Plan A is industrial agriculture, whose costs are now exceeding its manifest benefits.  

This is the consensus of a UN assessment of agricultural knowledge, science, and technology that is not getting the attention it deserves. The report’s assessment of best available evidence concludes that food security, sustainability, and livelihoods are threatened by industrial farming systems; the better direction to support all three goals is to foster farming systems which are knowledge-intensive and which redirect scientific research towards a partnership with farmers, rather than displacing farmers and their experience of adapting to changing conditions with one-size-fits-all systems based on machines and agrochemicals.  

Even the benefits of industrial farming are increasingly in question. The industrial system has succeeded, even exceeded, at producing vast quantities of wheat, maize, and soybeans, so much so that efforts to use up the latter two in particular have ended in a spiral of poverty, environmental degradation, risky dependence on a shrinking genetic base for food crops and animals, and chronic diseases. This has made it more rare for mixed farms to produce nutrient rich vegetables and fruit. Supermarkets have taken over from farmers’ markets, and even High Street shops, and find it convenient to source large quantities no matter what the distance. The result is a two-tiered food system, with lots of unhealthy foods available at the lowest prices and healthy foods more and more difficult or expensive to get. Even the cheap food, however, is vulnerable to the complete dependence of industrial farming on fossil energy, not only to drive the machines but also to make the industrial fertilizers and pesticides. Prices of maize, soybeans, wheat and especially rice spiked in 2008, mostly due to financial speculation, but consumer prices have not fallen in line with prices on international commodity exchanges.  

The new issue arising from this new pattern of abundance and scarcity is health, and the new health problem is obesity. In countries like the UK and Canada, the poor, not the rich, are fat, and fat is no longer a sign of affluence (remember the kings of England who died of “surfeits” of various rich or rare foods?) but of poverty. As popular books and films are increasingly making the public aware, excess quantities of maize and soybeans have led to industrial livestock operations, where they are used for feed. These systems degrade the lives of animals, their wastes are unmanageable pollutants rather than lovely fertilizers, and their concentration of animals requires antibiotics and inspires growth hormones. These operations circle back to create ever growing demand for monocultural fields of maize and soybeans.  

By-products of animal feeds make sweeteners and fats available in large quantities, and these, plus salt, appeal to the decultured eaters in focus groups for food industries. The result – prepared foods with the new basic food groups: fats, sugars and salt, plus residues of agrotoxins necessary in single crop systems, and various multisyllabic chemicals to keep these edible commodities stable during shipping and storage.  

To complete the circle, industrial farming displaces farmers with centuries of experience and practical knowledge, and commitment to a long view: maximizing production and income, even for capitalist farmers of the 18th century, took second place to “improving” what used to be called “the heart of the soil.” As farmers move into other occupations, more steps of transporting, selling, preparing, shopping, cooking and shared meals have become profit centres. The jobs they hire people to do are less rewarding on the whole (even acknowledging the unfair burden on women of doing much of this for no pay at all). Food manufacturing and services offer mostly poor pay and conditions, contributing to the decline of good jobs throughout so-called rich countries. The result: many people have less time and money to shop and cook healthy foods, and buy the edible commodities on offer.  

Where do the rich get nutrient-rich foods, such as fruits, vegetables, and increasingly, fish? The global South is becoming a “farm” supplying these to the rich of all countries. This means they have less and less access to these foods themselves. Farmers who used to grow many foods in diverse farming systems are stuck if they specialize in selling one variety of cucumber to a UK supermarket chain, which then for any reason fails to accept or collect them. Cucumbers may be rich in nutrients but no one would recommend them as a dietary staple. Even less fresh cut flowers.  

People are being pushed off the land in favour of “efficient” farming more or less like that of the North. While most one- and two-dollar a day people targeted for international aid (whether or not it is forthcoming), live in rural areas, they are more likely to be able to access fresh fruits and vegetables directly or through local markets than people forced to enter “the planet of slums.” As wealth shifts around the world, another force contributes to the “global enclosure” of the remaining small farmers of the world. Land deals between governments shift huge areas of farmland in South America and Africa away from local markets in favour of export to countries only beginning to source as traditional countries of the North have done, mainly China, India, and the Gulf States.  

The “nutrition transition” is the name for an extraordinary shift in human diets brought about by industrial foods across the world. The image of rich countries getting fat while poor countries stay thin is no longer accurate if it ever was. Now equal numbers of people in the global South suffer from “over-nutrition” as “undernutrition.” Of course, even more suffer from over-nutrition, now called obesity, in the global North. The South is “catching up” to the North’s appalling preventable diets of nutrient poor foods because more people have to shop for foods where price trumps health, and markets are dominated by supermarkets, even in cities of Africa, Asia, and especially South America.   

This is where Plan B comes in. Plan B is not alone. Many exciting initiatives are building a new food system in the cracks of the industrial system in Ontario, the largest province in Canada. These include box schemes, creative ways to link aging farmers with young farmers-in-training, and most exciting in an age of cultural diversity, renewal of the crops and cuisines of cultures settling in kaleidoscopic mixes in global cities, and even in small towns, villages, and countrysides. As the cracks widen, policies are coming into focus to shift the whole system towards a tipping point.  

Three policy initiatives are beginning in Ontario, focused on the “Golden Horseshoe” – the most densely populated region with the richest farmland and the largest city (Toronto) in Canada. Toronto and Ontario have always looked to Britain, since Tim Lang (then of the London Food Commission) came to talk to the founders of the Toronto Food Policy Council in the early 1990s. Now Sustain Ontario, inspired by Sustain in the UK, is at once the result and the centre of one of these initiatives. Still, every place has a unique social, economic, geographical, and policy context, so there is much to share.  

The top official in the Toronto Public Health department, Dr. David McKeown, plans to present to Toronto City Council, in June, a Food Strategy, which will embed food system thinking throughout municipal government. After almost two decades of work by Public Health staff and volunteer members of the Toronto Food Policy Council, all sorts of initiatives are suddenly coming into view and into mutual connections. The Food Strategy focuses on healthy citizens and healthy communities. Its proposals range from municipal organic waste recycling, to making healthy food available to all regardless of income, to making “food friendly neighbourhoods”, to creative food economies, to food literacy in the schools. The Food Strategy builds on existing initiatives in public, private, and social sectors, showing how to leverage them to fill in the policy cracks through which food often falls, and to join up to work towards a tipping point for healthy food policies.  

‘Menu 2020’ is the result of a sustained effort by the charitable Metcalf Foundation to support food system change. It sponsored a report called “Food Connects Us All” in 2008. Based on that overview of issues and initiatives, Metcalf created a new organization, Sustain Ontario, and made a call for proposals to study specific obstacles and opportunities for food system change. Those studies in turn are now being integrated into the Menu 2020 report, which is subtitled “Ten Good Ideas for Ontario.” This study is not restricted by the jurisdictional boundaries of Toronto. Its findings complement the Food Strategy, widening it to emphasize the farming part of the food system. It suggests ways to recreate local infrastructure of vegetable and fruit processing and abbatoirs, which have been displaced by supermarket supply chains reaching towards large suppliers; to make supply management accessible to small farmers and local markets; to support sustainable farming by paying farmers for environmental services; and to encourage urban and peri-urban agriculture. On the community side, it suggests ways to educate for food literacy; to create Community Food Centres modelled on a successful pioneer CFC; to expand public procurement; to relink food with health, and to plan for these and other changes that will arise as these are implemented.  

FoodShare Toronto, the oldest social venture in food security in Canada, is leading a campaign among a wide alliance of private, public, and social groups for food education in the schools. Called ‘Recipe for Change,’ it seeks to make food literacy mandatory at all levels in the public schools, and to make this practical as well as abstract. Gardens and cooking will be part of this. The efforts of community gardeners, chefs and others, including FoodShare, to pioneer school programmes, have built examples and allies within schools and communities. Obstacles related to land, kitchens, teacher training, and of course, funding, are many, but the time is right. This initiative makes space for initiatives like Plan B to deepen their educational activities.   

A different food system is possible.

With thanks to Jessica Mitchell, editor, The Food Magazine, for granting permission to publish this piece here.

On day 1, Monday 5^th July, at 12:45 – 13:30 ( Meeting Room 4) we do hope you will bring your lunch and come along to meet the study group/conference convenors at the BSA FOOD STUDY GROUP  BUSINESS MEETING AND MEET & GREET.  This session will provide an overview of the activities of the BSA Food Study Group and will give delegates the opportunity to voice their suggestions for future meetings and conferences.

• Should the 2012 Food, Society and Public Health conference be held in Scotland? Who would you like to see as plenary speakers?
• What meetings would you like to see organised – or can help to organise – over the next year or two? Bring along your ideas!
• What sessions should the Food Study Group organise at the 2011 BSA Annual Conference at the London School of Economics, which will celebrate 60 years of the BSA?
• Does the Food Study Group meet your needs? What else could we be doing to develop and promote the sociology of food?
• Would you like to join the organising committee of the Food Study Group?

This session will also be helpful if you are alone at the conference and would like to get to know other delegates ahead of the evening’s drinks reception and poster session.

Sheila Dillon

We are delighted to announce that Sheila Dillon will attend the Poster Session and Drinks Reception and present a short ‘viewpoint’ about her observations about food in/from the UK and elsewhere.  

Sheila Dillon is the presenter of BBC Radio 4′s The Food Programme.  She comes from Hoghton, Lancashire, the village where in 1603 a drunken James VI of Scotland, en route to take the throne of England, knighted the loin of beef he was served in HoghtonTower’s banqueting hall—hence Sirloin. Sheila says the story may be apocryphal but it shows that good food has long been taken seriously in her part of the country.

Sheila has had a varied career but it was in the US 20 years ago when she understood what she really wanted to do – cover the subject of food: the pleasures of eating it and the politics of producing it. She became associate editor of Food Monitor magazine. Moving back to London , she heard Derek Cooper present the BBC’s Food Programme, and knew that working there would be the perfect job. She was hired as a reporter in 1987, and a year later became senior producer. She and Derek won awards for investigative reporting and features about BSE, the food system in Russia and Ukraine after the collapse of communism, the science of the new fats, the development of organic farming, bioengineered foods and supermarket power. Last year Sheila won the Glenfiddich Award for best broadcast for a programme on food & poverty, produced by Jessica Mitchell. Sheila also created Veg Talk, BBC Radio 4’s interactive grocery show.

Institution:   Aberystwyth University

1. Tell us a bit about the paper/poster you will be presenting at the conference

This paper demonstrates the value of changing popular conceptions of food.  Taking a semiotic approach, the paper is entitled ‘Conceptualising Food as Death’.  This is clearly a provocative title, but also establishes, I believe, a sound trope for the purpose of re-evaluating our existing food provision systems.   Food has been conceptualised in a number of ways, each with their own values and politics.  I would argue that the dominant trope in affluent societies is  where food is seen as a commodity, to the detriment of its nurturing, and nourishing purposes.  Drawing on radical environmental political philosophies I show that where food is prioritised as commodity, commercial/industrial food practices promote death –  of the body, of  communities and of the natural world.  This  trope privileges the destructive aspect of food over others such as pleasure, identity and nurturing, and challenges the positive assumptions supporting the trope of food as commodity.    

 2. What got you interested in this area?

Five or six years ago I was reading one of the Sunday papers, which included an article about supermarket practices.  The example that stays with me is where one of the major supermarket chains air freighted asparagus, grown in Norfolk, to an African country, where utterly exploited African women received a pittance for tying 5 spears of asparagus together with a chive.  The asparagus bundles where then packed and flown back to the UK.  I was, and am, outraged by the total disrespect shown to both humans and the planet at large, and decided then and there that someday I would do research into the politics of food.  Since I was already very interested in radical environmental political philosophies, it seemed natural to look at each in the context of the other and a PhD proposal evolved.  ‘Conceptualising Food as Death’ is the place where my PhD emerges.

3. What are you hoping to get out of the conference?

The idea that everyone at the conference is interested in more about food than merely eating it, and yet approaches the subject from so many different angles, really excites me.  I’m hoping to meet like minded people, and also people to disagree with.  I strongly believe that it is useful and important to conceptualise food in the way that I am promoting, but recognise that there are other useful and important ways of conceptualising food and am interested in other peoples’ take on the subject.  Finally, the conference is an excellent reason for revisiting and updating my paper.

4. Which single book, article or academic has most influenced your approach to the research area about which you are presenting?

Lang, T. & Heasman, M.  (2004)  ‘Food Wars: The Global Battle for Mouths Minds and Markets’  London, Earthscan.    I read this when I was beginning to put my ideas on food and environmental philosophy together, and it has been a major factor in the development of my research.  Lang & Heasman identify 3  different food production paradigms , and argue that the current paradigm (productionist)  has devastating effects on human and environmental health, and is unsustainable.  It will eventually be superseded by one of the others. (Ecologically Integrated or Life Sciences Integrated).   I was interested primarily in the Ecologically Integrated Paradigm, but discovered that the main focus was on existing food systems, the other paradigms were ‘merely’ sketched out as possible futures.  Whilst this is an undeniably excellent book, it hadn’t done what I wanted, and I decided I would have to write it myself.

Name:  Richard Hyde

Institution:  University of Nottingham

1. Tell us a bit about the paper/poster you will be presenting at the conference

At the conference I will be looking at the ‘Scores on the Doors’ initiative, which aims at giving the public information about the food hygiene practices of establishments that sell food, such as restaurants. My paper focuses on how the scheme changes how consumers and businesses act, and how the benefits that the scheme is meant to provide might not be playing out in the manner expected. I also explore the potential benefits and potential problems with the scheme from the perspective of local authorities, based on qualitative interviews conducted with environmental health officers. This throws up some interesting insights into the influence that this scheme may have on the methods of regulating compliance with food hygiene regulation, and, more generally, on the way that local authorities carry out food safety enforcement functions.

2. What got you interested in this area?

I got interested in food during my practice as a solicitor, when I work for a number of food law clients, and was involved in a number of cases about both food hygiene and the branding, advertising and marketing of food. My interest deepened when I returned to university to undertake a PhD that looks at the law enforcement by local authorities, and found that many of the most innovative practices aimed at ensuring businesses comply with the law for the benefit of consumers are found in the food arena. As well as scores on the doors, local authorities are devoting resources to support of food businesses in their area, and are, in many cases, acting as business advisors to small businesses, providing them with compliance and risk management information that would not otherwise be available to them. This preponderance of interesting practice, along with the social, economic and cultural importance of food has ensured that food is a stimulating and interesting area to be working in, albeit an area that  has in the past suffering from a lack of attention from socio-legal scholars. I hope to start addressing this lack of insight through my PhD, and continue to do so in future.

3. What are you hoping to get out of the conference?

I am looking forward to using the conference as an opportunity to receive feedback on my work from colleagues working in the food sphere, and to interact with those with similar interests to me.  Meeting those who can offer different insights and perspectives on my work will undoubtedly benefit my writing in the long run, as well as providing an interesting and stimulating conference experience.

4. What do you think will be the ‘next big thing’ in research on food, society and public health?

I think research into the governmental efforts to control diet may become more prominent in future. For example, the recent US Healthcare bill contained provisions mandating that particular restaurants disclose the calorific content of their food to consumers prior to purchase, and, in the UK, the various ‘traffic light’ systems are being used to disclose nutritional information about food brought in supermarkets. Research into the impact of these regulatory and self-regulatory innovations and their impact on the behaviour of individuals and the collective health of the nation is likely to disclose interesting results, which may influence the methods which are chosen in future to achieve health goals that are seen as desirable.

We are really pleased to welcome the Food Standards Agency  to the conference and the blog. Here, Helen Atkinson introduces the Agency’s presentation at the conference and tells us more about the work of the Social Science Research Unit.

We are delighted to be taking part in the BSA’s biennial food conference this summer and equally pleased to be invited to tell you about our presentation for the event, a little bit on who we are, the wider work we do and the ways that you can engage with us.

The conference

At the conference, we will be talking about a piece of research that we are commissioning in collaboration with the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). The ESRC and the Food Standards Agency (FSA or Agency) formed a strategic partnership in 2008 to fund a number of activities to develop the social science evidence base on food. The first project to be undertaken as part of the strategic partnership is being carried out by the Thomas Coram Research Unit at the Institute of Education (IoE) and will explore food practices in employed families with younger children.

The study involves secondary analysis of the Agency’s 2009 National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), the Health Survey for England and the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to examine, in relation to diet, the associations found in other studies between childhood overweight and parental employment. The analysis is complemented by an intensive study of 48 working families sampled from the NDNS and selected according to income level and the quality of children’s diets. This part of the study seeks to provide explanations for statistical associations found (or not found) in the survey data.

We aim to reflect on our experiences of commissioning a multidisciplinary study at the BSA event, and the use of Agency data not previously used for secondary analysis.

Who are we?

We are part of the social science unit (SSRU) at the FSA. The Unit was established in 2007 with an aim to help strengthen the Agency’s access to the social sciences in the same way that it already has with the physical and natural sciences.  Since its formation the unit has grown to 9 members and we each bring a range of different subject and methodological expertise. The unit is also a member of the professional service for social science in Government; Government Social Research (GSR).

Our work

Our work is focussed on four key activities: developing a social science research strategy; cross cutting and policy specific research; providing advice; provide a secretariat for the Social Science Research Committee which we have set up and contains a number of social science academic members.

Particular examples of work undertaken recently include the development of the Agency’s new flagship survey of people’s attitudes and behaviour towards food issues called ‘Food and You’.  The survey went into the field in 2010 and is expected to be carried out annually at the same time each year, so that we can measure if, and how, public attitudes and behaviours towards food issues change over time. We have also, and continue to, contribute to the ESRC’s longitudinal survey ‘Understanding Society’ and, last month,  hosted an exiting event at the British Library in partnership with the Academy of Social Sciences and ESRC. A ‘Register of Specialists’ has also been established in the last year to ensure we get independent expert social science advice on the work we commission and carry out, which is now flourishing.

Opportunities to engage with us

If you are interested in engaging with us further, the unit has two stakeholder mailing lists which you can sign up to. The first mailing list is for those interested in keeping up to date with the social science research (including economics) activities of the Agency.  Those signed up to this list will receive e-mail notification when the Agency publishes social science research evidence, hosts events, publishes papers from the Social science Research Committee and other social science research information that may be of interest. The second mailing list is specifically for organisations and specialists working in the social sciences to receive updates about Agency social science research procurement activities.

If you want to join either of the mailing lists then please email SSRU@foodstandards.gsi.gov.uk. Alternatively, please come and talk to us at the conference.

Name:  Nick Piper

Institution:  Sheffield University

1. Tell us a bit about the paper/poster you will be presenting at the conference

I will be talking about my proposed and ongoing PhD research that I am undertaking at Sheffield University as part of a project called ‘Consumer culture in an age of anxiety’ (CONANX) which is funded by the European Research Council.  My research focus is on TV food media and celebrity chefs with a particular emphasis on the things that can be learnt about different audiences through a discussion about Jamie Oliver. The relative explosion of food media has also seen the rise of celebrity chefs who are increasingly seen to communicate moral messages about food in addition to cookery advice and instruction. Given the popularity of these shows I think it is pertinent to assess something of their social significance, both as entertainment but also as cultural co-ordinates within a much broader web of relationships to food and social life. An essential aim of my project will be to ascertain how moral and culinary knowledge is co-produced through engagements with TV media. I am interested to find out how a differentiated audience make meaning and use of food television as it becomes entangled within different discursive and material contexts over a range of spaces and places.  

2. What got you interested in this area?

As a postgraduate student with an interest in geographies of consumption and the media I was naturally drawn towards the CONANX project as it allows me to explore how contemporary food media can be oriented amongst many other subjects of food and anxiety. I have developed an interest in food media by watching, reading and listening to it and wondering how significant and influential seemingly commonplace forms of pleasurable entertainment might be for people. The PhD scholarship allows me the opportunity to take that interest forward in a comprehensive way with the massive advantage of working in a very supportive and stimulating team environment. It is a fascinating privilege to join an experienced group of scholars working in diverse ways towards an understanding of food and social anxiety.      

3. What are you hoping to get out of the conference?

I’m very much looking forward to hearing the range of speakers and getting an idea for the directions that current research projects on food are going. I’m consistently impressed by the depth and breadth of academic work on food and I’m excited about getting to see researchers present their ideas in person along with the opportunities for learning and interaction that it will bring.

This conference will be a new experience for me as it will be my first time presenting at such a large and prestigious event. Having the chance to present at the British library is a fantastic opportunity for me to build my presentation skills and get a feel for the workings of professional conferences. I also hope to get some feedback on my PhD work which I can use to improve the critical quality of my project.  

 4. Which single book, article or academic has most influenced your approach to the research area about which you are presenting?

 Joanne Hollows work on celebrity chefs has been very interesting for me to read over the past few months, especially because she has written at length about the cultural significance of Jamie Oliver. I particularly like the way Joanne combines poignant descriptions of popular food media with interesting social and historical observations that demonstrate the ways in which culinary media might be classed, gendered and politicised. I also like the way Joanne draws attention to the discordance between the media image of the celebrity chef and the broader social figurations of gender, class and culinary life of those people watching. This, for me, has added weight and clarity to the idea of using contemporary food media as a sounding board to explore how people’s attitudes and behaviours towards food and each other are geographically situated.

Food and Photo by Willa Zhen

Name:  Willa Zhen

Institution: SOAS, University of London

1. Tell us a bit about the paper/poster you will be presenting at the conference

My presentation is based on my PhD project on cooking schools in Guangzhou, China.  I spent all of 2008-2009 in the field studying at vocational and ‘recreational’ cooking schools.  I am interested in how they teach and transmit culinary knowledge and how this knowledge influences local culinary culture and identity.  The paper I will be presenting focuses primarily on my experiences at what I call ‘recreational’ or amateur cooking schools – those with a domestic focus versus professional training institutes.

2. What got you interested in this area?

I find cooking schools and culinary training to be fascinating.  There are so many different layers to a cooking school, and the way the curriculum is structured at each of the schools I’ve studied at reveals much of the instructors think about local cuisine and their society at-large.  Also, there’s a rather limited amount of literature on this topic, so I figured it would be worthwhile to start filling in this gap starting with my PhD research.

3. What are you hoping to get out of the conference?

As a junior academic, I am just thrilled about the opportunity of presenting at this conference.  I’m looking forward to sharing a bit of my research with an audience of colleagues, and to get their feedback.  I’m always keen on hearing other perspectives on my work and how to make it more rigorous.  But I’m most excited to hear all the presentations and to meet the many academics whose works I’ve read and have shaped my own project.

4. What’s your favourite London restaurant (or food type) and why?

Since the conference will be held at the British Library, I’d like to name a few of my favorite places that are within a comfortable walking distance (20 minutes) of the venue.  The Espresso Room (www.theespressoroom.com) serves some of the best coffee in all of London.  It’s very easy to miss it, as it is quite literally a tiny room converted into a shop.  Another favorite is Bea’s of Bloomsbury (www.beasofbloomsbury.com) for their gorgeous cakes and afternoon teas.  Bloomsbury is also home to a very authentic Sichuanese restaurant called Chilli Cool (www.chillicool.com), which has become a favorite among spice fans and overseas students from China.