Resisting and Reviving Food Cultures

Resisting and Reviving Food Cultures is the third seminar of "Eating Well in Women's Creative Arts Bodies, Politics, Ecologies", a series of eight online seminars that together explore eating disorders, consumption and patriarchy, food cultures and placemaking, cannibalism, ecological crisis, multispecies worlds, and the politics of meat-eating. See our website for further details.

Date: Thursday, 13 January 2027, 5:00-6:30 PM GMT/ 4:00-5:30 PM CET
Location: Online

Speakers, Abstracts & Bio:

Claire Chambers, University of York: "Textual and Culinary Collection: Anthologizing the Forgotten Foods and Desi Delicacies of Muslim South Asia"

Abstract: In this paper I will discuss the two literary collections about food I have been a (co-)editor for: Desi Delicacies (2021) and Forgotten Foods (2023). Both books bring together essays, anecdotes, recipes, and reflections on food from South Asia, particularly from Muslim South Asia, in order to provide a unique perspective on the history and culture of food. They include contributions from authors, historians, chefs, and researchers, as well as little-known ingredients, life writing, and stories. The collections emerged from a Global Challenges research and public engagement project entitled ‘Forgotten Food: Culinary Memories, Local Heritage and Lost Agricultural Varieties in India’. Taken together, the anthologies discuss the cooking, serving, and eating of food, waste, servitude, and the supply chain in order to think through political issues. The curated essays focus on understanding personal experiences, reviving and preserving culinary traditions, and exploring the delicious diversity of regional cuisines. The essay collections are a celebration of gustatory culture, providing a way to bridge populations and create a new textual archive of food memories.

Biography: Claire Chambers is Professor of Global Literature at the University of York, where she teaches contemporary writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. She is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers, co-editor of Imagining Muslims in South Asia and the Diaspora and Translation and Decolonisation: Interdisciplinary Approaches, and co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write About Sex and Love. She published two paired monographs, Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780−1988 and Making Sense of Contemporary British Muslim Novels. Together these books narrate a literary history of Muslim writing in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Claire has also brought out such anthologies as Rivers of Ink, A Match Made in Heaven, Desi Delicacies, and Forgotten Foods. Her forthcoming monograph is Decolonizing Disease: Pandemics, Public Health, and Pathogenic Novels (Liverpool University Press, 2026). Claire’s research has been supported by funding from HEFCE, the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust. She publishes widely in such journals as Interventions and Contemporary Women’s Writing, and for over a decade acted as Editor-in-Chief of JCL: Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Valentine Lacoste, Sorbonne Université: "The Cook, the Writer, and the Painter: Women’s Creative Practices in the Bloomsbury Group"

Abstract: Criticism on food in Virginia Woolf’s work has long focused on the dinner scene in To the Lighthouse (1927). The famous meal is often read as the culmination of Mrs Ramsay’s “triumph” as hostess, yet Woolf also attributes artistic value to the dish itself, describing the boeuf en daube as the cook Mildred’s “masterpiece.” Moreover, as Harriet Blodgett has argued (1997), Woolf’s description of the dish invites an impressionistic mode of looking, suggesting unexpected affinities between cooking, painting and literary composition. My talk takes these converging forms of creation as a point of departure for exploring the figure of the cook across literary, visual, and archival Bloomsbury.

I will move between three kinds of material. The first is Woolf’s writings: her representation of two fictional cooks, Mildred in To the Lighthouse and Mrs Sands in Between the Acts (1941), as well as two little-known sketches, “The Cook” and the “Cook Sketch” (Dick 1997; Jones 2014), which help trace the shifting voice and place Woolf gives the cook. The second is Vanessa Bell’s paintings, with a focus on that of Grace Higgens, the cook at Charleston Farmhouse. The third is the traces we have of the Bloomsbury cooks themselves: Higgens, whose papers are held at the British Library, as well as Sophia Farrell, Nellie Boxall, and Louie Mayer, documented in portraits and memoirs, and in Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants (2007).

Taken together, this corpus reveals a network of women whose engagements with food unfolded across different media and class positions, yet were connected by a shared attention to food as something to make, observe, discuss, learn, and teach. I therefore propose to read cooking, writing, and painting as interconnected practices of making, revealing a continuum of women’s creative work that complicates conventional distinctions between intellectual and manual labour, the symbolic and the material, and ultimately between art and craft.

Biography: Valentine Lacoste is a doctoral student at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She graduated in English literature and is an alumna of Ferrandi, the French school of gastronomy. She has worked as an assistant editor on cookbooks and as a researcher at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, contributing blog entries dedicated to its gastronomic collections. Her doctoral research investigates the role of food in twentieth-century British literature, with a particular focus on the works of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and explores the culinary as a critical site of materiality, politics, and aesthetics. She has published on representations of fish as food in Virginia Woolf’s work in Sillages Critiques and is currently working on Forster’s contributions to the gastronomic periodical Wine and Food.

Organisers
This seminar series is organised by Phoebe Chetwynd (CY Cergy Paris Université) and Poulomi Choudhury (University College Dublin), with thanks to Héritages: culture/s, patrimoine/s, création/s.

Cover image by henry perks on Unsplash, free to use under the Unsplash License.