Raw and Undercooked

There are faint whiffs of spring lavender from the campus landscaped gardens as we enter the older of Durham University’s business school buildings. Inside, it smells of nothing. We weave around the inner hallway on the second floor to find our seminar room masquerading as a corporate boardroom. There are large glass windows on one wall so meeting participants can glimpse the courtyard and lavender bushes below. On the other wall, there are screens for PowerPoint or Zoom. In a corner of the room, a staff person has already set up coffee, tea, and packaged snacks. Participants arrive and, without prompting, begin arranging the food samples they brought from home onto the boardroom table. One plates biscuits, framing them with branches of cedar. Another lines up their collection of mate (the container to serve yerba mate, made traditionally of gourd, but also other materials), some of which are accompanied with a plain or decorative bombilla (metal or wooden drinking straw). Tesco supermarket strawberries in their plastic container appear on one side of the boardroom table, containers of ceremonial tea carefully gridded on a decorative cloth on the other.We were ready to begin a workshop on food studies for graduate students and staff members at Durham University (UK). We are all members of Gastronomica’s Editorial Collective and in May 2025, we held the second session of a two-part program to introduce graduate students and curious faculty members to food studies. This program was financed by the Cohort Development Fund of the Northern Bridge Consortium, a doctoral training partnership for universities in the north of the UK and Northern Ireland, funded by UKRI, the Arts and Humanities Research Council in December 2024, taking advantage of a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship held at Durham University by Daniel E. Bender. Despite the broad range of food-centered scholarship, there are no food studies programs in the institutions that are part of the consortium (Newcastle University, Durham University, Northumbria University, Queen’s University Belfast, Sunderland University, Teesside University, and Ulster University). A common theme among invited participants was that they had come to food by way of other disciplinary research projects.Over the twenty-five-year history of Gastronomica, we have witnessed how many authors have made similar meandering journeys to food studies. As members of the Editorial Collective, we know that only a minority of our authors teach or were trained in food studies programs. They come to their interests in food from a vast spectrum of disciplinary homes. Even among ourselves, Daniel E. Bender teaches in a food studies program, but he trained as a historian. H. Rosi Song came to food studies through Spanish cultural studies, and Janita Van Dyk is an anthropologist. When this Editorial Collective formed in 2019, we chose the subtitle The Journal for Food Studies to highlight that Gastronomica offered a home for, rather than a single definition of, food studies. Similarly, Gastronomica encourages imaginative and non-traditional food writing through our “Food Phenomena” section. Our workshops sought to make a space and opportunities for writing with and through food that reflects the comestible as a collaborative—not only in making but also mediating it in writing and research. By narrating this experience for our anniversary issue, we could illustrate and mark the process of how we came to food studies. As a writing exercise, it could also offer a roadmap to begin playing with food writing as we think about the next generation of writers and readers of Gastronomica.Like our work in the journal, our workshop was guided by key questions: How to do food studies and to envision our approaches without a shared set of literature, methods, or concerns? What does it mean to write food narratives in our scholarly work from the mediated worlds of our research materials? What emerges when we bring these foods into collaborative and individual engagements with food as a sensory, social, and often deeply personal substance for the communities with whom we research or through which we write? How could we invite early-career and established scholars to integrate food in all its dimensions into collaborative thinking and writing that does not require established terms or methods? In our initial meeting in December, we invited scholars to present work in progress to highlight how different disciplinary approaches and language could arrive at similar questions. Then, we sat down to dinner. The first step in food studies, we suggested, was gathering.For the May workshop, we envisioned a space in which we could take what we saw and learned during the December presentations into a writing workshop. We planned three activities, spread across four hours, where we would get participants to engage with thinking and writing about food. The first involved introductions and collecting keywords and themes arising from participants’ summaries of their research interests. The second was a “show-and-tell” of the foods or food-related tools everyone—participants and organizers—were invited to bring with them. We concluded the show-and-tell with a writing warm-up exercise on describing food and the senses. The third activity was a longer collaborative food-writing exercise telling the stories of a meal. Across each activity, we wanted to create a space where we could test some ideas about how we write and craft stories together with other scholars about and in the presence of food. Through tasting and writing together, we aimed to introduce a broad range of questions and alternative food writing modalities that make food studies scholarship so engaging. Gastronomica writes and pictures, rather than defines, food studies. Similarly, our workshop offered writing and tasting as an entry point into food studies. Our common narratives offered commonality and commensality. Ultimately in running the workshop, we discovered again that imaginative and collaborative stories mediate different cultural and sensory experiences of food. They demonstrate that our scholarly responsibility and capacity to write through and with food is, implicitly, a coauthored exercise. We hope readers will be encouraged and inspired by these writing exercises as they conduct research and write future articles and Food Phenomena pieces for and with Gastronomica.We present our script for the May workshop and share some results as a possible blueprint for those who might be interested in organizing a similar activity. As organizers, our goal was to think together about what brings people to the study of food, rather than to present a history of the field, for example, by touching on its iconic texts. The workshop focused on fostering connections and collaborations with food researchers that do not require a cohesive, disciplinary “Food Studies” identity. Writing and gathering together can also generate new modes for scholarly connection. Finally, the workshop represented a chance to experiment and generate writing exercises that we could bring to our teaching practices to bring yet more generations to the study of food. We planned the exercises to be scalable to small or larger groups. In this case, we worked together as a group of ten participants, including the conveners.Participants’ Prompt: Briefly introduce yourself. Discuss—how did you come to the topic of food in your research? What questions or themes are you working through?Organizers’ Task: Document keywords and themes that emerge. Use a whiteboard or projector to note themes for the group.Rationale: To map out a “situated” food studies as a set of embedded concerns and interdisciplinary or multi-disciplinary approaches.The meeting room’s whiteboard quickly populated: grounded, belonging, labor, mobility, environment, commons, method, in-between, scale, materiality, embodiment, design, politics, the everyday. How is food studies defined and who gets to define it, we asked participants? Keywords came easy and identified research dimensions with food absent of familiarity with food studies but, given the relatively young history of food studies, we hoped to invite a conversation about commonality, interdisciplinarity, and multi-disciplinarity by “naming” through keywords our scholarly investments with food. Keywords came from a group of researchers arriving from environmental studies, literature, performance studies, and agriculture. Some participants were graduate students working on food theses. Others were faculty members arriving at food in ongoing or new research projects. We were, thus, bringing food to universities without food studies programs or research centers. However, after the introductions, we also wanted to introduce a tension—is food just the medium through which we find these topics, or does food in its sensory, material, and social dimensions shape what we can know and thus represent?Participants’ Prompt: Briefly introduce the food item, material, or tool you brought. Go around the room to sample. Then, for a short period, draft a sensory description of another’s item. Consider the multi-sensory and contextual dimensions of the item, space, and people.Organizers’ Tasks: Summarize approaches and themes. Discuss challenges and opportunities in describing the foods brought.Rationale: To bring food samples and food-related materials into sensory engagement and contrast with the setting. Food and the senses can highlight the social boundaries of where food and eating typically “belong” and how to engage with it out of “place”—in seminar activities, classroom spaces, or workplace writing and research. For example, food scholars might study and interrogate food, and use it to sustain their writing and work, but actively making it materially and sensorily present in the activity of scholarship can potentially bring out practices, memories, social dimensions, sensory entanglements, and commensality. Our samples tangibly and edibly demonstrate how, in the study of food, we experience and depend upon alternative materials. Food is ephemeral; the samples on the table, however extended by preservation, live on, not in archives, but in interviews, cookbooks, participant observation, and creative nonfiction. From our disciplinary comforts, we could all recount vital stories about food.Introductions complete, and coffee and tea urns depleted, we turned to our “show-and-tell.” We wanted participants to recognize that food was a challenging material to engage with, as an ephemeral, sensory, basic, and highly politicized or charged object. The sensory contrast of lavender outside in the landscaping, the samples on the table, and PowerPoint screens inside the corporate classroom helped capture—and challenge—the limits imposed on food in the academic workplace. We encouraged participants to engage with the sensory experience first of tasting, then writing—all to demonstrate ways that food studies challenges the boundary-making within our workplaces.Without prompting, people neatly placed their samples in front of them. For example, one participant tore the plastic wrapping off a tray of supermarket apples and piled them into a pyramid (as if they were on a market stall). We asked participants to describe orally (and later in writing) how they prepared or procured their samples and why they chose these items. We then asked everyone to stand up, circulate, and (depending on choice or dietary restrictions) taste. We asked each participant to choose a single item (or more) as it would become the focus of a short writing exercise. Selecting one or a simple combination could help narrow the reflection to manageable proportions for a short, warm-up writing exercise. A meeting room is orderly; a food studies room might become a lively space of chatting, chewing, and sniffing. One organizer suggested combining ingredients, dipping one participant’s bread into a ramekin of olive oil she had brought. Some participants rearranged their samples before we began tasting. Some gave clear instructions on how to taste or eat their samples—one instructed that a dried, powdery sweet date-like fruit be tasted first before the babka that was made with it. The mystery ingredient, unknown to most of us, was the Russian olive. It immediately produced reactions and participants gathered around to taste it again, eat the bread, and share their impressions of the fruit and the braided bread before we could commence the writing part of the exercise.We circulated, trying each other’s samples, and realized that we all wanted to try everything. We probably should have realized food scholars’ appetites for inquiry. Given the robust flow of conversations, we allowed more time for tasting and the exercise. The aromas of a spice blend brought by a participant soon diffused throughout the room. As our senses were heightened by the tasting, the smelling, and the chatter, we sat again. We asked everyone (conveners and participants) to write a brief description: a paragraph on the sensory dimension (any element of taste, smell, appearance, texture, temperature, sound), a dish presentation (container, labels, dish composition, ingredients, or other), and, if they wanted, a brief narrative. Later, we collected information from participants about the items they brought in for the tasting. We have selected three types of writing we received and collected from the exercise: a brief identification of the foodstuff brought for tasting, a background story about why it was chosen and, finally, a sample of the description exercise that took place during the workshop:As organizers, we didn’t anticipate how creative and personal the descriptions became. Our warm-up writing exercise and its time constraints allowed for a sense of commensality through sense-making across disciplinary lines.Participants’ Prompts: Participate in a collaborative writing exercise telling the story of a meal. Each of you has a blank sheet of paper. Everyone completes the first writing prompt. Once complete, the sheet of paper is passed to the right, and you inherit the one from the left. Then you continue where the previous person’s narrative left off. In each break between prompts, the paper is passed to the next person until the activity is complete. The story of the meal comes together and is titled and read out loud to all the participants. (Specific prompts with workshop examples provided in the following reflection.)Organizers’ Tasks: Participate in the prompts with the participants. Keep to time limits and ensure that the papers are passed and completed by the next participant.Rationale: To consider imaginatively how the meal or foods are cooked, shared, and consumed. Participants hand off ‘their’ dish to the next person to consider its taste and cultural meanings. We knew that this hand-off reproduced the social tensions inherent in sharing and writing about personally-valued foods. The exercise also integrates creative approaches on how to work with food descriptions, recipes, and narratives we may encounter in our research and how food and the “meal” are both partial and shared in writing and scholarship.After taking a lunch break, we began the intensive writing round. This time, we wrote collectively, rather than the more common individual writing and research of our participants’ fields and disciplines (and including our own). Together, we crafted stories responding to a series of prompts reproduced below. Each participant had a pen and a sheet of paper in front of them. They would pass the paper to the right and receive from the left. The instructions: “Take the written material from the previous prompt(s) and build off it in the next prompt. There will be five (5) rounds and we will create a ‘collaborative food narrative.’”In the first round, we asked people to consider a personal dish or a notable food with which they were familiar. This time, foods were recalled or imagined, rather than present on the table in front of us. In from the to the we wanted to with the and mediated ways we often encounter food and taste. We participants that these were creative They could experiment with what they could write with information that many scholars encounter when they arrive at food-related narratives or We encouraged participants to the narrative on the descriptions from previous We asked writers to consider the following questions: you the set by the previous of the How can or do these up to a narrative or through on what has come finally, consider your about the this dish one prepared in the or could it be a a a food sample a food a a teaching Each of three of and five of We five to ten for the step to read the narrative and craft a for the were the writing prompts we and we some examples of the that we As we are to all of them of space we also at the of the the of the stories we completed during the writing after the second was we to a and to a from a who were trying to previous participants’ more to the person them from whom they had just received the narrative. these the only other were the of papers and of and describe the in a chosen dish or meal. some on its the of the in a small olive until to in a a (or who procured or will with the to the did they up, what are they on with these or what are their or what are their and where do they is the to a or to be on the there will be a babka in one of the in the does it come do a it this one or that of in just for this that is that can do this with home the What is the how do you present this (as as in a or where is this what of or can be does what is around the who is plates are The already one of the their Some of the up on the it is at just the The presentation is but the only find that all the more from the the a This is only helped by the of the in the which out of the and into the of the an the in what are the sensory you encounter in or the at what point in the process of (or are these sensory dimensions what is the between the food and the that these sensory on more and than their had them was in it was The is and think It is so this of with our the will be on this it might have of with its and had not off three to the of the is the dish who is present at the what is during its What might the become at and more at How is the food passed how does it the table, comes to the arrive after work and a into the The and that of all the The are for the for that who The for the eat loud to as she the had to work their and choose the to eat before the meal the sheet to the next the and the the story for the of the Food for A in This from the out that writing in a group a more time than planned and is more when not The part of thinking about food narratives in food studies the and as we up the room and up what of lunch to take the sharing a was the most part of the exercise. a food narrative the home food that is, a space of shared The group a different of commensality through the each participant for the stories we and coauthored We and were and at the and of the participant We that writing about dish and both and shared food As a we on our experiences during the writing and as we the with a set of questions: What were the challenges of this What was absent in the How would you this exercise into your research or What you or How does this exercise (or narratives in food research? What themes came to the in the different narratives labor, materiality, sensory dimensions, practices, We discovered that some of these questions are similar to the we our authors when we read or their work and that at into our Editorial Collective In the workshop, some of the questions were and were left in the not the we when a table after a meal. already for the next are to the provided by the Northern Bridge Consortium, The Leverhulme Durham University, and to each one of our participants for their time and their in sharing a thinking and writing about (Newcastle (Newcastle (Newcastle University). to for the and we

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