Arrow@TU Dublin

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 hiera…

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 W…

Since the early twentieth century, Palestinians have used poetry as a means of remembering and celebrating their homeland amid its occupation and colonization. Naomi Shihab Nye, Rashid Husayn, and Zeina Azzam are understudied poets of Palestinian heritage. All three experiment with varying depictions of Palestinian food and foodways, and placing their poetry into conversation enables a greater un…

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…

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…

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 encou…

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 entit…

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 farme…

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 …

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 othe…

This paper focuses on the status of the Good Food Guide in Britain during a small wave of revived interest among chefs in British regional food in the 1970s, especially under the editorship of Christopher Driver and during a decade when Michelin’s return to Britain and Ireland threatened not only Britain’s recovering sense of its culinary heritage, but also the legitimacy of the Good Food Guide i…

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. Neve…

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 off…

This is the full and final Programme for the DGS 2026 - Food and Crisis/Hope, as well as the Map of Producers who furnished the delicious food and drink we serve at lunch over the two days of the event.

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…

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 an…

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. Inst…

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 portr…

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 throug…

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 inse…