Call for Papers 2026

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium 2026 - Food and Crisis/Hope

A crisis is often equated with disaster, but it fundamentally refers to a key turning point where a major change takes place, for better or worse, often related to the need for a decision – the original root of the word in Greek (κρίνω krinō). In this reading, a crisis is always also a chance for hope. Many serendipitous discoveries such as penicillin or safety glass originated in a minor crisis but subsequently provided hope to humanity out of “happy accidents.”
The Japanese art of kintsugi mends broken pottery pieces with a golden lacquer – rather than hiding its fragility, it emphasises the flaws and imperfections, rendering the piece stronger, more beautiful than before – and unique. Similarly, rewilding knits back damaged ecosystems. Fire devastates, but it can also be a tool for renewal, allowing regermination and restoration. Conversely, Canadian author, Naomi Klein, has dubbed the exploitation of crisis for political ends “the shock doctrine.”
Innovation often springs out of a crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic brought international scientists together in a search for solutions on an unprecedented scale. Wars and global conflict can also be a source of innovation and of enduring changes to our landscape for better and for worse. During the Franco-Prussian War, Auguste Escoffier had to acquire new skills such as gardening and canning in his role as chef de cuisine for the army, later cooking as a prisoner of war for the captured Marshal MacMahon and his staff. Numerous are the innovations and changes that have sprung from the crisis of war – from canned foods to the GI Bill allowing US soldiers to pursue higher education after WWII that was fundamental to the foundation of the Culinary Institute of America. Beyond the obvious devastation in human terms, innovations that seem life saving can end up imperilling beyond belief, think of the application of DDT in WWII, which saved soldiers from dying of disease but left an environmental wasteland in its wake, as documented by Rachel Carson in Silent Spring.
Upton Sinclair’s muckraking novel The Jungle (1906) exposed the conditions in the US meatpacking industry and sparked changes in food regulations as well as workers’ rights, while Prohibition was a crisis for many but a source of opportunity for others. Restaurants were shuttered, but ice cream parlours thrived. Crises have given rise to traditional food and drink specialities – grapes that are frozen on the vine, or infected with botrytis, for example.
Many a personal and existential crisis has sown the seed for great, in the widest sense of the word, art. Artists and activists galvanise the wider public, educating and eliciting political and personal responses. Collectives such as Cooking Sections “investigate the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism.” London-based artist George Selley has exposed the nefarious dealings of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala and the banana trade in his art project, A Study of Assassination, named after the infamous CIA document.
The crisis of the Cuban Special Period forced a focus on urban agriculture, often organic. It is curious that songs and poems about crises can also give hope for the future.

The 2026 Dublin Gastronomy Symposium invites abstracts around the theme of Food and Crisis/Hope. As with previous symposia, authors are encouraged to interpret the theme from a broad perspective including but not limited to the following:

  • Environmental crises and hope whether from climate change, intensive agriculture, war or capitalist greed; regenerative farming practices
  • Effect of crises or war on the material culture of food such as cookware or cutlery, items that carry food or food rations, cooking tools or cooking methods
  • Community responses to the absence of food, whether due to siege or famine, displacement or austerity; the emergence of alternative food networks, mutual aid, cultural responses to food scarcity; rations and the battlefield
  • Body beautiful – obsessions with big/small; personal or societal crises relating to the body; the role of food in navigating trauma; beauty standards, diet culture, food anxieties
  • The fear of bacteria – where are your gloves chef?, disgust, outrage, and racism in social media food videos; contamination, class and race
  • Eating on the hoof (ships, mines, fields, the navvies breakfast) and the invention of dishes
  • Celebration dishes/cocktails/recipes after victories or historical events
  • Beverages and crisis: effects of climate change/production costs for the wine/tea/coffee industry; decreases in global alcohol consumption, the natural wine boon and biodiversity/feminism/creativity, the scourge/need of bottled water
  • Crises in education: gaps in food literacy, whether in nutrition, budgeting, cooking or understanding food systems; changes to domestic science, culinary education; the transmission of skills; forgotten or emerging food skills; the colonisation of curricula
  • Urbanisation as crisis – the devaluation of rural labour; migration patterns; rediscovery of traditional foodways; urban farming; foraging
  • Hope out of crisis through the practice and production of food/drink-related art
  • Food crises and hope in literature – food/culinary memoirs as chronicles of despair and joy; the hope/comfort of food/drink in poetry/song
  • Out of the ghetto – Food/drinks brands (Hennessy/Moët) as status symbols in Hip-Hop
  • Cookbooks: national pride or toxic nationalism?; the straightjacket of the recipe; cookbooks and recipes maintaining tradition and identity
  • Miracle foods? – westernisation of superfoods; ultra-processed foods; food/drink as cure; food fads; good and bad foods
  • AOC/PDO systems as elitism or protectors of food heritage/tradition?

    • Peter Hertzmann Award: In honour and memory of a longstanding friend of the DGS, we will award the Peter Hertzmann Award for the best paper in the area of Food and Techne – Technology, Techniques and Technicalities for the first time at the 2026 Dublin Gastronomy Symposium. If you wish your paper to be considered, you can notify us when submitting (it will be part of the submission form for the finished paper).

    Abstracts (length 250 words) are now accepted - deadline to submit a proposal abstract is 21 October (extended deadline). Please submit your proposal abstract here

    You will be notified whether your proposal is accepted by early November 2025. The full paper shall be 4,000 words in length, excluding references, and will be due in early February 2026 in order to undergo peer review before publication ahead of the conference.