Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

In late 2023 Peter Hertzmann, a long-time DGS participant and friend of the Symposium, passed away. Not only was Peter a regular attendee, he also did the typesetting for the DGS articles from the first symposium in 2012.

Typesetting and proofreading is an unglamorous, indeed thankless, and time-consuming task. Peter devoted a considerable amount of time to each paper, ferreting out typos and style mishaps, and providing thorough notes for each speaker. He played a crucial part in presenting the research at the DGS in the professional manner it deserves.

His own scholarly contributions to the DGS mostly concerned the technology and technicalities of food, such as refrigerators, the special wire in electric kitchen tools, lunch boxes, and government policy. For other venues, he wrote on such things cooking measurements, cooking techniques and implements such as knives.

In appreciation of Peter’s service to the community, and in his memory, Dublin Gastronomy Symposium now features the Peter Hertzmann Award, for the best paper in the area of Food and Techne: Technology, Techniques and Technicalities.

Food and Techne

Techne (or tekhne) is derived from the Greek term technê, meaning “art, craft, technique or skill.”¹ In Plato’s re-telling of the myth of Prometheus, the latter’s theft of the techne of fire is the “founding moment of humankind’s technical and technological capacities.”² Arendt, writing on the human condition, focuses on different types of work or activity and distinguishes the labouring animal, animal laborans, toiling to sustain life, from homo faber, the tool-making human who creates an unnatural or not-natural world around him.³ This is the world of culture, and today it shapes all aspects of our existence, not least our food.

Techne – craftsmanship and tools – is fundamental in cooking as well as in agriculture and all steps of food production and processing. Food, as Barthes said, has not been “just food” since human food expanded beyond what could be foraged and scavenged in the forest.⁴ It has been cultured ever since early man banded together to hunt and, more importantly, cook their victuals, and then share and eat them in company. Since then, tools have been vital for the transformation of natural raw materials into human sustenance, from early flint stones to kill or divide up the spoils of a successful hunt, to scrape bones, cut stems and dig roots, to the first rudimentary cooking arrangements beyond the open fire, such as earthen pits, hollow turtle shells or leaf wrappers. None of these were accidental – “natural” – and with them, technological skills had to develop: techne. Of course, both the culture and techne of food have made gigantic leaps since these early days, as for around 12,000 years now, humans cultivate the vast majority of their provisions and leave less and less up to the whims of nature.⁵ Lévi-Strauss has explained how we further “culture” and categorise our food, distinguishing the raw from the cooked (culturally acceptable) on the one hand and the rotten (culturally unacceptable) on the other.⁶ Meagher notes that the naming or “imaginative defining of reality” is at the heart of all contemporary ethical debates⁷ – including on how we should feed ourselves.

Papers considered for the DGS Peter Hertzmann Award should fit the topic of Food and Techne, discussing one or more of the following:

• Techniques – e.g. growing, prepping, cooking, baking, processing (industrial or artisanal), serving, selling of food or beverages…
• Technology – from agricultural implements to food laboratory technology, industrial equipment to artisan tools, digital apps to cutlery, etc.
• Technicalities – e.g. on temperature control, measurements; agricultural policy or cookery school curricula; nutritional advice or philosophical definitions…

The papers do not have to mention the term “techne” in order to be recognised.

Papers that are submitted to the jury for the DGS Peter Hertzmann Award will be judged on:

• • Depth and breadth of academic work
• • Originality and contribution to the field of food studies/gastronomy
• • Representative of the idea of techne
• • Quality of writing, crafting an argument

The announcement of the winning paper and the bestowment of the award certificate (by the DGS Organising Committee) will take place in one of the plenary sessions (opening or closing) of the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium.

The contact for the Peter Hertzmann Award in the DGS Organising Committee is Dr Anke Klitzing (submissions editor and programme coordinator) anke.klitzing@tudublin.ie.

Citations

¹Ian James, “Tekhne,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia, published online 25 February 2019, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.121.
²James, “Tekhne.”
³Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
⁴Roland Barthes, “Towards a Psychosociology of Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader. 2nd ed., ed. Carol Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28.
⁵Anke Klitzing, Reading Food in Literature, Film and Other Imaginative Texts: Gastrocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2026), ch. 1.
⁶Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques Vol 1. (1964; transl. John and Doreen Weightman, 1969; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
⁷ Robert Meagher, “Technê,” Perspecta 24 (1988): 163, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1567132.