Critical Food Studies Network | Graduate Seminar

Food is fertile ground for examining how law, culture, and creativity are defined and governed across disciplines. This talk brings copyright law into conversation with cultural heritage studies to explore how these frameworks approach food, recipes, and foodways in markedly different ways. While copyright law has traditionally excluded food and recipes from protection by framing them as functional processes, cultural heritage frameworks increasingly recognize food practices as forms of intangible cultural heritage tied to identity, history, and collective knowledge. The talk is structured around culinary examples drawn from the Register of Representative Lists of the 2003 UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Following such examples across these legal and cultural contexts reveals how different regimes allocate value to food knowledge and shape its circulation. By placing legal doctrine alongside cultural and historical analysis, the presentation invites interdisciplinary reflection on how law participates in defining food as knowledge, culture, and property.

From Chagra to Cuisine: Weaving Ticuna Indigenous Agrifood Worlds in the Colombian Amazon

This research asks what it would mean to rethink agrifood system redesign in the Amazon Basin from an Indigenous perspective. Drawing on localized, bottom-up ethnographic research in San Martín de Amacayacu, Colombian Amazon, it traces Tikuna agrifood worlds through everyday practices of chagra cultivation, fishing, hunting, animal husbandry, cooking, and food processing. While the FAO defines agrifood systems as interconnected activities that make food from field to table, Tikuna agrifood worlds are better understood as the weaving of life with forests, rivers, animals, plants, and spiritual beings.

 

Tikuna agrifood worlds are neither static traditions nor linear trajectories of modernisation, but dynamic and continually rebalanced formations. Focusing on the women-led collective Saberes y Sabores Ticuna as one site where such dynamics become visible, the research examines how Tikuna women actively restore, innovate, and circulate ancestral recipes and food knowledge. Emerging from inherited subsistence practices, these initiatives rework agrifood worlds from within through engagements with state policies, NGO projects, market integration, and new technologies, producing transformation as an ongoing reweaving of continuity and innovation. Finally, this research calls for supporting agrifood niches grounded in local knowledge and priorities, and advocates policies that foster epistemic plurality and long-term sustainability.

 

This paper focalizes provision in Claire Keegan's fiction. In it, I explore how scenes of consumption reveal economic, social, and moral vulnerabilities. I argue that, through a fundamental preoccupation with desire and control, Keegan situates the dinner table as a space of reconstitution and manipulation. I probe the cultural norms which sustain hospitality and troubled interpersonal borders exposed by sharing a meal. Scenes of hospitality demonstrate the coercive possibilities of providing, as well as the (dis)empowerment of being a guest at the dinner table. I conclude by positioning hospitality as a type of temporality, suggesting a metatextual lens of Keegan as a kind of ambivalent host.