We invite proposals of no more than 750 words on the topic of Food and Time, our theme for the 2027 Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery. Time in the kitchen, time in culinary cultures, and time in the broader physical environment all are possible approaches.
Time is often seen as an abstraction, evading easy definition, but one that we intuitively understand as demarcating the course of our days and lives, past, present, and future. Foods and dishes can be metonyms for time and its cycles, both sacred and secular. Treasured recipes may be dutifully prepared only for holidays, and many traditions celebrate the first fruits. Time also reaches beyond the human and cultural and is reflected in the earth and its environment. Time implies change, as modelled in Claude Levi-Strauss’s culinary triangle of the raw, cooked and rotten. It is the often-unspoken ingredient in all culinary practices. Investigation might focus on culinary history, memory, calendrical and seasonal observances, technologies, material culture and the past or predicted future of food and cookery. Proposers are most welcome to offer other approaches.
Literature and art can provide inspiration: the familiar example of Proust’s madeleine immediately transports the narrator back in time and place, as does the genre of culinary memoirs. Private food diaries fix fleeting events in time, often providing relatively unfiltered information. Writing about past meals can create a nostalgic golden age; for diasporic or forcibly displaced communities, such efforts help to battle cultural erasure. Artworks may express culinary time: for example still lifes, cookery scenes and market depictions draw the viewer into sites of transformation.
Cookery books, online sources, and other media reveal both personal and cultural relationships between time and the kitchen. The quest for speed and ease, versus the embrace of slow traditions and artisanal craft, recurs throughout cookery and dining. The tools and materials that assist the cook in measuring units of time have shifted from the historic cook’s skilled observations or rhythmic tricks to the modern cook’s reliance on a variety of chronometers. Microwaves, pressure cookers, slow cookers, and sous vide technologies have altered the cook’s use and perceptions of time. Domestic culinary practices run the gamut from reliance on industrialized and convenience foods to a resurgence of old-fashioned cooking from scratch. Outsourced shopping and delivery services shorten the time spent acquiring and preparing food. The food replacement Soylent was based on the presumption that time spent shopping, cooking, preparing and eating meals was time wasted.
Foods with limited seasons are eagerly anticipated for their appearance in local markets and community festivals, while techniques such as drying, fermenting, salting, canning, and freezing have made versions of these foods available all year round. Similarly, rapid transport such as railways have triumphed over time, bringing foods from distant shores and changing the role of suburbs in supplying fresh foods to cities. Chemical preservatives and additives reengineer foods to extend shelf life. The meanings and values ascribed to the perishable versus the preserved may invite investigation, as do dishes with reputations for incorruptible aging, such as pot au feu, century eggs, hung game, or sourdough starters carefully nourished for decades.
Other approaches might examine food and cookery as part of epochal change. The emergence of cookery has been argued to be a critical step in humanity’s physical and cultural evolution. The slow displacement of hunter-gatherer societies by agriculturalists launched efforts to change and control the environment and its products, from technologies as simple as greenhouses that extended the growing season to genetically modified crops with faster growth rates and shorter times to maturity. The impact of technologies, whether specifically agricultural or more general, raise urgent questions about climate change, justice in food systems, and the timeline for mitigation or adaptation.
These musings are only starting points. We encourage broad and imaginative interpretations from all disciplines, methodologies, and cultures to explore how time—geologic, (pre)historic, measurable, psychological, imaginative, ritualistic, sacred, or futuristic—influences food and cookery.
Propose a Paper
The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery invites anyone with an interest in food and its history to submit a paper for consideration. The Symposium maintains high standards regarding content, however has a longstanding tradition of quirky openness to all things, including seemingly non-academic topics.
