Symposium
of Food History and Gastronomy
20 –21 November 2026, Wellington
Theme: Time
The 2026 Symposium will be held at the Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies on the Kelburn Campus of Te Herenga Waka —Victoria University of Wellington on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st November.
The theme for this year’s symposium will be Time — loosely defined and deliberately open to interpretation. We’re interested in the full range of ways that food and time intersect, from the geological and the historical to the personal and the everyday.
Papers might explore the following strands, but we encourage all contributions about any topics that are about food and eating.
• Nostalgia and anachronism
• Food and memory
• Rituals, commemorations, and feast days
• Childhood food and biographical time
• Food futures
• Intergenerational transmission
• Indigenous food practices, deep time, continuity, and custodianship
• Cookbooks, menus, and food writing
• Recipe and ingredient histories
• Disruption and revival
• Extinction and loss
• Slow food / fast food
• The harvest and the calendar
• Seasonal food, seasonal eating
• Growing, foraging, preparing, sharing
• Fermentation, preservation, and aging
• Preservation technologies old and new
We welcome anyone – amateur, academic or professional – with a passion for food history or gastronomy. This can include food producers, growers, cooks, eaters, researchers and armchair gastronauts. The symposium is, as always, a small and convivial gathering. Formal papers sit alongside conversation, and no subject is too humble or too obscure if it has something interesting to say about food.
Topics with or without a brief abstract of approximately 200 words are invited by 31 August.
Please send your abstracts to sam.hassibi@royalsociety.org.nz, amir.sayadabdi@vuw.ac.nz, or leanne.miranda@vuw.ac.nz. Feel free to contact Sam, Amir, or Leanne if you have any questions.
We are in the process of booking restaurants for informal gatherings on Thursday and Saturday nights (19 and 21 November). And on Friday night, we will have the main symposium dinner (20 November). We’ll provide more information soon, however, if you would like to book seats for all or any of these nights in advance, for yourself and others, please feel free to get in touch!
Registration opens: TBA
The Stout Centre for New Zealand Studies is located at 12 Waiteata Road, Kelburn, Wellington 6012, New Zealand