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Food studies in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa tends to focus more on hunger-related and nutritional issues, rather than on broad humanities-oriented, socially determined ways of considering how human beings relate to or experience food. 

This is according to Professor Desiree Lewis, Principal Investigator of the Critical Food Studies: Transdisciplinary Humanities Approaches Programme, an intra-institutional programme funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Centre of Excellence in Food Security (CoE-FS).

Lewis and her team of collaborators are organisers of the postgraduate mini conference titled: Towards decolonial transdisciplinary research: The humanities in food studies, taking place on 21 November 2019 at the University of the Western Cape (UWC).

The full day event will comprise four plenaries covering topics such as: Consumer culture and food branding; foodways and social identities, the complexities of experiencing food, as well as humanising food movements and activism.  

The conference is aimed at generating conversations, fostering transdisciplinarity, and encouraging relevant theorising and methodological work on food studies. The event is a collaborative effort by students and faculty from UWC and the University of Pretoria – co-hosts of the CoE-FS – as well as those from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. 

The programme concludes with a performance of My Daily Bread, a theatre play performed by students from the Gender Equity Unit at UWC.  

For more information contact Lynn Mafofo on: info@criticalfoodstudies.co.za