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Drawing on the fieldwork in northeast Fujian, China, this research examines how former boat dwellers maintain ecological bonds with marine species after resettlement. Stories about yellow croakers, clams and oysters at changing tables reveal how relocation reconfigures multispecies relationships.

Paper long abstract

The transition from water to land has fundamentally reshaped the material and symbolic centre of life for wooden boat dwellers in northeast Fujian, southeast China. While families once gathered around makeshift tables on wooden boats swaying with tides, they now convene around stable tables in concrete houses and apartments. Yet this physical relocation represents far more than an architectural shift; it marks a transformation in how these (former) boat-dwelling people relate to the marine environment that once defined their existence. Meanwhile, the stories that boat dwellers tell about the waters they once called home remain rich with memories of marine life, such as the large yellow croakers, clams and oysters that were edible and once intimate neighbours. These narratives have not disappeared with the move ashore but have evolved, carrying forward ecological knowledge and changing relationships with species. Tables, whether floating or fixed, continue to play as a site where these multispecies stories are shared, contested and reimagined across generations. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among the former wooden boat dwelling community in this coastal region, this research explores the dynamic and ongoing entanglements between marine species and people whose lives remain intertwined even after resettlement. By examining how memories, practices and relationships persist and transform across the threshold between boat and building, this research illuminates the enduring bonds between boat-dwellers and the more-than-human worlds they inhabit, revealing how relocation does not sever ecological connections but rather reconfigures them in unexpected and generative ways.

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This paper explores childhood food memories as reflections of nostalgia, identity, and intergenerational connection. It examines how these memories shape cultural belonging and whether nostalgia can inspire sustainable cooking practices, challenging consumerism and the decline of home cooked meals.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines food memories as expressions of nostalgia, identity, and intergenerational connection. Through personal narratives, it explores how individuals recall meals from their formative years, dishes often remembered with warmth, longing, ambivalence and sometimes even discomfort. These memories can shape personal identities and contribute to cultural belonging, highlighting deep connection between food, the past, and interpersonal relationships.

The study will explore how memory and food intersect at the kitchen table, examine whether nostalgia can serve as more than personal reflection. Specifically, it will consider whether nostalgia can act as a catalyst for sustainable, home based cooking practices. This research ultimately aims to demonstrate that preparing food is not merely a daily task but a meaningful performance of cultural continuity and belonging.

The paper focuses nostalgia as more than a simple sentimental longing for the past. It is framed as a complex, temporal experience that engages with a deeper existential sense of being. Drawing on ethnological studies of commensality and food practices, the paper will explore the kitchen as both a symbolic and social space. Historically regarded as the heart of the home, where meals are shared around the table, the kitchen will be contrasted with today’s trends of convenience foods and diminishing home cooked meals. The study will question whether the kitchen table, traditionally a site of communal meals, is disappearing and if so how nostalgia can inspire the reclamation of cooking practices as a counter to modern consumerism

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In the storytelling during collaborative workshops about the social life of kitchens, “Nature” provides just a background. Other main characters lead the plot: disputed gender roles, strong emotions, senses of belonging, the dutie to feed, and the moral economies and poetics of modern home.

Paper long abstract

I focus on stories shared by participants during collaborative workshops and personal interviews within the project In Kitchens: Relationships, Moral Economies, Materiality, and Poetics of Intimacy in the Domestic Kitchen (UNED, 2023-26). The project entailed fieldwork in Madrid, Marseille, Halifax, Montevideo, and Mexico City. The participants, mostly women, exchanged lively on their experiences regarding the practice of everyday cooking, the meals, the sharing of housekeeping, and related topics like food shopping, appliances, refurbishing, children grooming, and family celebrations.

The stories presented here include (a) the Canadian traveler who -after years of wandering away- felt the urge to write down the recipes of her old mother, anticipating she could die soon; (b) the newmarried Montevidean woman who felt trapped by the cooking complicities that gradually emerged between her husband and the grandma that had raised her; (c) the savvy tricks of an Andalusian housewife, struggling to reeducate her husband and daughters in the kitchen chores; (d) the Canadian man who found ways for self-learning in the responsibilities of the family kitchen, becoming a foody; (e) a very “old and ugly green cooking glove” that everyone used -and loved- in a roomies’ apartment at Montevideo -and why.

I will question in what ways “Nature” appears in these kitchen plots. Not visible at its center, it does nevertheless provides a background for the agency of other protagonist actants: disputed gender roles, strong emotions, senses of belonging, the duties to feed and to be fed, and the moral economies and poetics of modern home.

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This paper explores the performative role of the table and commensality in enacting sustainability as oeconomia, developing a pedagogy for Creative Sustainability that fosters relational care, ecological awareness, and collective learning.

Paper long abstract

The paper draws on ethnographic vignettes and reflections from the first year of Creative Sustainability, an experimental undergraduate program set in a former home economics school for women in rural East Iceland. The aim is to explore the role of the table and the act of preparing a meal and eating together in developing a pedagogy that enacts sustainability as oikonomia, fostering relational care, ecological awareness, and collective learning.

In the Creative Sustainability program the table is more than an inanimate piece of furniture and meals are more than mere sustenance. The school building is embedded in a remote and marginal place, surrounded by forest and farms. Inside as well as outdoors, tables of various kinds gather students, teachers, and community members into a collective of learners. At the table students encounter cultural heritage, tradition and craft, as they learn through making, sharing, and handling materials. Berries from the forest, vegetables from local farms, or a homemade loaf of sourdough bread become entangled, and edible, narratives of pasts, presents and futures.

In the act of preparing and eating together, stories and memories are exchanged—about places, materials, tastes, former foraging trips, family traditions, and everyday craft practices. The practice of commensality enacts a pedagogy where food, materiality, remembrance and storytelling intertwine and cultivate attentiveness to ecological entanglements and cultural heritage. In this way, the table emerges as both a symbolic agent and a material teacher, anchoring learners in shared attentiveness to food, place, and the relational ethics of sustainability.

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This paper explores the East Asian winter solstice custom of eating red-bean porridge. This commensal act transforms a food into a cultural symbol, telling a story of communal survival against disease by blending astute natural observation with protective folklore.

Paper long abstract

Engaging with the panel’s theme of “nature(s) in narrative,” this paper explores the East Asian winter solstice custom of consuming red-bean porridge as a form of commensality where food, stories, and social encounters entangle. This practice exemplifies how nature is transformed into “edible culture” through material and symbolic acts. The ritual emerged as a profound response to deadly infectious diseases like smallpox, with the porridge believed to offer protection from epidemic demons.

This table-story is rooted in our ancestors’ astute observations of natural phenomena, such as determining the solstice, which surprisingly align with modern science. This precise observation of “the natural” fostered fantastic narratives about the food’s power to combat “unnatural” or supernatural disease forces. The custom thus becomes a site for negotiating the relationship between food, communal identity, and environmental challenges like widespread disease.

The folklore’s endurance highlights how the act of eating together is narrated and remembered to reinforce community well-being. This paper posits that science (observation) and fantasy (folklore) are not always antithetical; they converge at the table in a dynamic performance that bridges materiality and narrative, creating enduring customs that are shaped by societal challenges.

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Buddhist food rituals demonstrate how tables function as dynamic spaces where nature continuously transforms into culture through material practices and narrative encounters that extend beyond human boundaries.

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This paper explores how Buddhist monastic food practices create narrative spaces where nature becomes culture through ritualized storytelling and material encounters. Drawing on ethnographic research at a Sōtō Zen and a Theravāda monastery, this research examines how dining tables act as agents in forming relationships that extend beyond the human. Communal meals function as what Marcel Mauss termed “total social facts”, integrating religious, economic, environmental, and moral dimensions within a single eating ritual. Gift-exchange cycles emerge among practitioners, food offerings, non-human entities, and natural ingredients, transforming raw produce into what participants describe as vehicles for practicing interconnectedness. The table becomes a gathering place for human and more-than-human elements: monastics, lay practitioners, donated vegetables, garden herbs, and even the cats who sometimes claim seats during rituals. Stories shared in the garden and during food preparation embed ecological relationships within social dining, turning meals into living narratives of reciprocity. These findings show how Buddhist food rituals animate the table as a dynamic site where nature and culture co-emerge through material practices and storytelling. In these ritualized meals, sharing food is not merely a social act but a multispecies performance that recognizes the agency of all participants in sustaining life. By highlighting how Buddhist tables cultivate ethical attentiveness and ecological relationship, this paper contributes to understanding how food rituals can transform ordinary dining surfaces into vibrant stages for a more-than-human community.

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What happens when an invasive fish lands on local tables? In Latvia’s coastal communities, the round goby is abundant yet contested. Fishers see opportunity, households resist, calling it “not ours.” This paper explores how food heritage and gastropolitics shape identity in the face of change.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades, invasive species have become a global ecological and policy challenge, reshaping ecosystems and food systems alike. The Baltic Sea, one of the world’s largest and most vulnerable brackish water ecosystems, has seen a rapid influx of non-indigenous species. Among them, the round goby (Neogobius melanostomus)—introduced from the Ponto–Caspian region—has established itself as a dominant coastal fish. Ecologically abundant and physiologically adaptable, it has become a central player in Baltic trophic networks. Yet in Latvia, despite its availability, its role as food remains marginal.

Tables are never neutral surfaces: they gather people, tastes, and values, defining who belongs and who does not. This paper explores how the round goby is negotiated at the tables of Latvian coastal communities, showing how ecological change intersects with cultural meaning and food heritage.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Latvia, the paper examines how fishers view the goby as a resource with economic potential—filling seasonal gaps in catches, integrating into smoking and export practices, and representing pragmatic adaptation to ecological change. By contrast, coastal households often reject the goby, with food choices shaped by habitus, inherited tastes, and culinary traditions. Here, the goby is seen as too bony, too sweet, or simply foreign—acceptable only when incorporated into familiar recipes or displaced onto “others”.

The analysis highlights diverging adaptation tempos: communities demonstrate flexibility and openness, while households remain conservative. In this sense, the goby becomes a medium through which ecological change, identity, and tradition are negotiated in coastal Latvia.

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The Taste of Home explores how Latvian food traditions are preserved and adapted in the diaspora. Through participatory research and community contributions, the project shows how culinary heritage sustains identity, memory, and belonging across borders.

Paper long abstract

Culinary practices are central to processes of cultural continuity and transformation in migration. For Latvians abroad, foods such as rye bread, sauerkraut, and pīrāgi embody powerful sensory links to home, often persisting as symbolic anchors of identity even after language use and other cultural practices have diminished. In 2025, the “Latvians Abroad – Museum and Research Centre” initiated The Taste of Home, a participatory research project documenting how Latvian food traditions are preserved, adapted, and transmitted across generations and geographies.

Through monthly thematic discussions and community contributions of recipes, photographs, and oral histories, the project collects material on the lived experiences of diaspora communities. Preliminary findings suggest that culinary heritage is not only retained but creatively reinterpreted in response to migration, resource availability, and intercultural exchange.

This paper situates The Taste of Home within broader debates on diaspora heritage, memory, and museum practice, arguing that food constitutes a critical site of identity work and an effective medium for co-creating cultural knowledge with dispersed communities.

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The text explores skyr as a cultural phenomenon, from traditional communal meals on Icelandic farms to individualized consumption in modern times. It reflects on how skyr has shifted from a shared household ritual to a marketed product that shapes new forms of intimacy, memory, and eating practices.

Paper long abstract

Dining, whether formal or informal, has long carried layers of meaning. To share a meal is to build intimacy, but also to create distance, since rules of pace, portion, and propriety are always at play. Across cultures, feasts are shaped by unspoken norms, making the table itself an altar where food is offered and bonds are reinforced.

In farming society of Iceland, skyr was a staple and essential knowledge. Housewives transformed milk into skyr, a task embedded in the rhythm of household labor and the natural cycles of the farm. Skyr’s flavors and colors shifted with the seasons, and its living bacterial flora mirrored the slow tempo of agrarian life. Eating together was a shared ritual, each spoonful tied to land, labor, and kinship.

Despite this transformation, skyr continues to evoke cultural memory and intimacy.

In the 21st century, this structure is fraying under the pressures of capitalism and speed. Communal dishes have largely given way to single-serving tubs, consumed on the go. Family-sized portions persist, but often in large plastic containers that flatten intimacy into convenience. Dairies, through packaging, portion sizes, and advertising campaigns, shape the rhythm of eating skyr today. Yet the food retains a certain intimacy. Though the communal dish has splintered, the act of eating skyr still invites us into a dance between past and present, memory and marketing, solitude and togetherness.

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Through sensory ethnography, this research explores how fire, water, earth, and air shape Southern African foodways, with shared meals as sites of storytelling, heritage, and embodied connection between people, place, and nature.

Paper long abstract

In Southern Africa, food practices are inseparable from the elements (fire, water, earth, and air) and the stories people tell around meals reveal the deep entanglement of nature, culture, and identity. Drawing on sensory ethnography and oral histories, this research documents individual accounts of how elemental forces shape culinary practices, food heritage, and community life. Through first-person narratives, participants describe cooking over fire, harvesting and preserving water- and earth-based ingredients, and incorporating air in rituals and food preparation, showing how these practices encode knowledge, memory, and ancestral connections.

The table emerges as a central site where these elements converge, transforming eating into a performative act of commensality. Shared meals become spaces for storytelling, remembrance, and the transmission of intangible heritage, where flavours, textures, and rituals embody histories of resilience, migration, and adaptation. These acts of eating and sharing reveal social hierarchies, inclusion, and solidarity, while simultaneously reflecting humans’ interconnectedness with the natural world.

By attending closely to lived experiences, this work demonstrates that foodways in Southern Africa are not merely sustenance but active, symbolic spaces where nature is transformed into culture. Elemental food practices, narrated, performed, and experienced, mediate relationships between people, place, and environment, preserving heritage and identity in the face of social and ecological change. This research situates commensality as a dynamic, multisensory performance, where storytelling and the materiality of food entwine to sustain memory, culture, and the elemental pulse of Southern African life.

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Based on my food installation, the paper presents a social encounter that reimagines the living room as a shared ecological commons. Through tasting as a method of inquiry into forgotten flavors and vernacular knowledge, this research explores how governmentality shapes what counts as edible.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on a participatory food installation and workshop conducted at BioArt Laboratories during the Dutch Design Week 2025. “Welcome to the Living Room” is a social encounter that invites visitors to enter a space where all living beings—human and more-than-human—are welcomed as guests. Reimagining the domestic "living room" as a shared ecological commons, this space offers hospitality not only to people but also to memories, soil, vernacular knowledge, and edible roots. Here, food becomes the medium of welcome, and tasting becomes a site of negotiation between standardized regimes and localized, embodied experiences. The dining table transforms into an installation: whole plants, sliced ingredients, and accompanying stories on each root are displayed together.

The project traces rhizomatic connections between culinary traditions, local ecologies, and embodied memories. Each ingredient is grounded in specific soil conditions, regional tastes, and cultural geographies, offering a multisensory way to think through the politics of place and food. Building on Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality, this paper explores how dietary norms form part of broader regulatory systems that shape bodies, environmentality, and ways of living. Treating the living room as a porous, sensorial space where guests co-compose an edible landscape, this research contributes to environmental humanities and advances biosensory politics, presenting eating not merely as nourishment but as an act of care, remembrance, and situated knowledge.

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This paper explores how Toronto’s indie music venues use food to navigate regulations, blending music and gastronomy into thriving community hubs. Through ethnographic research and case studies like the Horseshoe Tavern, it shows how food becomes a powerful tool for cultural and creative resistance.

Paper long abstract

In the face of regulatory constraints, communities often find subversive ways to preserve cultural vibrancy. This paper explores how independent music venues in Toronto have leveraged food offerings to navigate the Liquor License Act (Ontario Government, 2023), which requires bars serving alcohol to also offer food. Originally designed for health and safety, this regulation has become essential for survival in Toronto’s independent music scene. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, including interviews with venue owners, cooks, and an analysis of local policies, this paper examines how food serves not only as a compliance tool but also as a cultural asset.

Inspired by my fieldwork in Dublin, where smoking areas became subversive spaces of community resistance to public health legislation, I see a parallel in Toronto’s music venues. In both cities, local responses to regulation foster opportunities for cultural solidarity. Here, food itself becomes a type of performance, with chefs engaging in creative acts of expression that mirror the music on stage. The sharing of food fosters connection, creating hybrid spaces where music and gastronomy intersect as forms of expression.

Venues like the Horseshoe Tavern and Grossman’s Tavern illustrate how food culture can act as a catalyst for solidarity, creative autonomy, and financial sustainability. Amid pressures from urban development, these venues use food to resist commercialisation and maintain relevance. This paper highlights how food culture in Toronto’s live music venues not only navigates regulatory restrictions but also serves as a vital tool of resistance, preserving the independent cultural spaces that embody community spirit.