Gastronomy is less a narrow field of study than it is an expansive prism through which scholars can assess all manners and facets of the human world. It’s a field designed to challenge boundaries, and that quality was on display when BU’s Metropolitan College hosted the first-ever Queer Food Conference.
Held April 27 and 28, the conference was organized by MET Director of Food Studies Megan Elias and McGill University Assistant Professor Alex D. Ketchum of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. In all the conference saw more than 160 attendees with roughly 80 joining in person, coming from as far away as California and France to be a part of the first-of-its-kind, sold-out event. Matters such as queer food spaces, queer food, and queer food culture were brought to the table, as current BU students, alums, and scholars from all over led presentations, connecting with peers who, sometimes surprisingly, were conducting work in parallel to their own.
The groundbreaking event won the attention of multiple press outlets. In the New York Times, MA in Gastronomy student Isabel Marie Barbosa was featured for their presentation which showcased recipes that were drawn from a 1990s magazine aimed at supporting those with H.I.V. or AIDS. “Food is community care,” they told the times.
The Boston Globe highlighted the contributions of MA in Gastronomy student Anna Salzman, a baker who makes all sorts of changes to recipes in order to challenge the status quo. This, she says, is a fundamental uprooting of the baseline normativity of cooking. “There’s not a recipe for queerness,” she told the Globe. “That’s the point. It’s unbound by the cookbook rules.”
And in BU Today, Dr. Elias drew connections between the theme of the conference and a course she teaches, Food and Gender (MET ML 706). “To put it bluntly, we have this idea that food belongs to women—that’s their domain in the family unit, while the men go to work and make money,” she told BU Today. “But when you consider a queer person or family, those strict roles don’t really make sense, and they start to break down. The idea of bringing queerness to food is the idea of opening up many definitions, of making it all more fluid.”
Speaking with NBC News, Elias indicated that the meaning of “queer food” is fluid, calling it “circumstantial,” and “up for conversation.”
“There is no one way to define queer food, but thinking about queerness and food together is very productive,” Elias said after the conference, adding that she learned that botany can be nonbinary and a great deal about the role food can play in gender transition.
Read more in the New York Times, Boston Globe, BU Today, and NBC News