Portable Food

Promising explorations of the foods we encounter travelling, Portable Foods was selected as the topic for the 2022 Oxford Symposium on Food, the year in which symposiasts could after a two year hiatus gather for discussion and enjoyment. Fascinated by the meals possible on rolling trains and zooming jets, the symposium included analyses of the history and culture of dining in mobile spaces. Containing papers on diverse topics, including on luxury and historical imperialism, the food served in twentieth-century Dutch airplanes, and safe guarding with gender differences in twenty-first-century Indian train compartments, the studies encompassed all kinds of travel foods, both of exploration and nomadic life, from pemmican and penguin meat to achar and qurut.