The Food Politics and Cultures Project has evolved into an inter-institutional programme between the Universities of the Western Cape, Pretoria and KwaZulu Natal, called Critical Food Studies: Transdisciplinary Humanities Approaches. You can meet the principal and senior researchers and students who are breathing life into this new venture by following this link: https://www.criticalfoodstudies.co.za/our-team/

What excites us about this new programme?

Prof. Desiree Lewis says:

I’m able to explore ideas about embodied subjectivities and struggles for personal and broader freedoms in exciting ways that I haven’t explored before.In writing about food, I feel freer to use genres (such as autobiographical reflection and storytelling) that the academy tends to marginalize. It puts me in touch with the vital connections between knowing, feeling and acting.

I’m inspired by those with similar passions. As an academic working on critical food studies I engage with the ideas of students and other academics, and also with those of activists, foodworkers, cooks and many others: talking and writing about human relationships to food seems to animate people in unique ways, and gets them to trust what the academy and science often dismisses.

Prof. Vasu Reddy says:

I am excited about this project because it engages a topic, issue, factor that is both visceral, human and deeply meaningful in our lives. Food is not merely about survival, or that is about sustaining life. It is actually about our deep relationship to and the meanings that food opens up to what it means to be human and human(e). We are interested in the knowledge project (intellectual, creative and aesthetic) that are generated by this collaborative and deeply ‘Southern’ project.