Online 25-26 September 2025

PopCRN (the Popular Culture Network) will be holding a free conference online exploring representations of food in popular cultures in history and today, on 25 and 26 September 2025.

Delicious, Nutritious and Fictitious: Food in Popular Culture is asymposium that aims to interrogate the ways that food, recipes, cooking, eating and nutrition are evident in popular culture. This may be representations of food in television, film, literature, art, music, as text, narrative, discourse or any other scholarly form or genre.

The conference will interrogate representations of food in popular culture, with a focus on visual and material representations and the meanings of food in its cultural, social, gendered, historical, and contemporary contexts. The aim is to demonstrate how food shapes and informs our cultural practices, social relationships, ethical decisions, consumption, and because of its materiality and how it directly impacts the physical body and how food embodies and reflects how we understand socio-political and cultural practices including economics, politics, class, age, and power.

As a discipline of study Food Studies draws on anthropology, sociology, history, geography, gender and ethnicity studies, literature, agricultural economics, nutrition, and cultural studies, which all bring a different set of logics and lens to understand food, its production, consumption, preparation and serving. Food is also about ideology as none of us escape eating and drinking in our domestic lives, however what we eat and drink may be shaped by wealth, poverty, class or location.

Fabio Parasecoli in Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture reminds us that food is pervasive, that its social, economic and political relevance can’t be ignored. As such food is a marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, and our regional, ethnic and religious identities.

Selected papers will have the opportunity to publish in a special edition of Popular Culture Review (Wiley).

Papers about representations of delicious, nutritious and fictitious food in popular culture may consider, but are not limited to the following themes, that hopefully make you hungry.  

• "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Virginia Woolf. Food and romance
• "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food."  Hippocrates. Food as medicine
• "People who love to eat are always the best people."  Julia Child. Food and identity
• "The best cooks are not those alone who can arrange the greatest variety of dishes, but those who can prepare their food, no matter what it is, in the neatest, sweetest, and most wholesome style." Louisa Greene Richards, The Woman's Exponent (1872). Food as visual art
• "Food is our common ground, a universal experience."  James Beard. Food as collective
• "A party without cake is just a meeting." Julia Child. Food and celebrations
• "The only time to eat diet food is while you're waiting for the steak to cook."  Julia Child. Food and the diet industry
• "Food is memories."  José Andrés. Food and nostalgia
• “A martini. Shaken, not stirred.” James Bond (Sean Connery), Goldfinger. Alcohol in popular culture
• “You don't need a silver fork to eat good food.” Paul Prudhomme. Food and class
• “Land is a spiritual entity.” Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, Yuin Elder. Land and food traditions
• “I haven't eaten at a McDonald's since I became President.” Bill Clinton. Food and politics
• “It's okay to eat fish because they don't have any feelings.” Kurt Cobain. Food and vegetarianism
• “Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.” Sophia Loren. Food and regional identity
• “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.” Samuel Butler. Food and animal ethics
• “I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.” Oscar Wilde. Food cooking trends over the ages
• “That frying pan did more than fry chicken that night.” Fried Green Tomatoes. Food and crime
• “Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.” Peter De Vries. Food and emotion
• “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” – Clemenza, Richard Castellano, in The Godfather. Representing ethnicity via food in films
• “I think Australian food is probably some of the best in the world.” Karrie Webb. Food and national identity
• “It's easy for Americans to forget that the food they eat doesn't magically appear on a supermarket shelf.” Christopher Dood. Food production and agriculture
• “I'm not an amazing cook. But I can follow a recipe!” Rachel McAdams. The social and cultural history of cookbooks
• "Happiness is a small house, with a big kitchen." Alfred Hitchcock. Space of food preparation and consumption
• “My mama always said, ‘Life is (was) like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.'” Tom Hanks, Forest Gump. Food in films
• "Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world."  Norman Borlaug. Food and human rights
• “Fish are friends, not food.” Bruce the shark, Barry Humphries, in Finding Nemo. Food messages to children in popular culture
• “Maybe a person's time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.” Frank A. Clark. The political economy of food
• "A restaurant is a fantasy—a kind of living fantasy in which diners are the most important members of the cast."  Warner LeRoy. Food in the public sphere
• “The most dangerous food is wedding cake.” James Thurber. Food and traditions
• “Damn, it tastes good to be a gangster.” Goodfellas. Prison food
• “I saw few die of hunger; of eating, a hundred thousand.” Benjamin Franklin. Food, the body and obesity
• “People in Slow Food understand that food is an environmental issue.” Michael Pollan. Food sustainability and the environment
• “If music be the food of love, play on.” William Shakespeare. Songs about food
• “Sharing good food with your children is the purest form of love.” Monica Geletti. Food and family.
• "The health of a nation is directly tied to the health of its food system." Wendell Berry. Food and the state
• “If I like a food, I'll eat it, even if I know it's not good for me.” Kim Kardashian. Food, celebrity and influencers
• “Reservations at Dorsia.” American Psycho. Food and violence
• “Don't eat processed food, refined food but rather organic food from the earth - nothing with genetically - modified ingredients.” Deepak Chopra. The politics and economics of organic food
• “Climate change, if unchecked, is an urgent threat to health, food supplies, biodiversity, and livelihoods across the globe.” John F. Kerry. Food and climate change
• "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, including food justice." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Food poverty and justice
• "Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world." Norman Borlaug. Food and human rights
• “Food fetish at the fridge.” 9 1/2 Weeks. Cinematic representations of food and sex.
• “There are times when wisdom cannot be found in the chambers of parliament or the halls of academia but at the unpretentious setting of the kitchen table.” E.A. Bucchianeri. Food and everyday life
• “Food to a large extent is what holds a society together, and eating is closely linked to deep spiritual connections.” Peter Farn. Food and religion.
• "Progress in civilization has been accompanied by progress in cookery." Fannie Farmer, The Boston Cooking School Cook Book, food and societal development
• "As a food, the apple cannot be considered to rank high, as more than the half of it consists of water, and the rest of its properties are not the most nourishing." Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (1861). Food and fad nutritional diets

Please submit abstracts (200 words) and author details via our online portal By 1 May 2025. Notification of abstract acceptance is 1 June 2025.

Registration is free. The conference is welcoming of early career researchers, postgraduates, Indigenous scholars, people with diverse identities, and industry experts or food practitioners.

You can also submit via the QR code below or through the URLs below

• Submission here - https://unesurveys.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8jjzaWnS732QsFE
• Register here - https://unesurveys.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7TGWUYZidtlxVLU

Email queries to popcrn@une.edu.au