This panel seeks to examine the profound significance of food as a central narrative element in literature and its broader implications for literary scholarship. Inspired by this year's conference theme, Empowering Communities, the panel explores moments in which food transcends its culinary function to become a source of cultural knowledge, communal identity, and collective agency. Whether gathered around a dinner table, preserving family recipes, or cultivating food traditions in the face of displacement or oppression, literary communities frequently use food to sustain memory, foster belonging, and resist erasure.

We invite papers that examine the many ways food empowers communities in literature. Topics may include, but are not limited to, food as cultural archive; recipes as acts of resistance; communal meals and hospitality; food and diaspora; hunger and food insecurity; labor and consumption; environmental justice; colonialism and cuisine; food and memory; or food as a means of constructing identity and belonging. We welcome approaches to fiction, poetry, drama, graphic novels, children's literature, film, television, and creative nonfiction.

Please submit a 250-word abstract here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22702. Deadline for submissions is 9/30/2026. Remote presentations will not be accepted.