Virtual "Food Studies" Seminar Series

Mātauranga Kai

^{Wednesday, 7 October 2026}

In this talk, Dr Nikki Renall will share findings from the Mātauranga Kai project, which explores the connections between kai Māori and wellbeing. Drawing on research across multiple studies, the presentation explores how historical, structural, and social influences have shaped Māori foodways and continue to influence food practices today. It also highlights the role of social media as a contemporary platform for expressing and sharing Māori food culture, and explores how kai practices support cultural identity, wellbeing, relationships, and connections to whenua. Together, these insights informed the development of the Mahinga Kai Framework: Enacting Food Sovereignty, a framework that demonstrates how mātauranga Māori, values, and practices related to kai can support oranga in contemporary contexts.

“You Don’t Have to Murder the Poor Curry!”: Indian Women’s Cooking Classes and the Circulation of Culinary Knowledge in Aotearoa New Zealand

^{Wednesday, 2 September 2026}

Indian women’s cooking classes played an important role in shaping how Indian cuisine was shared and understood in New Zealand from the late 1950s. Moving beyond the domestic kitchen, these classes transformed everyday culinary knowledge into structured demonstrations and lessons for wider audiences. Through teaching techniques, ingredients, and recipes, women instructors created spaces where Indian food could be learned, experimented with, and appreciated across communities. These classes did not replace community cooking traditions but extended them into new public settings. By examining these teaching practices, this talk highlights how migrant women circulated culinary knowledge while contributing to the growing visibility and appreciation of Indian cuisine in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The Finest Obtainable? American Food and Drink in Colonial Singapore

^{Wednesday, 5 August 2026}

Singapore’s potential as a trading hub was recognised very early by the United States, as evidenced by the establishment of a consular presence. Individual travellers and officials could see the potential of Singapore as a market and as stepping stone to other regional markets, but it was a slow process establishing American products in Singapore. Success required negotiating the colonial context in terms of bureaucracy, importers who gave preferential treatment to British goods, and consumers who had allegiance to familiar European and British brands. But it also required negotiating the colonial context of race and class, which different companies and products managed with varied levels of success. There were many more Coolies than colonial elites, but they had less to spend. Working out who should be targeted and what should be sold was thus a complex equation. The quality of American goods also varied. Consumers were doing their own negotiating – of price, safety, and desirability. Yet some American goods – cold storage, domestic refrigeration, and alcohol – profoundly shaped colonial desires. America’s relationship with Singapore is obviously nowhere near as dominant as Britain’s, but in the empty milk, soup and sardine cans and the failed sales of chewing gum, and rye whisky cocktails, we can see a more complex story about the gustatory and consumptive practices in a major British empire port.

From the Sacred to the Profane? Pinot Priests, Pilgrims and Palooza

^{Wednesday, 1 July 2026}

The production and consumption of wine has long been associated with explicit religion, from Dionysus to the communion wines of varied Christian orders. Indeed, the production of fine wine – in particular Pinot Noir, a highly terroir-sensitive varietal – is seen to originate, historically and genealogically (Appadurai 1996), with the development of Burgundian climat (small, empirically terroir-delineated parcels of land) by 10th-11th century Cistercian monks and later with Dom Pierre Perignon’s, a Benedictine monk from Hautvillers, Champagne, ‘Golden Rules of Winemaking’ published in 1718. The rise of modern secularism has witnessed the significant truncation of explicit religions, with Durkheim (2001 [1912]), Bailey (1982), Latour (2010) and others arguing a correlated increase in implicitly religious beliefs and practices. A number of intersecting modalities, including sovereign individualism and the exaltation of scientific rationalism, are widely associated with implicit religion/religiosity and these find variegated resonance in contemporary Pinot Noir production and consumption. In this presentation I explore these resonances before briefly considering how current sociological wine scholarship is seduced by ‘methodological statusism’.