Gastronomy is less a narrow field of study than it is an expansive prism through which scholars can assess all manners and facets of the human world. It\u2019s a field designed to challenge boundaries, and that quality was on display when BU\u2019s Metropolitan College hosted the first-ever Queer Food Conference.<\/p>\n
Held April 27 and 28, the conference was organized by MET Director of Food Studies Megan Elias<\/a> and McGill University Assistant Professor Alex D. Ketchum of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. In all the conference saw more than 160 attendees with roughly 80 joining in person, coming from as far away as California and France to be a part of the first-of-its-kind, sold-out event. Matters such as queer food spaces, queer food, and queer food culture were brought to the table, as current BU students, alums, and scholars from all over led presentations, connecting with peers who, sometimes surprisingly, were conducting work in parallel to their own.<\/p>\n The groundbreaking event won the attention of multiple press outlets. In the New York Times<\/em>, MA in Gastronomy<\/a> student Isabel Marie Barbosa was featured for their presentation which showcased recipes that were drawn from a 1990s magazine aimed at supporting those with H.I.V. or AIDS. \u201cFood is community care,\u201d they told the times.<\/p>\n The Boston Globe<\/em> highlighted the contributions of MA in Gastronomy student Anna Salzman, a baker who makes all sorts of changes to recipes in order to challenge the status quo. This, she says, is a fundamental uprooting of the baseline normativity of cooking. \u201cThere\u2019s not a recipe for queerness,\u201d she told the Globe<\/em>. \u201cThat\u2019s the point. It\u2019s unbound by the cookbook rules.\u201d<\/p>\n And in BU Today<\/em>, Dr. Elias drew connections between the theme of the conference and a course she teaches, Food and Gender (MET ML 706)<\/a>. \u201cTo put it bluntly, we have this idea that food belongs to women\u2014that\u2019s their domain in the family unit, while the men go to work and make money,\u201d she told BU Today<\/em>. \u201cBut when you consider a queer person or family, those strict roles don\u2019t really make sense, and they start to break down. The idea of bringing queerness to food is the idea of opening up many definitions, of making it all more fluid.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking with NBC News<\/em>, Elias indicated that the meaning of \u201cqueer food\u201d is fluid, calling it \u201ccircumstantial,\u201d and \u201cup for conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no one way to define\u00a0queer\u00a0food, but thinking about\u00a0queerness and food together is very productive,\u201d Elias said after the conference, adding that she learned that botany can be nonbinary and a great deal about the role food can play in gender transition.<\/p>\n Read more in the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, Boston Globe<\/em><\/a>, BU Today<\/em><\/a>, and NBC News<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gastronomy is less a narrow field of study than it is an expansive prism through which scholars can assess all manners and facets of the human world. It\u2019s a field designed to challenge boundaries, and that quality was on display when BU\u2019s Metropolitan College hosted the first-ever Queer Food Conference. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21777,"featured_media":87139,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[198,47,196,32,163,37,33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87138"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87555,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87138\/revisions\/87555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/met\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}