CfP: Food and War: Recipes of Survival, Resistance, and Power
We're inviting contributions to our Spring 2025 issue, guest edited by Vanesa Miseres.
Food and war are undoubtedly intertwined, revealing histories of survival, oppression, and resistance. This includes how recipes and food practices shaped—and were shaped by—wartime experiences. Food functions not only as a material necessity but as a powerful narrative tool, exposing the intersections of hunger, rationing, and necropolitics.
Wartime cooking transforms under conditions of scarcity, such as the creative adaptations to rationing in World War II Europe or the ingenious survival strategies of Latin American communities during civil conflicts and independence wars. In other contexts, food figured in resisting oppression, from recipes secretly shared in concentration camps to the use of cooking as an act of cultural preservation in exile.
A focus on gender and race further highlights how women and marginalized groups used food to navigate the traumas of war while asserting agency. Additionally, food’s symbolic weight figures in commemorating or contesting wartime narratives, revealing how recipes sustain memory and identity amidst loss.
For the upcoming Spring issue, guest edited by Vanesa Miseres, the RP team is soliciting proposals for 500-850 word posts related to food and war featuring original research as well as pieces on commemoration, pedagogy, and museum and archival collections. We welcome contributions from anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, archivists, curators, artists, art historians, material culture scholars, and those with professional backgrounds in public history and commemoration. We value work that engages visual storytelling, so posts should include one or two copyright-cleared images. Please send a brief pitch (2 or 3-sentences) as well as an abbreviated CV to editors Vanesa Miseres (Vanesa.A.Miseres.1[at]nd.edu) and Jess Clark (jclark3[at]brocku.ca) any time before 21 February 2025.
This theme invites a range of perspectives—from histories of hunger to culinary acts of resistance—bridging continents and disciplines. It promises to provoke thought on how recipes endure as more than sustenance, becoming archives of survival and resistance in times of war. It is purposefully broadly defined to bring an interdisciplinary group of authors together and we are particularly interested in works that take an innovative approach to the topic. If you have any questions about the theme and how your work could fit within the special issue, please get in touch by email. Accepted proposals will be invited to join the quarterly volume on ‘Food and War.’ For full instructions and more detailed information on length and image requirements please see Open Call for Contributors.
Examples of Potential Topics (not exhaustive):
Wartime Cookbooks: Culinary guides and manuals produced during wars.
Food Memories and Trauma: Personal recollections of hunger, sustenance, or scarcity.
Victory Gardens: Civilian-led food production during war.
Food War Campaigns: Government efforts to mobilize food production and rationing.
Rationing Policies: Impacts of state-controlled food distribution.
Black Markets and Food Smuggling: Underground economies during conflict.
Hunger as a Weapon: Deliberate starvation or food deprivation as acts of war or genocide.
Wartime Literature and Food: Representations of food in war-related literature and art.
Collective Kitchens: Community responses to food shortages and displacement.
Women’s Strategies: Women’s roles in securing, preparing, and distributing food in wartime.
Warfront Food: Soldiers’ diets, field rations, and logistics.
Food as Resistance: Recipes, rituals, and meals as acts of defiance or cultural preservation.
Food Scarcity and Post-War Recovery: Rebuilding culinary traditions after conflict.
Commemorative Cuisine: How food and recipes memorialize wartime experiences.
Colonialism and Food Control: The role of food in imperial conflicts and resistance movements.
We look forward to reading your pitches.
—The RP Editorial Team