Over the last two decades, we have seen a surge of scholarship at the intersection of Food Studies and New Materialist theory. Thinkers like Elspeth Probyn (2000; 2016), Jane Bennett (2010), Annemarie Mol (2021; 2024), and Kyla Wazana Tompkins (2024) explore the diverse ways in which edible matter acts on our bodies, wills, and dispositions, in multilayered entanglements that involve water, minerals, fungi, bacteria, plants, as well as human and nonhuman animals. These material-discursive networks urge us to rethink not only our notions of agency but also our ways of being, knowing, and relating.

What happens when food is transformed into literary edibles, that is, represented and refigured in the space of literature? How do literary works reimagine and destabilize our perceptions of food, the eating act, and foodways more broadly? In what ways do these images diverge from food as an anthropological object, closely linked to group identity and marked by hierarchies of race, class, gender, and nationality? How do literary representations of food and eating affect us—and to what ends can they mobilize disgust, appetite, and pleasure? What does literature’s subversive engagement with foodways imply for our understanding of identity? These are some of the questions this panel seeks to explore. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• aesthetics of abjection
• Baroque feasts
• cannibalism
• deviant matter & gender
• ecocriticism
• food dystopias
• globalized identities
• hunger & scarcity
• race and edibility
• speciesism
• the edible nation