Transcendent Nourishment, a Retrospective
Call for Proposals
Emiliya Mailyan, Aurora Matzke, Consuelo Salas, Karen Tellez-Chaires
Send to: jmrfoodrhets@gmail.com
In the larger field of writing studies, our special issue will ask where the lines among cookbook, textbook, and food studies anthologies have intersected, and how a retrospective look into the foods of rhetorics and the rhetorics of foods have become, as a space within the field. This special issue will work as a collective to curate texts that nurture critical, cultural inquiry of food studies within the field over time–where we have been, where we are currently, and what directions might we go. In particular, we are interested in contributions that critically examine the ways in which rhetoricians have addressed food rhetorics and rhetorics of food, tracing the analytical and practical applications across time, space, and populations to influence the ways in which we come to terms with food–it’s production, manipulation, and consumption, as meaning-making moments.
Interdisciplinary scholarship across rhetoric and food studies has treated food as a meaningful rhetorical site, from foodways and cookbooks as genre and literary practices (Bower; Notaker, Tigner and Carruth) to recipes and food practices as embodied, feminist, and transformative cultural/critical work (Avakian and Haber; Goldthwaite). Scholars have also traced how rhetorics of food operate within systems of migration, globalization, labor, and consumption (Bell and Valentine; Garcia, et al; Jayasanker; Poulain).
Of course, food rhetorics continues to be a broad and popular subfield of study–most recently from works such as Carlnita P. Greene’s (2015) Gourmands and Gluttons: The Rhetoric of Food Excess to the playfully titled Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production (2020, eds. Conley and Eckstein). Through a feminist lens of embodied storytelling, we hope to offer something different. Amy Bentley et al.’s anthology on the rise of food studies within NYU moves more in the direction of our project, as they blend research, narratives, and policy analysis to examine the history of the multidisciplinary field, pointing to the value of how shifting disciplines and genres welcome multiple perspectives into a larger conversation. With the above in mind, we will focus more concretely on the arguments of and about food within writing studies writ broadly. In addition, the above example illustrates how dominant systems of classification can obscure the rhetorical dimensions of food rhetorics work. Thus, we emphasize food studies as an embodied act and archives as more than records: they reflect histories, identities, and networks of relationships and influence. As such, we must, as Sarah Pink posits, commit to reflexivity in engagement with and learning about other cultures—in order to uncover those “sites of embodied knowing” beyond what is written (13).
For this special issue, we aim to share our collaborative efforts to design a text that blends historiographic (re)covering(s) with reflective writing, rhetorical inquiry, cultural memory, and critical food studies. We hope this special issue invites attendees to actively share their own reflexive cooking narratives —centering embodied knowledge, lived experience, and reflective practice–as we look to our histories in order to inform our present and our futures.
Contributors should feel encouraged to embed media, recipes, narratives, and/or ways of creation that invite living texts, inter-articles, and multigenre curation strategies in online spaces.
Potential Questions for Participants to Examine:
- What foundational texts should/could/would be included in examining food rhetorics within/alongside/outside the field?
- What texts have been systemically sidelined or ignored that should be brought into and/or centered within the conversation?
- What value does an inter/transdisciplinary lens lend to this work? What has been favored and what can be further amplified?
- What histories and knowledges have been privileged?
- Based on what has/has not come before, what ways of making meaning within food rhetorics should the field turn toward?
- In what ways has food rhetorics shifted over time with/against technologies, crises, politics, and social movements?
- How have media and the development of media impacted/shifted/created opportunities within the broader field of food rhetorics?
Initial Proposals:
Proposals should be between 350-500 words and cover the scholarship and genre(s) of interest to the author(s).
Here are some example submission types (but feel free to propose others):
~up to 2500 words: poetry or series of social media posts with accompanying discussion/reflection
~4000 words: personal story or short reflective essay
~6000: book review essay, literature review essay, annotated bibliography, pedagogical brief, praxis essay, or interview
~7500–8000 words: research article or scholarly essay, symposium conversation
~multimodal piece (variable length): podcast, collage, video or image essay
Due Dates:
First Look: CCCC 2026, Feminist Workshop
500 - 600 word Abstract: May 22, 2026, email to jmrfoodrhets@gmail.com
- Authors notified June 17th
Please submit your full article manuscript by September 11, 2026
Anticipated Publication: Spring 2027 in alignment with Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics
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Ingredients List
Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/4296.
Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. Consuming Geographies: We are What We Eat. Routledge, 1997.
Bentley, Amy, et al., editors. Practicing Food Studies. NYU Press, 2024.
Bower, Anne L., editor. Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories. University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
Bourdain, A. (2013). Kitchen confidential. A&C Black.
Cognard-Black, J. (2017). The embodied rhetoric of recipes. Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics, 30-47.
Colwin, Laurie. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. Vintage, 2021.
Conley, Donovan, and Justin Eckstein, eds. Cookery: Food Rhetorics and Social Production. University of Alabama Press, 2020.
Crowther, Gillian. Eating Culture: An Anthropological Guide to Food. 2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, 2018.
Dietz, S. Theresa. The Complete Language of Food: A Definitive & Illustrated History. Quarto, 2022.
Fleitz, Elizabeth. “(Re) Mixing Up Literacy: Cookbooks as Rhetorical Remix.” Community Literacy Journal, vol. 15, no. 2, Spring 2021, https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1401&context=communityliteracy.
Garcia, Matt, et al., editors. Food Across Borders. Rutgers University Press, 2017.
Gill, Kelli. Food Rhetoric. https://www.foodrhetoric.com/, 2026.
—-. “#WhatIEatInADay *As A Fat Person Not on A Diet: Eating Online as Feminist Performative Symbolic Resistance.” Peitho, Vol. 28, no. 2, Winter 2026.
Goldthwaite, Melissa A., ed. Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics. Southern Illinois UP, 2017.
Greene, Carlnita P. Gourmands and Gluttons: The Rhetoric of Food Excess. Peter Lang Verlag, 2015.
Halloran, Vivian Nun. The Immigrant Kitchen: Food, Ethnicity, and Diaspora. The Ohio State University, 2016.
Iancu, Anca-Luminit̜̜a, and Alexandra Mitrea. Food Cultures Across Time: Flavours and Endeavours. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021.
Jayasanker, Laresh. Sameness in Diversity: Food and Globalization in Modern America. University of California, 2020.
Lamberti, Adrienne. “The Rhetoric of Food: Precedent Food Texts as Inventio.” POROI, vol. 11, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-6, https://pubs.lib.uiowa.edu/poroi/article/3328/galley/112170/view/.
Mastrangelo, Lisa. “Recipes for/of Subversion: The Rhetorical Strategies of The Suffrage Cookbook.” Peitho, vol. 22, no. 2, Winter 2020, https://cfshrc.org/article/recipes-for-of-subversion-the-rhetorical-strategies-of-the-suffrage-cookbook/.
Nguyen, B. M. (2008). Stealing Buddha's dinner. Penguin.
Notaker, Henry. A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page Over Seven Centuries. University of California Press, 2017.
Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sage, 2015.
Poulain, Jean-Pierre. The Sociology of Food: Eating and the Place of Food in Society. Translated by Augusta Dörr, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Shipka, Jody. “Edible Rhetoric: Making Memorable Meals.” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xW43yNzQq8.
The Story of Food: An Illustrated History of Everything We Eat. Dorling Kindersley, 2018.
Tigner, Amy L., and Allison Carruth. Literature and Food Studies. Routledge, 2018.
Wilkinson, Crystal. Praisesong for Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks. Clarkson Potter, 2024.
Zhen, Willa. Food Studies: A Hands-On Guide. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.