Food is perceived as a source of comfort, an assurance of stability and normalcy, and as a way of coming together and partaking in a community. For a very long time, food practices were understood as an innocent by-product of availability and affordability. However, it has been reviewed in a new light with the emergence of a significant body of work that located food within the cultural-matrix of power hierarchy and identity politics. Erstwhile a discipline invested in the objective study of production and distribution, it has had a ‘cultural turn’ resulting in acts of cooking and eating becoming a site of intense academic inquiry. These everyday practices of food are quite rich and vivid in our memory, and play an essential role in shaping the personal, communal, national, and global imaginary of the world which we inhabit. If food in the collective memory is a site of happiness and pleasure, it also operates as a site of concern and potential hazard, especially in the context of a pandemic-ridden world. Therefore a critical inquiry into the ways we engage with food in pandemic — all the way from its origin and production to its final setting on the table — is crucial to make sense of the time and space we live in.

The emergence and spread of the pandemic COVID-19 have altered the perception, imagination and practices of food across the world. Coming-togetherness and commensality that one associates with food has significantly altered due to digitality and the imposition of lockdown as a response measures to curb pandemic. While the economy suffered, the precarity surrounding food-security and sovereignty has exposed the structural inequities bringing into question the role of nation-state in the neo-liberal market. Further, Zoonotic diseases like SARS (2003), Nipah (2009), Ebola (2014) and now COVID-19, escalating to pandemics through animal-human interactions in the food system (Lu et al., 2020; Marty & Jones, 2020) have brought into focus ecological crises and a refocus on food safety norms. With media and communities consistently deliberating over food hygiene and sanitation, there have been calls for collective ban on certain food-consumption practices and food-spaces like ‘wet-market’ (Lee & Houston, 2020) resulting in the narrativization and emergence of geographical and cultural ‘others’ which further formulates normative food practices and identities. A quick glance into the experiences and narrativization of previous pandemics reaffirms the strong interconnectedness between pandemic and food practices. In the collective memory of pandemic, food is imagined both as a cause of the afflictions and the treatment for the same. These ‘mnemonic premediation’ (Erill 2009, 2017) through forms like social media, oral conversations, films, literature and other contents essentially shape our experiences of food, the pandemic, and the future. With such an understanding, the Department of English and Cultural Studies at CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, India attempts to facilitate discussions on Food in/of Pandemic by organizing a week-long International Conference (Online).