Culinary Practices, Decolonization, and Feminisms

Please join us to learn about the intersection between culinary practices, decolonization, and feminisms in Catalonia. Dr. Rebecca Ingram’s talk will be based on her book, Women’s Work. How Culinary Cultures Shaped Modern Spain. Specifically, she will present about the Barcelona Institut de Cultura/Biblioteca Popular de la Dona, a civic institution founded in 1909 that created cooking programs for working-class women and promoted Catalonian nationalist ideals. The Institut established women’s cooking labor as part of Barcelona’s modernization, stressing that culinary discourses held political relevance for the construction of national paradigms. Dr. Ingram has discovered a direct line between the cooking classes offered by the Institut and the formation of some of the top female chefs in Catalonia today. This transhistorical link will reveal how the evolution of gastronomic landscapes and culinary cultures has contributed to decolonization efforts and to establishing a national identity from a feminist standpoint.