Programme

Moderator/Discussion: Maria Paula Meneses (CES)

Rita Serra (CES): Wild food - wild mushroom picking in Portuguese forests

Abstract: Food connects us to the world through the essential dynamics to stay alive and secure our position in the food chain. In this workshop we explore the potential of wild food as an introduction to the socio-ecological relationships that take place in Portuguese forests, in particular through mushrooms. Eating wild foods can be part of environmental education approaches that explore multiple ways for people to find and value species that flourish in cultivated and uncultivated spaces, and that resist domestication. The "wild" becomes closer, inhabited by species that surprise us and whose life stories are not entirely controlled by us. Through their names, we can learn to trust that they can provide for us and consume them in a respectful way, while at the same time, linking ourselves with the stories and ongoing struggles between humans and non-humans that make up these places.

Pedro Hespanha (CES/FEUC): Eating and drinking in the popular Portuguese imaginary

Abstract: Sixty years ago, Portugal remained a society distant from power, rural and religious, with an access of modernity to Lisbon, where the ideal of life was identified with “eating, drinking and strolling about”. This caricature clearly emerges from the representations that writers and artists left us from those times and that have been carefully inculcated in our minds from primary school, soap operas and, until more recently, North European politicians worried about our lack of ambition and little commitment to building a society of plenty.

The deconstruction of such representations involves understanding the “strange”, “irrational” and “different” as an expression of resistance to a lifestyle that the working classes do not want, because it enslaves them to meaningless tasks, destroys their roots, their spaces of sociability and nature itself, imposes tastes and patterns of consumption that mischaracterizes them and deprives them of the freedom to decide collectively their future. In 13 notes on “eating and drinking” in the popular imagination, there is an acute perception of the marginal condition it occupies, the profound inequalities in access to food, the zeal surrounding the full exploitation of the scarce food resource, an obligation of solidarity for those who have less and a work ethic underlying the provision of food.

1. The stone soup: survival food
2. Eating and working: the ethics of producing for life
3. Insatiable hunger and shrewdness: “Hunger sharpens ingenuity”
4. The pig-cutting feast: zero waste
5. Eating with your hands, eating out of the trough: sharing of what is of hold
6. The good life: 2eat and drink, strolling about”
7. "Eat well, eat like an abbot!"
8. Eating badly: outdoor rations
9. The evils of eating: a popular recipe
10. The viands of the rural labourer: exploitation in sustenance
11. Food gifting and weddings: festive eating
12. The kitchen: the private space of sociabilities
13. The eating house, the inn and the tavern: the public space of sociabilities

Maurício Virgulino Silva (PhD student in Arts at PPGAV/ECA/University of São Paulo, in doctoral internship at CES): Aesthetic complexity represented in food photography

From the professional experience as a food photographer, a reflection will be made on this "art/communication" that mobilizes markets, customs and social practices. And also, how this representativeness can be used in the construction and valorisation of local cultures.
 

Moderator: Patrícia Branco (CES)
Roundtable on food