Food and the Elements

Forthcoming, July 2026

The annual volume of papers selected from the previous year's Oxford Symposium will be devoted to the exploration of the theme "food and the elements".

The papers examine not just the four elements of classical Western philosophy — fire, water, earth, and air — but also the elements of flavor, of chemistry, of culture, of care. In short, all the building blocks of the culinary world.

Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the flavor of bitterness in rituals of trauma, the terror of elemental uptake, calendar change and culinary continuity in southern Italy, costal foraging in Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, traditional food pairing in French Polynesia, the role of caste in late nineteenth-century colonial western Indian meat markets, the uses of lithium, salts in the Himalayas and on the Catalan coast, nixtamalization in traditional Mexican foods, synthesizing saffron and vanilla, sourness in Persian cookery, Japanese temple cuisine, feeding the Royal Navy in the Age of Fighting Sail, water and food insecurity in Uganda, edible gold, and accounts of the creation of Adam, changing dietetic patterns in Medieval Islam, and the Guangzhou kitchen.