15th Conference of the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food
3 – 5 December 2025
Tours, France
Call for papers
Since the 1980s, growing public interest in gastronomy, food-related issues and the culinary arts has extended to the worlds of comics, bandes dessinées, manga and graphic novels, all of which now constitute a legitimized cultural field. Since the very beginning of these graphic and narrative arts, food was mostly used, as in novels, as a background element, often inspired by classical iconography to contribute towards characterization, evoke certain cultural traits, or convey the norms and values associated with food. Early examples such as Heinrich Hoffman’s Der Struwwelpeter (1844) or Winsor McCay’s Hungry Henrietta (1905) and Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-1925) vividly depict the effects of ingestion, which are in reality invisible, on the bodies. Obelix’s wild boar roast, crowning the village banquet that recurs at the end of the Asterix albums, and other evocations of food heritage that punctuate the travels of many comics characters play a significant role in their moral economy, while enhancing the imaginary worlds that host them. When aimed at children, comics have often been used as mean of education and were regularly chosen to convey nutritional or advertising messages about food. They nowadays also contribute to the growing public interest in gastronomy and cooking that has spread across all media, particularly in France and Japan.
At least since the 1980s popular Japanese gastronomic culture has been at the heart of manga production. The Oishinbo series (1983-), which follows the peregrinations of a culinary journalist, initiated the genres of the ryori manga and gurume manga (gourmet manga). Both genres depict culinary practices and the art of tasting in opulent detail. French readers began to appreciate this genre in 2005 when Masayuki Kusumi and Jirô Taniguchi’s Kodoku no gourmet (1994, The Solitary Gourmet) was first translated. More recently, the Shokugeki no Sōma series (Food Wars, 2012-2019) features apprentice chef battles and advocates the search for a personal culinary expression capable of drawing inspiration from gastronomies across the globe as well as from the social diversity of cuisines and restaurant practices.
Currently, the ongoing series dedicated to the world of oenology, Kami no Shizuku (2004-, Drops of God), is enjoying worldwide success, has been adapted into an American-French-Japanese television series while sky-rocketing the sales of the wines it mentions. With sales reaching 130 million copies for the 110 volumes of Oishinbo and 20 million copies for the 36 volumes of Shokugeki no Sōma in Japan, these series rival the greatest successes of the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée. Their distribution is worldwide and intermedial (anime, TV series, books, merchandising). Such comics have become an essential media of gastronomic cultures. They promote cuisine based on intercultural exchanges and offer a forum for culinary experimentation as in Yûgo Kobayashi’s recent Fermat no ryouri, which revisits the Neapolitan sauce by using ketchup (2018, Fermat Kitchen, 2023-).
In France, the bande dessinée is nowadays a major player in the publishing world and food-related publications have become more prominent within the genre of graphic reporting which is expanding since the 2000s. Already famous for exploring social and political themes, Etienne Davodeau devoted a highly acclaimed volume to “unconventional” winemaking in 2011, Les Ignorants, which undeniably contributed to the popularization of biodynamic wines in France. The same year, Gallimard commissioned Christophe Blain, renowned for his album about the daily life at the Quai d’Orsay during Dominique de Villepin’s foreign ministership, to devote an album to the chef Alain Plassard (En cuisine avec Alain Plassard, 2011). Since then, the number of original publications on gastronomy has grown steadily, with a wide range of approaches and themes, including documentary projects and journalistic investigations about the challenges and risks of our food supplies, biographies of key figures in culinary history, family sagas rooted in regional expression, and the revival of well-researched educational comics dealing with health and nutrition. The French National Library (BnF) has created a special entry, “BD Gastro” in order to promote these publications in the science and technology section open to the public at the François Mitterrand site. In the Franco-Belgian and Japanese spheres, at least, comics have established themselves as a media in their own right for gastronomic cultures, understood in their broadest sense to encompass all the knowledge, practices and forms of expression of our relationship to food.
In 2024, the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image d’Angoulême (France) devoted an exhibition to the connections between food and bandes dessinées entitled “Croquez ! Quand la bande dessinée met les pieds dans les plats” which confirms the richness and vitality of food comics. Scholars in media studies or literary studies have already devoted occasional but notable works to these questions. On the other hand, barring a few exceptions, social science and historical studies devoted to food have made limited headway in this vast field of investigation to reflect on how comics relate and contribute to the transmission of food cultures.
The 15th Conference of the European Institute for the History and Culture of Food to be held in Tours in December 2025, is intended to provide an opportunity for exchange between these two fields of study – food studies and comics studies – across all disciplines. It seeks to encourage a deeper appreciation of the importance of ninth art and its potential to contribute to food studies. It also seeks to initiate a dialogue between food and comics studies concerning the ways in which the later address questions and concerns core to research on food cultures. Since the IEHCA has a tradition of broad disciplinary openness and an interest in all cultural areas and historical periods, papers can cover a wide range of fields and approaches. The notions of comics, manga or bande dessinée are considered in their broadest sense as graphic and sequential modes of expression, which some trace back to palaeolithic art, Egyptian and Greek antiquity, as well as to early printmaking traditions, well before the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the vast field of visual production forming the medium of comics.
Suggested topics
1. Comics as source and research field for food studies
- Comics as a source for food studies: thematic, comparative, synchronic and diachronic approaches.
How can we write the history of the emergence of food-related themes in comics? How are the representations of cooking, cooks, the dining table and its practices, gastronomic approaches, and the expectations of guests represented? What kinds of visualizations of fears and food crises do comics offer? How do these representations mobilize the contributions of food studies, and what place do they give to scientific and activist perspectives?
- Food cultures and their histories through the prism of comics: expressing identities, promoting hybridization.
How are culinary and gastronomic cultures and their expression in comics interwoven ? The connections between comics culture and food culture is especially strong in Japan and France. What is the situation in other areas producing comics, in the rest of Europe, in Turkey and the Arab world, in China, on the African continent and the Americas? How do comics help express food cultures, their relationships, hybridizations and transformative dynamics? How can comics contribute to hybridization, cultural transfers, appropriation, reconfigurations and universalization? How do comics express food identities and otherness and contribute to innovation ?
- A medium that shapes gastronomic cultures and culinary practices?
What role do comics play in the transmission of gastronomic practices and culinary training of readers? Can comics impart cooking skills? How are comics used for educational or professional purposes? How can recipes be translated into comics? What kind of cooking can be learned from comics? To what extent is there a perennity and renewal of old uses for educational and vocational purposes?
Are comics a new medium for transmitting culinary knowledge? What are the ways of representing food cultures and practices, the heritage of gestures and the sensory constructions that accompany them, that are particularly specific to the formal language of comics?
- Comics and social relations in and around the kitchen: gender, class relations, intercultural exchanges, intersectionality.
How can the history of the deployment of these themes and their modes of expression in the medium of comics be written? How could it contribute towards understanding the processes of legitimization of these themes and of the medium, the means of economic and symbolic domination, but also gendered relations, colonial relations, the representation or structuring of identities and food heritage that are at the heart of the social construction of food?
2. How do comics deal with, use and treat food and gastronomic themes? How are they affected by new publishing challenges?
- Narration of gastronomic themes: intention, messages, effects, conveying tastes and senses
Food and gastronomic themes give rise to an infinite variety of narrative and visual approaches, with equally diverse effects. Based on the perspectives opened by the works and their creators, what are the contributions and intentions these comics convey, what are their specific leverages and driving forces? Which place do these elements occupy in the narrative and visual compositions, how do they extend from contributing to characterization and setting to forming the core of the publications? How are food-related sensory experiences expressed in comics (appetite, pleasure, disgust, satiety, etc.)? How can comics convey sensory experiences linked to food pleasure or lack thereof, taste and distaste, the pleasures of the table and of sharing food, of the music of cooking and of the tricks of trade?
- Visual, narrative and intermedial approaches to food cultures.
How can we analyse the specificities of comics in the treatment of food-related themes: scripting, rhythm and tension, use and creation of icons etc.? Do comics offer a specific treatment of these themes in comparison to other forms of graphic and textual expression? What are the potentialities of panels, strips, mise-en-page, the book form and ellipsis? Are some kind of scenes favored, with what intentions? How do comics dialogue with audiovisual media, social networks, foodporn, blogs or YouTube?
- What place for comics in gastronomic and culinary publishing?
What are the dynamics of recent developments in publishing? What are the complementarities and contributions of comics in relation to other forms of culinary and gastronomic publishing? What are the prospects for these publishing projects?
3. Reception, distribution and readership
- Readers, audiences, fans, gendered approaches to ‘food’ comics.
What do we know about the readership of these comics devoted to food and culinary themes? Does this form of expression replace or complement other media? Do comics open the world of gastronomy to new audiences and/or do they cater to an already existing audience? How do readers adapt their food culture to these different media? How do comics reflect gender differences in the way people relate to food culture?
- Uses and effects of reading practices.
How do comics determine specific ways of appropriating elements of food culture? What do readers of gurume manga do with detailed references to recipes? Can comics encourage innovation in food and finding a culinary style? To what extent do comics help to shape individual and collective imaginations, to channel the expression of culinary sensations, to convey prejudices or to support culinary passions? Can the medium generate conversional, dialogic effects? What role do food-related themes play in exchanges between fans of series and authors, do they inspire elaborate criticism ?
- Comics as a means of communicating the issues surrounding food culture.
Are nutritional recommendations, advertising pitches and surveys of our eating habits easier to digest when they are presented in comic form? How can comics be used in education and vocational training? From cookery books to cookery comics: what are the continuities and the differences? How do haute cuisine, the food industry and comics inspire each other?
Scientific committee:
- Maaheen Ahmed (Ghent University, Belgique)
- Loïc Bienassis (IEHCA, France)
- Jérôme Bocquet (Université de Tours, France)
- Pierre-Antoine Dessaux (Université de Tours, France)
- Laurent Gerbier (Université de Tours, France)
- Irène Le Roy Ladurie (Université de Lausanne, Suisse)
- Eric Maigret (Université Sorbonne nouvelle, France)
Organization :
- Loïc Bienassis (IEHCA) : [email protected]
- Pierre-Antoine Dessaux (Université de Tours, CITERES) : [email protected]
Paper proposals must include a title, name and affiliation, a short abstract (max 500 words in English or French) and a short CV (max 300 words). Presentations are expected to last 20 minutes.
Please submit proposals by 28 February 2025, at: [email protected]
The conference will be free of registration charges.
Short bibliography
Brau Iorie, « Oishinbo’s adventures in eating: Food, communication, and culture in Japanese comics », Gastronomica 2004/4, p. 34-45.
CarrieLynn D. Reinhard, Julia E. Largent, Bertha Chin (ed.), Eating Fandom: Intersections Between Fans and Food Cultures, London / New York, Routledge, 2021.
Deramond Julie, Lambert Emmanuelle, « L’art de dire et de faire le goût : les médiations culturelles dans un manga culinaire », Recherches en communication, 2019, Du discours gastronomique et œnologique, 48, p. 7-28.
Groensteen Thierry, Un objet culturel non identifié, Angoulême, L’An 2, 2006.
Grove Sylvia, « Cooking for everyone through bande dessinée: gender and the limits of culinary democracy », Modern and Contemporary France, aug. 2021, vol.29, 3, p. 261-279.
Histoire et bande dessinée, dossier dirigé par Sylvain Lesage, Sociétés et Représentations, 2022/1.
Koering, Jérémie, Les Iconophages : Une histoire de l’indigestion des images, Arles, Actes Sud, 2021.
Kukkonen, Karin, “Space, Time, and Causality in Graphic Narratives: An Embodied Approach”, From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013, p. 49-66.
Maigret Eric, Stefanelli Matteo (dir.), La bande dessinée : une médiaculture, Paris, Armand Colin INA, 2012.
Marabet Astrid, « L’aventure est en cuisine ! Les ménagères de la BD franco-belge des années 50 », Séance n°6 du séminaire Doct’ISOR, tenue au centre Panthéon de l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, le 18 mai 2016. URL : https://isor.hypotheses.org/316.
Miyajima Keiko, « Queering the palate : the erotics and politics of food in Japanese gourmet manga », Studies in Comics, 11, 2020, p. 271-283.
Nakamura Maiko, « On one’s own or with someone else : desire and gourmandism in contemporary japanese manga », Gastronomica, 2024/24, p. 26-35.
Ory Pascal, « L’histoire par la bande ? », Le Débat, vol. 177, no. 5, 2013, p. 90-95.
Parasecoli Fabio, “Gluttonous crimes: Chew, comic books, and the ingestion of masculinity” in “Eating like a ‘man’: Food and the performance and regulation of masculinities,” special issue of Women’s Studies International Forum, 2014/44, p. 236-246.
Peeters Benoit, Métamorphoses de la cuisine – Cycle de conférences CNAM, 2018 https://www.arts-et-metiers.net/musee/metamorphoses-de-la-cuisine-dix-conferences-de-benoit-peeters-savourer-au-musee-des-arts-et
Peeters Benoit, Poétique de la bande dessinées, chaire création artistique du Collège de France, 2022-2023 – séminaire https://www.college-de-france.fr/fr/chaire/benoit-peeters-creation-artistique-chaire-annuelle
Pruvost-Delaspre, Marie, « Un festin imaginaire ». Anthropology of food, no 15 (31 décembre 2021). https://doi.org/10.4000/aof.12829.
Roland Manon, « Quand l’appétit va, tout va », Cahiers de la BD, 2024/26, p. 107-111.
Smolderen, Thierry, Naissances de la bande dessinée: de William Hogarth à Winsor McCay, Brussels, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2009.
Comics, bandes dessinées, manga
Abouet Marguerite, Oubrerie Clément, Aya de Yopougon, Paris, Gallimard, 8 vol., 2005-2023.
Alarcon Franckie, L’art du sushi, Paris, Delcourt, 2019.
Astérix et les 40 banquets, éditions Albert René, 2024.
Aurita Aurélia, La Vie gourmande, Tournai, Casterman, 2022.
Bachelot François. Oenologix : tout savoir sur le vin en bande dessinée, Malakoff, Dunod, 2022.
Barry Linda, Girls and Boys, Real Comet Press, 1981; Big Ideas, Real Comet Press, 1983.
Bidaud Marine, Charrier Mathieu éd., Bouchées doubles : les nourritures du futur en bande dessinée, Pantin, Keribus, 2023.
Blain Christophe, En cuisine avec Alain Plassard, Paris, Gallimard, 2011.
Bourdain Anthony, Rose Joel et al., Hungry Ghosts, Berger Books, 2018.
Burniat Matthieu, La Passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Paris, Dargaud, 2014.
Davodeau Etienne, Les ignorants, Paris, Futuropolis, 2011.
Eisner Will, La cuisine occulte pour les apprentis sauciers et saucières, ed. fr. Paris, Dargaud, 1976.
Gleason Emilie, Croq Arthur, Junk food. Les dessous d’une addiction, Tournai, Casterman, 2023.
Gorridge Gérard, Mangeur de feu, Montreuil, Les Enfants Rouges, 2016.
Goscinny René, Uderzo Albert, Une aventure d’Astérix. Le tour de Gaule, Paris, Dargaud, 1963.
Ha Robin, Cook Korean! A Comic Book with Recipes, Grenoble, Glénat, 2018.
Jul, Aitor Alfonso, La faim de l’histoire. Une histoire du monde par la gastronomie, Paris, Dargaud, 2023.
Kariya Tetsu, Hanasaki Akira, Oishinbo, Tokyo, Shōgakukan, 1983-en cours.
Katchor Ben, The Dairy Restaurant, New York, Schocken, 2020.
Knisley, Lucy, Relish: My Life in the Kitchen, New York, First Second, 2013.
Kobayahi Yügo, Fermat kitchen (Fermat no ryouri), ed. fr. Paris, Mangetsu, 2022-2023, 4 vol.
McCayWinsor, The Dream of the Rarebit Friend (1904-1925), trad. fr. partielle Les cauchemars de l’amateur de fondue au chester, Paris, Pierre Horay, 1979.
Nakahira Sam, Bill’s Quiet Revolution: A Japanese American Artisan of California Cuisine, autoédition, 2019.
Peeters Benoit, Aurélia Aurita, Comme un chef, Tournai, Casterman, 2017.
Pham, Thien, Family Style : Memories of an American from Vietnam, New York, First Second, 2023.
Rutile, Charve Frédéric, Escoffier : roi des cuisiniers, Grenoble, Glénat, 2018.
Taniguchi Jirô, Kusumi Masayuki, Le gourmet solitaire, ed. fr. Tournai, Casterman, 2016.
Tsukuda Yuku, Saeki Shun, Food Wars (Shokugeki no Sōma), ed. fr. Delcourt Paris, 2011-2023, 37 vol.
For a French version of this CFP, visit: Sarah Mallah (5 décembre 2024). Appel à communications : À la table de la bande dessinée. Récits graphiques des cultures alimentaires d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Tours). LPCM. Consulté le 6 décembre 2024 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/12uj5
