The 2026 Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture Cookery and Culture: Ecology, Technology, and the Good Life

The 2026 Ioan Davies Memorial Lecture will be given by

Dr. Seán Cubitt
Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne

Cookery and culture: ecology, technology and the good life

Cooking is a medium of conviviality and culture with deep historical and anthropological roots. It transforms things from the world, using energies of the world, in an event of sharing. Tracing the sources and journeys of ingredients and equipment raises ethical and aesthetic questions connecting natural, technical and cultural processes to the sensory experience of emergent futures. As a medium, cooking is an act of imagination deeply entwined in the histories and actualities of colonialism and capital. And yet, gathered round the charcoal barbie in the back garden, smoke curling up, few practices connect us so socially and profoundly to inherited techniques and ecological agencies. In Good, the second book of a trilogy, old skills are referred back to ancestors, and ecological agencies to gods. It assesses claims to locate the good life in personal, interpersonal, political and ecological good. The discussion of tandoori barbecue draws together themes from the previous and following volumes to make the case for processes of consideration, imagination and making as the core principles of aesthetic politics.