Conference session on geographies of dietary change

I am organising an in-person session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, held 1^st - 4^th September 2026 at the Royal Geographical Society in London. My session is called ‘Food on the move: geographies of dietary change and (re)valuation’, and I am accepting abstract submissions until 27 February 2026. Full details of the session and submission guidelines are below, and are also available as a PDF here.

Food on the move: geographies of dietary change and (re)valuation
Sponsored by the Food Geographies Research Group
Convenor: Jonas House (University of Southampton)

Efforts to improve the sustainability and resilience of Western food systems will ultimately entail eating differently. Whether adopting new food sources, refraining from others, or returning to earlier ways of eating, dietary change of some sort appears unavoidable. This raises important questions for those seeking to improve Western food systems. How do things become appreciated and popularised as food? How, in fact, do things become regarded as food in the first place? Food geographers have made important contributions towards answering such questions, particularly across topics such as production- consumption linkages, ‘alternative’ ways of organising and producing food, and explorations of how food (and food waste) are enacted and categorised in practice. However, there is still much to learn about how foods circulate and become (re)valued within different geographies of production and consumption, knowledge around which is essential if we are to organise Western food systems differently. This session aims to advance debates in these areas. It asks: how do foods move around, both physically (e.g. foods travelling to different places) and socioculturally (e.g. foods becoming de-/re-valued by different eaters)? What does this tell us about how Western food systems might be organised in a more just, resilient and sustainable way? The session welcomes papers that address these questions empirically or theoretically. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• foods ‘travelling’ to new places
• things ceasing to be food
• rediscovery of foods
• (re-/de-)valuation of food
• contested or controversial foods
• mainstreaming of new/niche food sources
• the rise and fall of food trends, products and practices
• unusual foods
• dietary change
• food ontology
• (in)edibility

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words, plus up to five keywords, to Jonas House (j.house@soton.ac.uk) on or before Friday 27^th February 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out on or before Wednesday 4^th March 2026.