Leftovers: A history of food waste and preservation Eleanor Barnett
Event details
Join historian Eleanor Barnett for a topical and richly entertaining history of food preservation and food waste in Britain from the 16th-century kitchen to the present day.
Eleanor, author of Leftovers, will explore the many ingenious ways in which our ancestors sought to extend the life of food through preservation, the culinary reuse of leftovers and the recycling of food scraps. Embracing a broad historical lens, her talk will move from the Tudor kitchen, to the world-changing inventions in food preservation of the Industrial Revolution, the politics of food and packaging waste in the modern era of sustainability, to the AI restaurants of the future.
Opening a window on the everyday experiences of ordinary people in the past, Eleanor will reveal how factors such as religious belief, class identities and gender have historically shaped attitudes towards food waste. At a time when a third of the food we produce globally is wasted, she will consider how we might build a sustainable future by learning from the past, linking her central historical focus to humanitarian and environmental issues of urgent contemporary interest - including climate change, globalisation, scientific advancement, poverty and inequality.
This event will take place live on Zoom Webinar. You will receive a link to join a couple of days before the event and a reminder an hour before. During the event, you can ask questions via a Q&A function, but audience cameras and microphones will remain muted throughout.
Book sales
You can buy copies of many of our speakers’ books from Fox Lane Books, a local independent bookseller and Festival partner. In some cases, author signed bookplates are available too.
Image credit: Photo of Eleanor Barnett by Lucy McGrath
About the speaker
Dr Eleanor Barnett holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge currently holds a Leverhulme research fellowship at Cardiff University. Her work uses food as a lens through which to access the daily lives of ordinary people as well as wider cultural, economic, political and religious historical processes. As @historyeats on Instagram, she posts daily food history stories, paintings and objects from across the world to a wide audience. She writes the monthly historical recipe for BBC History Magazine and is a regular contributor to public-facing media. Leftovers: A history of food waste and preservation (Bloomsbury, 2024) is her first non-fiction title.
Partners
