About the Kitchen Research Unit

The Kitchen Research Unit (KRU) focuses on transdisciplinary scholarship and practice research expertise around food, taste, eating and cooking.

The KRU is home to all kinds of adventures and analysis on and with food. KRU draws on various traditions in sociology, geography, anthropology, art and Science and Technology Studies to analyse food practices, both at home, within communities and in professional fields, such as restaurants and industry and brings them together with practice research. 

Crucially, KRU engages food as a material and political issue that is of everyday concern to academics not just as a topic, but also as a material concern. The KRU engages with local communities and aims to use food from local providers, as well as connect with local groups that promote food justice. With its initiatives, the KRU also aims to intervene in food provision on campus and beyond.

The unit is interested in a wide range of topics, practices and cultures:

• Taste, recipes, cooking methods and cookbooks
• Alternative and sustainable food systems
• Foraging practices and cultures
• Food technologies
• Practices and processes of fermentation
• Food, communities, urban spaces and regeneration
• Food traditions, indigenous knowledges and food sovereignty
• Multicultural and multifaith practices of solidarity through food
• Food and media cultures
• Food, health and wellbeing

KRU hosts visiting scholars and encourages students to get in touch with its members with an interest in writing relevant MA and PhD dissertations. 

KRU collaborates with the Goldsmiths Allotment, and the Art Garden and Laboratory, a research centre that grows and analyses food.

KRU maintains an active website as well as a blog.