What do we mean by food studies? Is it a distinct field or not, and what might it encompass? This issue starts, poignantly, with a commentary that summarizes some intense deliberations on these questions at CAFS 2014, the annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Food Studies. The authors conclude by suggesting that “food studies scholars and practitioners...traverse not just disciplinary boundaries, but epistemological boundaries.” This entails more than different methodologies, as they point out, but may open up a broader typological range of research questions, examine how food can serve as a catalyst for exploring new issues, and expand the possibilities of where, or to whom, researchers can turn as a source of learning. Moreover, when disciplines are projected as “ways of knowing, doing and writing” rather than “static territories of knowledge,” such an approach can reveal potential “relationships among the disciplines that are often otherwise obscured.”

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Desjardins, E., (2025), "“Ways of knowing” in food studies", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i1.76)

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1. food studies

Original publication: Desjardins, Ellen. "“Ways of knowing” in food studies." Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation, vol. 2, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1-3. DOI: 10.15353/cfs-rcea.v2i1.76. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation. Copyright © the author(s). Work published in CFS/RCÉA prior to and including Vol. 8, No. 3 (2021) is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY license. Work published in Vol. 8, No. 4 (2021) and after is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. For details, see creativecommons.org/licenses/.