Food is simultaneously a cultural text and a political artifact — a site where identity, memory, power, and resistance converge. This panel invites world language educators and scholars to examine how food, as subject, medium, and metaphor, can transform the language classroom into a space of critical inquiry, developing not only linguistic proficiency but also intercultural communicative competence and critical citizenship.

Despite the proliferation of food-focused language courses in higher education, the field remains theoretically fragmented. This panel seeks to address that gap by bringing together scholars experimenting with food and the arts — literature, film, visual arts, music, and culinary arts — as frameworks for language instruction grounded in critical food pedagogy, decolonial perspectives, and translingual competence frameworks.

We welcome proposals engaging topics including but not limited to: food and collective memory, storytelling, or cultural identity; food justice, migration, and diaspora foodways; decolonial approaches to culinary representation; gastronationalism and the politics of food in media and visual culture; digital food cultures, social media, and algorithmic taste; food, environmental humanities, and sustainability; and food activism and civic engagement in the language classroom.

By centering critical food pedagogy alongside intercultural competence frameworks, this panel aims to build a formal community of practice — and lay the groundwork for a shared resource repository and future collaborative publication — for the study of food, culture, and the arts within world language education.