About the Journal
Harvest is an open access interdisciplinary journal dedicated to publishing original research, analysis, and creative work that deepens our understanding of the complex and evolving world of food. We provide a platform for critical engagement and diverse perspectives that span global contexts, with a particular emphasis on the unique challenges, cultures, and innovations found within Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific region.
We welcome contributions from students, scholars, practitioners, activists, and writers whose work fosters dialogue across disciplines and communities. We welcome submissions written in clear, engaging language that speaks to both academic and public audiences.
Current Issue
This special issue of Harvest, the journal of AUT's Centre for Critical Food Studies, marks ten years at the table for AUT's Gastronomy Programme - a milestone that invites reflection on how the study of food, culture, and identity has grown within Aotearoa New Zealand's academic landscape. Over the past decade, the programme has cultivated a distinctive community of scholars, chefs, and food thinkers committed to examining food as a lens for understanding history, place, politics, and belonging.
Ten Years at the Table showcases a selection of research dissertations produced by programme alumni, offering a rich cross-section of the intellectual curiosity and critical rigour that has defined gastronomy at AUT. These works traverse diverse terrain - from Indigenous food sovereignty and sustainable production to the sensory politics of taste, migration and culinary memory, and the evolving relationship between hospitality and identity in a changing food system.
Central to this issue is a celebration of student research itself - the lifeblood of any postgraduate programme. Student researchers bring fresh perspectives, lived experience, and a willingness to ask difficult questions about the food systems and cultures they are part of. If the programme has spent a decade planting seeds - in curriculum, mentorship, and critical enquiry - then these dissertations are fittingly its harvest, the tangible yield of years of intellectual cultivation. By foregrounding alumni dissertations in this anniversary issue, Harvest recognises that a programme's legacy is best measured not only by its staff and curriculum, but by the calibre and impact of the research produced by the students who pass through it.
Together, these contributions demonstrate the enduring value of gastronomic scholarship as both an academic discipline and a practical, engaged field of inquiry. As this issue's title suggests, ten years at the table is just the beginning - an invitation to consider where critical food studies might go next.
Rob Richardson, Editor
N.B.: All of these abstracts have been published here with permission.
