Hungry for Peace

Hungry for Peace invites readers into the remarkable world of food as an active agent of conflict and connection. From community kitchens to food festivals and shared meals around tables, Elaine Mei Lien Pratley shows how food shapes tensions, sparks understanding and produces everyday peace. Through participatory fieldwork with young people in Melbourne, Australia, ordinary acts – eating consciously, sampling unfamiliar cuisines and reducing food waste – emerge as powerful, agentic gestures that negotiate conflict, build trust and nurture connection. Blending feminist peace studies, food research and posthumanist theory, the book reveals how more-than-human actors – smells, ingredients, tables and atmospheres – participate directly in peace and conflict. It shows food practices not as background, but as lively collaborators in peacebuilding, offering new ways to understand, navigate, and shape conflict in our interconnected, entangled world.