Hosted by Laura Otto’s Chair of European Ethnology at the University of Würzburg, the Gone Fishing? lecture series invites reflections on the past, present, and future of human relationships with water bodies and the worlds that they stage.

This Thursday, 9 July, the Off the Menu team will join the discussion to share our work on eating and ecology. Appetites, or so they seem, are boundless, but squid are not. Spotlighting the eating that drives fishing, we will present a lecture in three parts. The first will introduce the relationship food studies has to coasts and water. From a post-industrial fish to overshucked oysters and overlooked sea urchins and from shameful last bites to a squid that once was, we will consider the role that docks and shores play as both beginnings and endings to histories about humans and creatures of the sea. The second part surveys how “Off the Menu” aims, in homage to John R. Gillis, to fill food history’s “blue hole,” and the third theorizes the role that eating, at large, plays in the past, present, and future of aquatic life management.

The series is online and open to all to join.