Tasting History: Taking Pride in Glasgow’s Food Heritage

Food is a topic everyone connects with. As a historian, my research has food at its core. I interpret past recipes, cookbooks, and food writing to interrogate how people understood, questioned, and created wider debates around diverse topics including innovation, globalisation, place, and culture. The ways that ingredients, cooking techniques and diets change or proliferate over time sheds light on many things, from changing fashions and technologies to perceptions of class, labour, and gender. What underscores all of these debates, however, is how intrinsically food is tied to our sense of identity and belonging. More than just fuel, food is linked to our understanding of ourselves, the people we surround ourselves with, and the places we inhabit. 

In Scotland, our culinary identity is presented through a narrow selection of foods: tartan-wrapped haggis, whisky, shortbread, and porridge. Particularly in Glasgow, food is often maligned and seen as predominantly plain, unimaginative, or unhealthy, with jokes about deep-fried mars bars and pizza crunch (both delicious) belittling Glasgow’s vibrant food culture. These stereotypical perceptions of Glasgow’s food past and present flatten a cuisine that is richly diverse, multicultural, and rooted in longstanding traditions. Gaps in our understanding of Scottish food culture can negatively affect our tourism and heritage offering, local economic growth, and representation of place and community. Repositioning food as the focal point of Glaswegian and Scottish culture offers an opportunity to change this. 

Established by the University of Glasgow’s College of Arts and Humanities in 2022, the Food: Sustainability, Health, Heritage and Tourism Catalyst was conceptualised to address these gaps around Scottish food. We built a network of over 50 academic researchers and stakeholders working across Scotland’s food sector, bringing them together to establish challenges and co-create solutions and projects driven by arts and humanities research and the diverse expertise of people working in food. The projects the Food Catalyst has so far generated have sought to better understand the work done within the sector via the Scottish Food Library; created learning programmes around Japanese Culinary Consciousness and sustainable food practices; and championed Scottish food history across the heritage and tourism sectors. 

Born of the Food Catalyst, a collaboration between myself and Peter Gilchrist of Tenement Kitchen resulted in the development of the Scottish Food Heritage Symposiums: annual events which explore and celebrate Scottish food history. This year’s symposium looks at tea and is being delivered in partnership with Mackintosh at the Willow to showcase how Scottish food and drink are powerful tools for education. The popularity of these events demonstrates the appetite for more activity around Scottish food and its history – an appetite perfectly aligned with Taste the Place. 

Centring food at the celebration of Glasgow’s 850th birthday is a brilliant means of showcasing both the past and present of Scottish food, but also its exciting potential. If we embrace Scottish food fully to the extent that we should, it could have a transformative effect on life in Glasgow, both for visitors and locals. Our cuisine has the power to bring people together, form connections between disparate groups, and reconnect us to memories and traditions that are at risk of being forgotten, in order to both celebrate and futureproof Scotland’s vibrant food culture.