Event Type: Branch

Takes Place: 16th August 2025

Time: 11am

Venue: National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

Description: A third of all the food we produce goes to waste globally, and if all this needlessly discarded food were a country it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world after China and the US! How did we become such a wasteful society? What can we learn about building a sustainable food future by looking at the past? Based on the speaker’s newly-published book Leftovers: A history of food waste and preservation, this talk will explore the many ingenious ways our ancestors in Britain sought to avoid food waste through preservation, recycling or otherwise disposing of food scraps. Beginning in the Tudor kitchen, it’s a delicious and disgusting story that takes us to medieval streets lined with butchers’ offal, that explores the world-changing inventions in preservation of the Industrial Revolution, the hidden history of Victorian street-food scavengers, the thrifty recipes of the World Wars, right through to the AI restaurants of the future. Through our leftovers, we learn a lot more about our culture and our shared history, from poverty and inequality to globalisation. If we are what we eat, we are equally defined by what we don’t eat!

How to book: No booking required

Price: Free

Email: historyliz1565@yahoo.com

Website: www.haswansea.org.uk

Organiser: Swansea Branch

Lecturer: Dr Eleanor Barrnett

Comments: Eleanor Barnett is a historian of food and religion with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cardiff University in Wales, where her research used food as a unique lens through which to view the dai

Region: Wales

Branch: Swansea