Anna Colquhoun

Anna Colquhoun is a doctoral student with the Anthropology department at SOAS, University of London, where she is a member of the Food Studies Centre.

Her project concerns current constructions of Istrian cuisine and local specialities, with a focus on inland Croatian Istria, where she also runs a guesthouse. She is interested in who and what makes such foods local and special, and the tensions arising for smaller food businesses as vernacular ideas and practices interact with food, tourism and heritage governance regimes.

Having completed fieldwork she is now writing up her PhD thesis and working on related projects.

Anna has a degree in Anthropology & Archaeology from the University of Cambridge (1996) and an MA in the Anthropology of Food from SOAS (2015). She worked for ten years in international development before training as a chef in California and then working in London as a freelance cooking teacher, food writer and consultant.

Publications include the books “Eat Slow Britain” (Sawdays, 2010), the “Riverford Companion” seasonal vegetable series (Riverford, 2015) and “Gather, Cook, Feast” (Fig Tree, 2017), and the journal paper “Making good meat: from draft animal to local speciality” (Gastronomica, 2019). She was also the original consultant for BBC Radio 4's culinary panel show, “The Kitchen Cabinet”.

The anthropology of food, and tourism, in particular the relationships between food, place and value/s, including the construction of cuisine and local specialities.