CAFS Dinner and Social 

Location: Seto Dining | 117 Mississaga St E, Orillia, ON L3V 1V6
Date: June 16, 2026
Time: 6:30-10:00 PM 
Tickets & Pricing (see the Registration tab for tickets)
Solidarity: $70.00  |  Regular: $120.00  |  Pay it forward solidarity ticket: $70.00

Join us for an unforgettable evening of celebration and social connection at Seto. Mingle with fellow Canadian food studies colleagues in a vibrant yet relaxed atmosphere, enjoying a carefully curated menu by one of Orillia’s newest and finest local food businesses. Dinner will be served as a sit-down, family-style, 3-course meal. Menu details to come! In addition to amazing food, this year’s social event will feature a Book Launch profiling several Canadian food studies publications– with a few words from the authors! We will also honour CAFS standout achievements with our annual Awards Ceremony, including the Food Studies Lifetime Achievement Award and Student Paper Awards. In addition, the evening will feature an Interactive Wine Tasting and Workshop, facilitated by Sommelier John Carlo Meli (see workshop blurb below). 

Purchase your tickets by June 5, 2026. Allergies and dietary restrictions need to be communicated in advance to be accommodated. 

About the Food: From Chef Kim Haugen from Orillia Matters

“We’re not trying to be a strict, authentic version of any one cuisine. It’s playful, it’s honest, and it’s inspired by the flavours I grew up with and the techniques I’ve learned over the years.” Originally from the Philippines and raised in a tiny Australian town, Haugen’s influences are global and grounded. “Every time I make a dish, it usually starts with a French base and finishes with an Asian flair,” he said. “It’s food that’s meant to be shared, savoured, and remembered.” Read more here. 

Student Paper Awards: The Undergraduate Student Paper Award and the Graduate Student Paper Award aim to recognize scholarly excellence and encourage participation by undergraduate and graduate students. One award will be granted in each category. The award includes a $200 prize, a one-year CAFS membership, and a complimentary ticket to the CAFS Social Event, where the prizes will be awarded. 

Lifetime Achievement Award honours individuals whose enduring scholarship, leadership, and public engagement have profoundly shaped food studies in Canada. The award celebrates visionaries and pioneers and recognizes sustained contributions that advance critical research, strengthen institutions, mentor emerging scholars, and deepen collective commitments to just and sustainable food systems. The award includes a complimentary ticket to the CAFS Social Event, where the prizes will be awarded. 

Book Launch: A celebration of the launch of new books by Canadian food studies scholars and CAFS members between 2024 and 2026. More to come!

About the Workshop: From the seed to the glass – The journey of wine: This workshop uses wine as a lens to explore food systems, ethics, place-based knowledge, and intergenerational farming. Led by John Carlo Meli, a wine educator and tenth-generation grape farmer, you will engage with concepts such as terroir, labour relations, and value systems from seed to table. Drawing on experience in his family’s vineyards in Pachino, Sicily, and his work with wine merchants in St. Emilion and Bordeaux, as well as supplying wines to the LCBO, Meli brings a practitioner-scholar perspective to key questions: how taste conveys place, how markets shape agricultural decisions, and how organic and fair-trade certifications shape global food economies. As the importer who introduced the first certified organic and fair-trade wine to the LCBO, he also speaks to the political economy of wine in Canada. The workshop is a guided tasting. You’ll conduct comparative sensory analysis of selected wines, exploring how flavour, acidity, structure, and aroma reflect soil, climate, cultivation practices, and human care. This tasting will connect sensory experience to terroir, sustainability, ethics, and knowledge transmission.

—
 
About the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS)
 
CAFS is a non-profit organization that promotes interdisciplinary research, teaching, and outreach related to food systems. As a community, CAFS facilitates partnerships between researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders in the food industry to address pressing food-related issues in ways that enhance and support equity, diversity, inclusion and decolonization. CAFS works to promote innovative approaches to food systems research and practice, including participatory and community-based research. On April 19, 2005, a number of academic and community-based researchers from Ontario met at Ryerson University to develop a proposal for a national research program about food security. CAFS was subsequently founded as an interdisciplinary academic association to identify research priorities and to share research findings on diverse issues. On August 16, 2006, it was incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation under the Canada Corporations Act. Since then, we have worked to expand our reach to include food sector practitioners and those with on-the-ground experience, so as to ground our efforts in diverse lived experience. Through our participation in national conferences and forums, a listserv, a bi-annual newsletter and the Canadian Food Studies Journal,  we exchange ideas and findings and develop new research priorities that deepen and extend our collective understandings. 
 
To learn more about CAFS, please visit Canadian Food Studies.