Gonville & Caius College Fellow Professor Melissa Calaresu and her co-editor Professor Victoria Avery have won the Association for the Study of Food and Society (ASFS) Book Award for 2026 for The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-Presenting a Global Fruit.

The wide-ranging, interdisciplinary volume is intended to provoke timely debate and generate radical rethinking of an overly familiar fruit with associations from luxury to kitsch and introduce new themes related to labour relations and sustainability. And now it has won the ASFS Book Award, which recognises an outstanding book about food published within the two previous calendar years.

The ASFS was founded in 1985 to promote the interdisciplinary study of food and society and has held annual meetings since 1987. Since 1992, the conferences have been held jointly with Agriculture, Food & Human Values. The 2026 conference took place in Burlington, Vermont, this week, with a focus on sustainable food systems and cultures.

The prize recognises books which employ exemplary research methods, offer novel theoretical insights and constitute a significant contribution to the study of food from a scholarly perspective.

Dr Calaresu is the Neil McKendrick Lecturer in History and Professor of History at Gonville & Caius College from this October. She was co-curator, with Professor Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition and co-editor of the accompanying catalogue, Feast & Fast: The art of food in Europe, 1450-1800 (London: Philip Wilson, 2019). Professor Avery is Professor of European Sculpture, University of Cambridge and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Keeper of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.

The Pineapple from Domestication to Commodification: Re-presenting a Global Fruit is one of eight new British Academy books, the first to be published with Liverpool University Press (LUP) under a new publishing partnership launched in 2025.

Read more about the book on the College website: https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/pineapples-global-appeal-explored-caius-fellow

Main image: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.