What we eat, how we consume it, and where we source our food are expressive of our collective habits and desires. To that end, artists have long explored food as a theme to comment on social issues, cultural values, and political agendas surrounding our insatiable taste and physiological need for edible things.

Spanning a period from the late 1800s through today across six galleries, Table Manners features important works from Sheldon’s permanent collection as well as several prominent loans.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race, and Soleil Ho, restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and host of the podcast Racist Sandwich, discussed the intersections of food and the social constructs that define our world. Casey Kelly, associate professor of communication studies and author of Food Television and Otherness in an Age of Globalization, moderated the conversation.