Food is not just about solving our biological needs. It also tells us about who we are.
That observation, made during one of the closing panel discussions at ClassicsFest 2026, landed with a quiet certainty. It was the kind of sentence that feels obvious the moment you hear it yet takes an entire festival to fully understand.
ClassicsFest 2026: Food and Feasting in Antiquity took place across Newcastle from Thursday 14 to Saturday 16 May, hosted by the Lit and Phil in collaboration with Newcastle University’s School of History, Classics and Archaeology. Founded by producer and director Cinzia Hardy, and supported by the Institute of Classical Studies, the festival brought together historians, chefs, performers, writers and academics to explore how food shaped life in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. But the conversations it sparked were anything but ancient.
Weeks before the festival: writing around the table
In the weeks leading up to the main event, something more intimate was already taking place at Seven Bridges Café in Newcastle. A series of three community writing workshops, facilitated by Ilisha Thiru Purcell and Mymona Bibi, brought together poets, refugees, migrants and curious members of the public around a shared prompt: what does food mean to you?
Not everyone who came was a writer. Some wrote poems. Others offered stories or fragments of experience, memories of kitchens, of dishes cooked in other countries, of meals that marked a moment of arrival or loss or celebration. Chef Archie Smith of Lubber Kitchen, prepared food inspired by what participants were writing, turning the sessions into something that was as much feast as workshop.
Mymona Bibi reflected during the Saturday panel that eating together helps with refining memories. That felt true of the workshops. Participants were not simply writing about food. They were recovering something through it, giving shape to experiences that are often left unsaid.
The workshops also produced something lasting. Lubber Kitchen became the home for a podcast and video documenting the creative work that came out of the sessions, preserving those voices beyond the room where they were first spoken.
Saturday at the Lit and Phil: where ancient ideas met living questions
The closing day of ClassicsFest 2026 was where the wider festival and the community thread finally came together. The panel discussion, Food and Hospitality from Antiquity to Today, brought together Professor Athanassios Vergados, Chef Archie Smith, anthropologists Professor James Staples and Professor Luke Heslop, and writer Laura Coffey. Alongside the conversation, food was shared with the audience, making the event a practical expression of its own subject matter.
At the centre of the discussion was Xenia, the ancient Greek tradition of hospitality towards strangers. Far from being a relic of the past, panellists noted that xenia is still actively practised in Greece today, a moral and social framework built around welcoming those who arrive at your door.
The conversation stretched that idea into the present. Hospitality, it was observed, has in many places become institutionalised, absorbed into moral and civic registers, something expected of societies and governments rather than individuals. In the context of Britain, with its ongoing and often fraught debates around migration and belonging, that observation carried weight.
What we eat and how we eat can infer a level of civilisation. Another thought from the panel that stayed in the room long after it was said.
One audience member asked, with a lightness that still made everyone think, whether British weather hampers hospitality. It drew laughter. It also opened something real. Hospitality is shaped by environment, by culture, by history. The question of what welcome looks like, and who it is extended to, is never settled.
Seven Bridges and the subversion of the table
Seven Bridges Café, which hosted both the workshops and chef Archie Smith’s contribution to the festival, offered its own quiet model of what hospitality can look like. The act of sharing recipes and eating together between participants shifted the usual dynamic of host and guest. Around those tables, the relationship became something more mutual, more generous.
That spirit carried through into the wider festival. ClassicsFest 2026 included Roman recipe recreations with chef and food historian Sally Grainger and Roman historian Dr Kathryn Tempest, a theatrical retelling of Trimalchio’s banquet from Petronius’ Satyricon performed around audience members at Tyneside Cinema, and Great Granda Apicius, a new play by Abby Walker inspired by the ancient Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius, winner of the ClassicsFest 2026 Playwriting Competition.
Satellite lectures in the weeks prior explored food in classical art, medicine and daily life on Hadrian’s Wall, extending the festival’s reach into the communities around it.
Food as a language everyone already speaks
The community strand of the programme was devised and shaped by cook Archie Smith and festival director Cinzia Hardy together with Becca Whitmore of DanceCity at the Seven Bridges Café.
What that strand made clear is something the ancient Greeks understood and ClassicsFest 2026 brought back into view. Food is identity. Food is memory. Food is the oldest form of welcome we have.
When participants at Seven Bridges Café wrote about the meals they remembered or the dishes that carried meaning, they were doing something the ancient Greeks had a word for and the Romans had a cookbook for. They were saying: this is who I am, and I am offering it to you.
That is not a small act. And it is exactly the kind of cultural work that deserves to be seen.
