Congratulations to our 2026 winner!
The winner of this year’s Sophie Coe Prize was announced at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery on Saturday 11th July. Michael Yeo was awarded the £1,500 Prize for his book chapter ‘A Liminal Commodity: Catch-Cropping, Chinese Capitalists and the Colonial State in the Pineapple Industry of Singapore, 1900s-1930s,’ discussing the success of Chinese businesspeople in Singapore in canning pineapple and selling it globally in the early twentieth century. In the judges’ view the work “brilliantly ties together the Chinese operating on the fringes of Empire and creating a product that appealed particularly to the British working class.”
Two other entries were singled out for honourable mention by our judges. They were impressed by the “quality of the writing and the intriguing stories” in Pratibha Kumari’s ‘The Moving Kitchen: How the Great India Peninsular Railway Invented Anglo-Indian Cuisines, 1853-1900’ and ‘The Time It Takes to Eat: Ekpang Nkukwo and the Social Meaning of Labour in Southern Nigeria’ by Itoro Alphonsus Utitufon.
Thank you to all who entered, and our congratulations to our winner and commendees.
You can visit our Winners page for full details, and click on the year to read the full Judges’ report.
The Sophie Coe Prize 
