This paper sets out to historicize time enmeshed with non/humans in food education as cookery. It analyses entanglements of time, place, material and people in non-/formal education through food, using the examples of the Liverpool Training School of Cookery (LTSC), started in 1875 and later called Fanny Louisa Calder College of Domestic Science after its founder, and the Liverpool Food and Betterment Association (LFBA), begun in 1893 and later renamed League of Welldoers. Operating from a key transatlantic gateway engaged in flows of non-/human movement reaching far beyond the Continent and bound up through non/humans (newspapers, personal/professional networks, etc.) with the Americas, Canada and India, among other places these institutions were at once “both very local and (…) regional, national, international and Empire” (Lawn 2014). In this context the paper investigates how non-/humans involved in food-related education (from foodstuff, dishes, depots, barrows, kitchens and recipe books, to the institutions mentioned and their promoters and users, to entangled initiatives and places) moved through time reconfiguring it past-present-future “not as a single thread (the thread of time) but as a string of many threads (temporalities) intertwined” (Nóvoa 2015 cited in Goodman 2017a, 122; Nóvoa and Yariv-Mashal 2003; Goodman 2017b). Revisiting Thomas Popkewitz’s curriculum-related metaphors of a “cake” and “alchemic processes” drawing attention to “assemblage[s] of inscription devices (….)[which] “order and classify” (2004, 4) helping “principles of representation, identity and difference” get embodied (2014, 10), it seeks to understand precisely “how multiple (…) events and trajectories come together” (2014, 14) in food education tied to the LTSC and LFBA. The paper’s hypothesis is that time and non-/humans have thus become tangled to the effect of exclusion-inclusion, or in Karen Barad’s (2007, 72) terms “differences that matter” enacted through “intra-action”(33). Among possible “effects of difference” of both “substance and significance” (Barad 2007, 72, 3) analysed, interlacing theoretical and methodological approaches from social and cultural history of food, education and domestic science (e.g. Scholliers 2001; Akyiama 2008; Egan and Goodman 2017), critical heritage studies (Brunotte and Giovine 2016), anthropology (Ingold 2015, Edwards 2009) and particularly quantum physics from which it borrows the analytical tool of “diffraction” (Barad 2007, 29, 30), are those relating to foods, diets, cookery, home economics, domestic and other nutrition-orientated science and re/imagining regarding classes, genders, ethnic-/religious groups, charity and professionalism. Secondary sources are thereby read through primary sources from the LJMU Special Collections Archives and Liverpool Central Library Archives.

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