2019. Utopian and Dystopian Meals: Food Art, Gastropolitics and the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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Cooking up changes: the act of cooking as a tool for facing the challenges of the Anthropocene
Saúde e Sociedade
Cooking encompasses cultural, environmental, social, economic, and political dimensions, as well as composes the activities contained in a food system and promoting dialogues and transformations. This study aims to describe and to analyze everyday elements related to cooking and its relationship with the food system based on the experience of a group of female urban farmers in the east side of the city of São Paulo. Body-map storytelling was used, a creative visual research method, in which, by drawing the participant’s body contours, visual and oral data were produced on the meanings of cooking. Seven women participated in this study, who develop actions related to agriculture and cooking. The generated data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Cooking proved to be a connector from the field to the table, strengthening and being strengthened by the practices of urban and peri-urban farming, and is an interesting tool to promote health, contemplating biopsychosocial well-being in ...
2017
Introduction: In October 2015, the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin staged a symposium entitled Science meets Comics. Academics from various disciplines converged along with artists from all over the world in order to discuss the future of global nutrition – and the medium of the comic strip as a communication tool for the complex issues in this field. The open two-day symposium was followed by a closed, three-day workshop wherein the artists and cluster members took up the issues raised at the symposium and worked on possible directions for the future. How did this somewhat unusual meeting come about? To answer this question, we must look back to 2013 and the inception of the cluster. The Cluster of Excellence assembled 25 different research disciplines from the areas of Gestaltung and science – natural, cultural, and social as well as the humanities. This combination of disciplines allows relationships to germinate that would unfold in new perspectives on the objects and processes of our times. The laboratory created a forum for academic work that previous rigid disciplinary limits and institutional barriers had precluded; until then, universities were, for the most part, organised in disciplinary departments and faculties. The aim of the cluster was, and is, to discover possible synergies through new collaborative methods and interlinked interdisciplinary (i.e. not simply multidisciplinary) research approaches; it aims to unearth their potential and consolidate knowledge gains with the help of the subjects more readily associated with Gestaltung. One of the cluster base projects, The Anthropocene Kitchen: A laboratory connecting home and world, was part of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory. We (the editors, together with other project scientists) investigated the kitchen as an in influential locus for the exchange of energy in the 'Anthropocene' age – our current geological era, the era of humankind. Our focus was the kitchen as one of the most energy- and resource-intensive loci, the terminal of a global production chain and logistics systems, through whose daily practices – native or general – the Anthropocene takes shape. Two levels of observation and measurement were involved and interlinked: on the one hand, the cultural level of preparing and eating food; on the other, the level of natural science, where resources, energy, and material ows are itemised on the balance sheet. The overriding aim was to highlight the fact that the Gestaltung of everyday life itself requires the contemporisation of global chains of effect which involve individual actions and a consideration of outsourcing practices that have persisted until now. The topic of food, which a ects everyone in equal measure, is a perfect candidate in this endeavour. Ten experts from the fields of geology, biology, geo-ecology, architecture, design, and geo-informatics worked on the base project, concentrating on themes that had augmented over the years and setting out to find solutions for the future of the global food supply. A conscious decision was taken to select diverse forms of publication. Our group, with a focus on global resource ows and a working title of 'Welt' (world), decided to take the comic as a communicative medium of Gestaltung. The possibilities it provided for combining word and image gave us the necessary means to represent complex contexts in a visual and appealing way, without having to simplify things. The use of narrative and personalisation can moreover convey factual information along diverse channels of perception. The embedding of facts within a narrative seems more than necessary, particularly at a time frequently described as 'post-factual'. This interlacing is especially evident in the cultural and artistic diversity of the comic which was implemented by 12 international graphic artists. A further emotional level of meaning transpired through this project, which could not have been carried by words alone. However, the production of a factual comic strip has one more objective, as yet too seldom countenanced: In order to make social dynamics and processes apprehensible and researchable in a societal context, one needs to remove the distinction between 'producing scientific knowledge' and the 'communication of science'. These two areas are particularly closely linked in the field of food and nutrition by acquired know-how, itself strongly influenced by culture. The narrative of each chapter was developed from interviews with people from ten different countries on the subjects of food habits and eating cultures. We took this dialogue-driven 'co-design' as a basis for generating the subsequent scientific research need. We did not attempt to formulate hypotheses in advance, in order to then seek empirical backing through interviews; instead, we let our research be directed by the protagonists' answers. Consequently, some unexpected re-combinations, linkages, and new evaluations in our scientific work arose out of that process. In order to attain the necessary transdisciplinarity, particularly the involvement of society and thus the fusion of knowledge generation and transfer, we deliberately kept the development of the storyboard relatively open, having first defined a few conditions to the structural framework. This required the theme of nutrition be discussed and tested against potential and possibly expandable options for the future, focusing on three main elements: 1) materials ows (local, regional, and global), 2) infrastructures (transport routes, markets, the home, and especially, the kitchen), and 3) the greatest possible diversity of cultural contexts. This was presented by means of a 'journey' through various countries. We did not address the three elements in a standard progression but adapted them to the storyboard as drafted together with the protagonists. This was because many aspects crystallised only after an intensive exchange of ideas. The main part of the comic provide an outline – one might also say an exemplary mapping of the food behaviours in today's Anthropocene era – and thus of the cultural preferences of the protagonists and the resulting outcomes for local, regional and global environments, and the entire earth system. The last chapter on the future of global nutrition was, as mentioned above, undertaken by all the artists involved in the book at the workshop (read more about the content of the book in the epilogue on page 111-117). This much on the background. Now, to return to the symposium, which the present volume seeks to document. The first day of the symposium was dedicated to comics studies. Following the welcome speech by Reinhold Leinfelder, Principal Investigator for the project, comics studies scholar Jaqueline Berndt, back then still at Kyoto Seika University, surveyed science manga with a special focus on nutrition and food safety after the Triple Disaster of Fukushima on 11 March 2011. Nick Sousanis, assistant professor of the School of Humanities and Liberal Studies at San Francisco State University, US, who published his doctoral thesis entirely in comics, spoke about the educational potential inherent in the interweaving of image and text. Science journalist Lukas Plank from Vienna invited people to discuss whether scienti c cartoon strips should be subjected to rules and guidelines in order to make sources and facts more transparent. Stephan Packard, a researcher into media culture at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg and President of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor), developed this theme further by asking "How factual are factual comics?". This was followed by a presentation by illustrator Veronika Mischitz and Henning Krause, of the Helmholtz Society's science communication department, of excerpts of their monthly web cartoon strip Klar soweit? (Savvy?). Finally, Reinhold Leinfelder explained the background for the Eating Anthropocene comic as a format for intercultural, cross-discipline, and participative communication. The second day was dedicated to the subject of nutrition. It was introduced by Arnold van Huis, Emeritus Professor at Wageningen University, Netherlands, a leading expert on insects as animal feed and human food. He expounded the potential of insects as an alternative source of animal protein, both for human consumption and for feeding animals. Cultural scientist Katerina Teaiwa of the Australian National University in Canberra joined the symposium by Skype and talked about the environmental effects of phosphate mining on Banaba, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She also discussed the social and political effects of mining on the population of Banaba in order to provide for rich harvests in the agricultural fields of Australia and New Zealand. Anne-Kathrin Kuhlemann, Managing Partner of BE Solutions & Blue Systems Design GmbH, spoke about the economic chances of sustainable and modern cycles of food production speci cally in urban settings, citing as an example TopFarmers in Berlin. The agricultural and nutritional scientist Toni Meier of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, provided the audience with a lot of theoretical and practical input at the 'Lunchtalk' with reference to the environmental footprint of various foods and diets. This was accompanied by a chickpea stew – a dish with a very tiny ecological footprint. As dessert we served a bee sting cake with drone larvae, made to a recipe featured in the comic. This volume of symposium proceedings contains contributions from all the participants in a variety of formats including essays, lectures, comics, and an interview. We hope that this blend will foster the promising cooperation between science and the humanities by using the medium comic. Reinhold Leinfelder, Alexandra Hamann, Jens Kirstein, Marc Schleunitz, Theresa Habermann
Anthropocene Kitchen (in: CulinaryTurn)
At the beginning of the third millennium, three unconnected news opened up an entirely new perspective on the human condition and at the same time on the image humankind has of itself as a species. The first decisive news was derived from the data of global demographics: The 21st century marks the first time that a majority of people lives in cities. Urbanization seizes the former agrarian societies and is becoming universal, its global momentum follows that which industrial countries experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries.1 The second groundbreaking news was the result of the anthropological research conducted by a group headed by Richard W. Wrangham, according to which the use of fire for cooking and the consumption of cooked meals took the evolution of humankind out of the hominid development stage. The effect of cooking on our physical and social constitution primarily made this animal into what we call the human.2 According to the theory, as a universal cultural technique cooking is not only a cultural, but also an anthropological matter. The third news suggests a reformulation of the era in which we live: Given the numerous indications that “in the coming millennia the climate on the planet will significantly diverge from its natural development” and that this divergence can be attributed to human activity, the geologist Paul Crutzen proposed that the current geological era be no longer classified as Holocene, but rather as Anthropocene.3 In 2008, the Stratigraphic Commission of the venerable Geographical Society adopted this position itself and confirmed the classification ‘Anthropocene’ as the term for a geological period, in which the human species has become the dominant geological factor. ...
To cite this article: Tony N. VanWinkle : "Savor the earth to save it!"-The pedagogy of sustainable pleasure and relational ecology in a place-based public culinary culture, Food and Foodways, ABSTRACT Sustainability has become a keyword in popular discourses in the age of the celebrity chef. As such, chefs and other actors working in the visible spaces and venues of a shared US public culinary culture have become powerful spokespersons for sustainable food production, consumption, and localization. Unlike catastrophist discourses of environmentalisms' of the past, however, this new discourse is often framed in terms of a politics of pleasure that redefines deliberate and considered hedonism as a kind of transformative eco-culinary engagement. In self-assigned missionary roles, chefs and other prepared food producers are often engaging in a very deliberate pedagogical project that link sensuality and sustainability. Likewise, and equally important to these efforts, is the centrality of regard-that is, attempts among chefs to re-embed exchange relations between producers and consumers, often serving as the critical interlocutors in such reassertions. This article is an exploration of how such processes have played out in the public culinary context of Knoxville, Tennessee and vicinity. As a mid-size city in the heart of southern Appalachia's Ridge and Valley sub-region, Knoxville is undergoing a familiar process of urban revitalization that includes a robust food service sector. Amid shifting demographics and media flows bringing more cosmopolitan influences to the region, a range of actors have grounded these in a regionally specific food and farming heritage in order to reconnect consumers and producers and cultivate a more sustainable and mutualistic local food system.
Troubling the impact of food future imaginaries
Nordic Design Research Conference, 2021
Global scale transformation is urgently required if we hope to stabilise socio-ecological systems. While design contributes to social and ecological un-sustainability, it can also play a pivotal role in bringing us towards more positive, inclusive ways of living and being within the planetary ecosystem. Experimental, co-creative design provides powerful tools for prompting critical thinking and inspiring new imaginaries. We engage with these possibilities, and explore their role in societal transition. We present an experimental food design workshop that aims to engender fantastical and plausible possibilities for regenerative (more-than-human) future food practices. We reflect on how to move from such imaginaries to 'implementable nows' that is, transformative innovations that might be enacted today. We provide inspiration and methodological guidance for designers interested in the social imaginaries brought forth through world-making efforts; leapfrogging the adjacent possible and reorienting situated practices towards better-socio-ecologically just-futures.
Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science
Food, Culture & Society
This introduction and special issue takes as its inspiration Kyla Wazana Tompkins' 2012 articulation of Critical Eating Studies. We examine how value is produced through the circulation and transformation of the parts that constitute eating and edible bodies. Guided by the presumed dead, done, and discarded, we find material and structural meaning by focusing not on finished goods but on by-productsboth intended and unintended. The Edible Feminisms special issue foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies as wastes and metabolic discontents. We explore how devaluation, or systemic discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms. In asking: what does feminism have to do with edibility? with waste and metabolic science? we illustrate the stakes of how, why and who of devalued parts and bodies. In the eleven essays of this special issue, we examine how cultural logics of devaluation (classism, racism, sexism) are related to the technical practices of revaluation (e.g. quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). We attune our readers to the messy insides of things, to food science through the Marxian concept of creative destruction.
Food and Art: Changing Perspectives on Food as a Creative Medium
This chapter will focus on exploring food as a medium for art (rather than a subject) and will examine the role of chefs at the intersection of food and art, within the larger narrative of food as a creative medium. Beginning in the 1930s, it explores the role of food as a medium in certain avant-garde movements and proceeds to look at their influence on later work in the studio and the kitchen.
CFP: Food as Activism in Contemporary Public Art - Public Art Dialogue
Public Art Dialogue- Peer Reviewed Journal Deadline: Jun 1, 2017 Food as Activism in Contemporary Public Art Guest Editors: Silvia Bottinelli and Margherita d'Ayala Valva Food, ranging from dinners to edible gardens, has been incorporated into public art projects since the 1960s. Artists as well as contemporary scholars have analyzed the movement’s historical significance, however, the question of its legacy remains open-ended. During the 1990s food became more consistently linked to relational art and social sculpture. For example, "Culture in Action," a 1992-93 exhibition/community art project curated by Mary Jane Jacob included two important food-centered pieces: Suzanne Lacy’s Full Circle and Haha’s Flood. In such contexts food became an opportunity to address pressing social issues such as gender identity and AIDS. Around the same time other artists also explored certain foods’ exemplification of postcolonial dynamics, while others tracked the ecological impact of food. The aesthetic discourse of food production and consumption as a relational practice can be extended to the realm of social media today. We are interested in receiving articles, interviews, essays, and artists' projects that analyze food art in the public sphere - be it in physical or virtual spaces - in the past four or five decades. Submissions may explore diverse geographical contexts and power dynamics, look at long-term or temporary projects, and focus on participatory, sculptural or conceptual practices.