More-Than-Human Eating . Reconfiguring Environment | Body | Mind Relations in the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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2021
This paper is concerned with emergent more-than-human eating practices and how they might challenge received understandings of bio-and geopolitics.After a brief review of the anthropology of food and eating and how its concerns may have to be expanded in the Anthropocene, we briefly analyse three empirical cases of anticipatory more-than-human eating practices: a set of artistic anticipations of future eating; microbiome research and related biohacking practices; and research on future food security in the context of planetary boundaries. We discuss how all three cases make the boundaries between body|mind|environment porous. The ›I‹ of the embodied human subject emerges as multiple-colonised and accompanied by a panoply of microorganisms. How might such a collective be subject to governance and 'self‹-technologies? We close by pleading for an experimental parasitic anthropology that critically addresses emergent forms of bio/geopolitics in the Anthropocene.
Shitty food-based world-making: Recasting human|microbiome relationships beyond shame and taboo
Futures, 2022
Anticipation holds that imaginaries of future situations can provide orientation in decision making, despite the incalculability of outcomes. The Shit! project turns this premise towards the rift between humans and 'the rest of our nature'. The project uses experimental means to examine how anticipation-performed through moving, making and doing with food-might assist people to envision and then perform healthier relationships with their gut microbiome. The imaginary is human|microbiome harmony, pleasurably negotiated through what goes into our bodies, materially, sensorially, nutritionally, and emotionally, and what comes out-our shit. To anticipate from and towards this imaginary, we use autoethnographic inquiry to estrange researcher thinking, a 'kitchen research lab in the wild' to expose early ideas to public scrutiny, and a fourpart workshop to estrange participant thinking. The workshop was conducted with people who struggle with serious gut disease, and close family members with ostensibly healthy guts. The activities reconfigure embodied design methods around, with and through food to engender a fertile space in which participants may address vulnerability and taboo, and embody anticipation of alternative relationships with their gut microbiome. The work introduces food and eating as anticipative actions for world-making, to support participant engagement with challenging subjects.
2019. Utopian and Dystopian Meals: Food Art, Gastropolitics and the Anthropocene
CoSMo: Comparative Studies in Modernism, 2019
The exploration of alternative foodscapes is a clear attempt at re-localizing food in contrast with agro-industrial globalization and its environmental, economic and social unsustainability. Art has dramatically contributed with speculations on what has been called "survival food". This paper analyzes three case studies: The Next Menu, a gastronomical art project designed to imagine a future supper and explore new or overlooked sources of nutrition to respond to climate change constraints; the De-Extinction Dinner by the Center for the Genomic Gastronomy, an experiment in cross-pollination of amateur science with multimedia art; Dana Sherwood's work involving decadent cakes to feed non-human animals with the purpose to understand interspecies relations.
Diving into Food Justice: Food Waste in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene calls for greater attention to the various and complicated ways by which humans interact with the environment and compels critical dialogue to identify and implement alternative solutions. Food uniquely illustrates humans' impact on natural systems and the environment. This classroom assignment uses documentary film and social media to engage students in considering the tensions between food and environment in the age of the Anthropocene. Examining food-related practices and reducing food waste engages food justice while offering opportunities to contribute to progressive change every day. Food waste is thus one accessible avenue for teaching about the environment, implications of individual actions, and the need for argifood system change in the Anthropocene.
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 ...
Respectful Use: The Ecological Ethics of Eating Nonhuman Persons
Although animal advocacy and environmentalism have had a long association as social and political movements, the relationship has not been without conflict, both in theory and in practice. An opportunity to defuse such conflict is to be found in the ecological feminist analysis of Val Plumwood. The foundation of Plumwood's position is an ecological outlook which, consistent both with indigenous worldviews and with the modern scientific understanding of the natural world, sees nature in terms of a community of interdependent self-willed agents, who are owed ethical consideration along with the communities they form and the ecological processes and places they depend upon. Plumwood strongly opposed other theoretical approaches that led to universal duties to veganism, articulating a series of ways in which normative veganism is in conflict with a non-anthropocentric ecological outlook that 'situates humans ecologically, and nonhumans ethically.' A recent attempt by Esther Alloun to integrate Plumwood's insights into uncritically universalist veganism is therefore fundamentally ill-conceived. In this paper, I reiterate why an ecological outlook precludes any universal duty to veganism, and refute some of the counter-claims that have been made against Plumwood's repudiation of universalist veganism. I then outline how ecological nonanthropocentrism casts the eating of nonhuman persons (including animals) as potentially respectful use within an ecological network of gift exchange, and in fact restrains human interference with the more-than-human world-including with individual nonhuman animals-differently but even more strongly than veganism. In the longer term, we must move towards food production methods that can co-exist with intact, healthy wild ecosystems, upon which all wild organisms depend. To motivate such a shift will take radical cultural change, which begins with each of us correcting our worldview. Key to this process is embracing our ecological situatedness, which is best done experientially, by direct, visceral participation in the wild food web: by hunting, fishing or foraging.
Carolan’s central argument is that “Global Food (…), through the embodiments it creates, helps foster particular knowledges, tastes, and feelings about food [which] give support to conventional food production and consumption” (p. 7). Carolan’s approach is critical: if the eating/growing bodies are as much a part of Global Food as are oil subsidies and potash mines, a “better” food system would have to engage seriously with the issues embodiment poses.
Desiring complexity: embodied subjectivities and historical sociomaterialities in eating
2018
Eating is embedded in multiple relations: within a global food system, household organization, physiology, memories, among many other factors. The multiplicity of eating can manifest several contradictions between people's beliefs, cravings, practices, experiences and living conditions. How can we study this complexity? I suggest a possible path through assemblages of desire. In this presentation, I explain how my fieldwork experiences studying eating practices in a marginal neighborhood in Tijuana, Mexico, and in my current research with college students from private and public universities in Mexico City, have led me to think about desire as a knot between embodied subjectivity, food, power and historical sociomaterial processes. I discuss a theoretical framework of eating, influenced by Gilles Deleuze, where desire is an assemblage, a potentiality that affects and connects elements that build social reality. The nexus between bodies, subjectivities, history and materialities are not univocal nor determined; they are dynamic, multiple and relational. We can map assemblages of desire where eating experiences and embodied subjectivities unfold. Thinking about desire can help us articulate the complexity of power and social life. My aim is not to propose a unique model for the anthropology of food and eating, but rather to suggest the creative possibilities of the field in order to understand broader issues in anthropology and social sciences.