Welcome to our chapter blog

This is where the discussions took place about the content and organisations of the following book chapter:

Ian Cook, Peter Jackson, Allison Hayes-Conroy, Sebastian Abrahamsson, Rebecca Sandover, Mimi Sheller, Heike Henderson, Lucius Hallett, Shoko Imai, Damian Maye and Ann Hill (2013) Food’s cultural geographies: texture, creativity & publics. in Johnson, N., Schein, R. & Winders, J. (eds) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp.343-354

The chapter is reproduced in full here. Please follow the links to its various sections to your right. We’re keen for this blog to continue its function as a place where food’s cultural geographies can continue to be discussed. If you want to add to the chapter, ask us questions, etc. please do so. The publication of this book chapter will hopefully not be the end of the online conversations through which it was created.

Comments from the editor: minor changes to make

Hi Everyone

I received this email from Jamie Winders over the weekend. Her feedback is encouraging, I think, but there are a few small things to do by the end of the week.

I have replied with thanks and asked Jamie if her email could be published here so the process from commission to final editing starts and ends this blog. She was happy for this to happen.

I have annotated the letter with my suggestions. But there are some issues that need to be dealt with by those who drafted different sections.

Can appropriate people correct our online version ASAP and in bold?  I’ll uses these changes to edit the Word version and send in the final version by Friday.

Good to hear from Becky that some of us managed to catch up at the AAG conference (in around the food sessions that start the paper!).

Thanks and best wishes

Ian

————

Hi, Ian,

I’ve sat down to read your chapter, which I very much enjoyed. I think it’s an excellent engagement with food in the context of cultural geography. I really like the way it’s organized, and I’m intrigued to see how/if people engage with it online.

As you’ll see, my comments/suggestions are very minor. I’m listing them here in chronological order.

1. In your introduction and the discussion of perusing the AAG conference program, you assume that the reader is a faculty member or researcher (but not a student). Given the likely readership of this book, is there a way to insert a sentence that might speak to students attending the conference? Yes, I’ll do this.

2. On p. 2, under ‘Texture,’ is there a way to incorporate not only the body of the eater but the bodies of the people who worked to make that final food product available? I realize that later in your chapter, you do focus on the growers; but is there a way to incorporate or address the physicality, etc. of the workers involved in food as well? Texture authors – can you agree on something here?

3. Your mention on p. 3 of the relationship between the embodied cultural politics associated with food and the politics of food is really key. It also gets at the point I raised above (No. 2). OK.

4. On p. 5 at the very bottom, I began to wonder about the differences in how ‘food’ work is oriented in Britain and the U.S. You hint at this point later in the chapter, but I wonder if you want to address it head on (if you don’t, that’s fine as well, since the difference isn’t always clear cut). Nonetheless, there are different strands in cultural geography – food or otherwise – between a focus on ‘psychogeography, mobile locative art,’ etc. (p. 5) and a focus on social justice, ‘politics,’ etc. Interesting. I’m not sure how to (or whether to) respond to this observation. Can we discuss this in comment son this post? What do you think?

As I said, Ian, my comments are very minor. This chapter is excellent. I’ll do a quick copy edit before I send it to the publishers with the other chapters but see no other major issues you should address.

Let me know what you think about my questions. If you decide to make any changes, I would need your final version by the end of next week (Friday, March 23rd, 2012).

Thanks again for a wonderful chapter.

All the best,

Jamie

‘Food’s cultural geographies: texture, creativity & publics’ is submitted.

Our chapter was submitted on Tuesday this week. All of our work now boils down to this!

Ian Cook, Peter Jackson, Allison Hayes-Conroy, Sebastian Abrahamsson, Rebecca Sandover, Mimi Sheller, Heike Henderson, Lucius Hallett, Shoko Imai, Damian Maye and Ann Hill (forthcoming) Food’s cultural geographies: texture, creativity & publics. in Johnson, N., Schein, R. & Winders, J. (eds) A New Companion to Cultural Geography, Oxford: Blackwell

Final editing begins

Hi Everyone

I’ve put the sections that are on the blog into a single document and have started to edit this together. All being well, I’ll have a full first draft – with the new intro and most of the 3rd publicity section (not quite finished by myself, Ann and Damian) – completed by the end of the day on Monday. I will circulate this via email as a Word doc – since Google docs have been problematic for some – and I will paste various sections back onto the blog, so that anyone can edit/add, etc. during the week.

It’s great to see this coming together in one document. The concerns that some have expressed about section word counts should be ironed out in the editing process as there is some repetition of arguments (from Crang and Wylie, for example) and the tightening up flow of the argument between the sections also will also makes things more efficient.

I hope you can all trust me not to maul too many your carefully crafted words! We we asked to write something that more or less speaks with one voice – very much unlike the Afters paper – and that’s what I’m aiming for with these final revisions.

I have promised the submission by the end of next week, so I hope everyone will be able to find some time to have one last look and edit…

Have a good weekend. Almost there. Thanks…

Ian

 

The paper: structure & tasks?

Hi Everyone

I’ve collated all of the posts and comments on the blog into a word document (please download it here). I’d like to make some suggestions about how we could – collectively – turn 29,000 blog words into a 6,000 (including refs) book chapter. I’d like to suggest a structure, section word counts, editor-teams, and rough ideas for the different sections.  It is by no means set in stone but will hopefully be manageable in the short time we have left.

Before that structure, etc., a reminder and a rationale:

Reminder (the original brief)

While we wish to let each author have the freedom to tackle his/her chapter as he/she sees fit, we recognise that it is important that we provide some guidance to give the volume coherence. We, therefore, offer the following broad outline of what we would like in each chapter: a short discussion of the evolution of the topic under consideration followed by a longer discussion of the major trends within the topic at present and perhaps speculation about future interesting research areas. While we do not expect you to write an exhaustive literature review, we would like you to identify key ideas, citing the literature within and outside of geography and illustrating the ideas where possible with empirical material. In cases where little empirical material has been produced, it might be interesting to speculate on the reasons for this absence.

Rationale (from the Crang 2010 and Wylie 2010 papers):

Crang (2010) argues that Cultural Geography has gained a new vitality and shares new sensibilities, via orientations to texture, creativity and publicity (to read the arguments to work with, see the detailed quotation from his paper on p.39 of the download or in the comments on this post).

These terms – with a bit of finessing – could work for us, as they allow a clear intro section- a summary of the state of the art in CG and three themes which more or less match what we discussed – and some kind of conclusion/ending – how the work we discuss illustrates and develops these wider themes. How this might work will be explained next…

Suggested chapter structure, contents, flow and drafters/editors

[NB please click the heading to go to the page where you could discuss, paste, and edit your section(s): to be completed]

i) Intro (500 words?)

Key points

• summarising the revisiting/rethinking of Cultural Geographies as discussed in the series of papers which include those by Crang & Wylie;
• making some mention of the proliferation(?) of food research in geography (e.g. via the 2010 + 11 AAG conference sessions);
• explaining the selection of Crang’s three orientations as ways to organise our cultural geographies of food, and saying something about that work’s potential contributions to debates in cultural geography(?);
• briefly explaining the rationale /process of our co-authorship (possibly in a footnote).

Where in the document?

• Discussions and quotations from Crang & Wylie’s papers on p.38-41.
• Picking up smaller bits an bobs in quotes throughout the doc(?).

Drafter/editor:

• Ian

ii) Texture (1,200 words?)

Key points

• what is ‘texture’ for Crang, and how is it part of the ‘evolution’ of cultural geogs? (summarised/quoted on p.38-41)
• how/why has food geog research ‘evolved’ towards appreciations of texture?
• this allows us to draw on the rich/fascinating discussions of materiality, viscerality, guts, and food/eating that were contributed to the blog.
• theoretically, this work seems to work primarily through arguments by Mol, Bennett, Probyn and Nash & Jacobs(?).

Raw materials?

• the section on ‘(Theorising) Food/Eating,’ p.4-10 +
• the section on ‘Food, desire and other feelings,’ p.10-19. +
• most of ‘Food and consumer practice’, p.20-24.
• [not sure about the short discussion of ‘White people food’ here – see what you think]

Drafters/editors?

• Main ones: Sebastian, Allison, Peter and Rebecca?
• Others: Lucius [maybe later, I’m asking him to take more of a lead below] + Melanie Dupuis [who may contribute something in the next few days?].

iii) Creativity (1,200 words?)

Key points:

• what is ‘creativity’ for Crang (and ‘performance’ for him and for Wylie), and how is it part of the ‘evolution’ of cultural geogs? (summarised/quoted on p.38-41)
• how/why has food geog research ‘evolved’ towards appreciations of creativity & performance?
  
• theoretically, this could expand/rework arguments on texture above, though Heike’s discussion of Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s joining up the work of chefs and artists on p.30 of the doc:

…the materiality of food and its precarious position between sustenance and garbage make it a powerful performance medium. Performance artists working on the line between art and life are thus particularly attentive to the phenomenal nature of food and the processes associated with it. In her companion piece “Making Sense of Food in Performance” (2007) she analyzes staging and performances of food and cooking in restaurants. This transformation of the workplace into theater moves beyond artistic considerations, it has clear economic implication.

• this seems to work in terms of our discussions of practice (Peter on p.20) and ‘performance’ (from Mimi, Heike, Lucius & Shoko), which focus primarily on chefs and artists;
• the section could usefully end with Mimi’s words on p.38:

So the question for me would be what can cultural geography (or social theory more generally) bring into performative practice that is distinctive, research-based, historically-informed, and maybe even transformative?

Raw materials?

• the start of the section on Food and consumer practice’, p.20 +
• the section on ‘Chefs performing food’, p.31-32 +
• the section on ‘Food, art, performance and cultural geography’, p.32-38 (before the Crang and Wylie summary/quotation that we could all read) + p.41-42 (the end of Mimi’s comment) +
• the section on ‘Cultural geographies meets performance studies’, p.24-31 +
• the section on ‘Performing food’ on p.47-49 +
• the section on ‘Food/Performance/Art’ on p.49-52

Drafters/editors?

• Main ones: Mimi, Heike, Lucius & Shoko.
• Others: Peter, Rebecca and Ian [on first draft of this bit?]

iv) Publicity (1,200 words?)

Key points

• what is ‘publicity’ for Crang (and what does Wylie have to say on the subject?), and how is it part of the ‘evolution’ of cultural geogs? (summarised/quoted on p.38-41)
• how/why has food geog research ‘evolved’ towards appreciations of public geogs?
• although the previous section will have discussed the ways in which food’s materialities/etc. are worked with by chefs and artists for their diners/audiences, here the emphasis could be on ways in which, Ann says on p.53, cultural geographic work on food could promise:

the potential to cultivate new food futures through research. What might new scripts for the ‘Drama of Food’ entail?

• this allows us to discuss the performative- / practice-based arguments  about ‘diverse food economies’ (Ann?), popular food activism (I could will draw on examples in followthethings.com’s Grocery dept) and, perhaps, about food security (Damian) that end the document…

Raw materials?

• the long comment by Ann on p.43-4 +
• the section on ‘The drama of food’, p.52-

Drafters/editors?

• Ann, Ian and Damian
• Mimi & Heike [to work on distinctions/overlaps re. the art work they discuss]

v) Ending (500 words)

Do this together, after the above sections are written?

vi) References (800-1,000) words

To be edited down from the original long list here.

Next?

Assuming this is more or less OK, makes sense, and one or two people in each section group have time to take a lead on this drafting process, can people:

1. get in touch with their section co-authors to discuss practicalities (emails below, but comment boxes can also be good)? and
2. paste and edit their sections on the new blog pages which you can click on above or in the right hand margin (we can see what others are writing, each of us can edit the pages’ texts, and we can discuss things in the comments).

There will be different experiences of co-authoring which we can bring to these smaller groups. Can we also do this ASAP?! I promised a ‘mid-Jan’ submission, but these 1,200 word chunks, and final editing will probably take us to the end of the month.

Texture group: Sebastian, Allison, Peter & Rebecca [C.S.Abrahamsson@uva.nl; allisonhayesconroy@gmail.com; p.a.jackson@sheffield.ac.uk; rjs228@exeter.ac.uk]

Creativity group: Mimi, Heike, Lucius & Shoko [mimisheller@msn.com; hhender@boisestate.edu; lucius.hallett@wmich.edu; shoko.imai@gmail.com]

Publicity group: Ann, Ian & Damian [m.ann.hill@anu.edu.au; i.j.cook@ex.ac.uk; dmaye@glos.ac.uk]

Excuse and correct any errors/confusions here, please!

Blog -> chapter…

Co-authors!

This is an admin post.

The coding/editing/drafting process for our book chapter will start on 2 January.

There’s lots to work with now/here, so thanks to everyone for reviving this discussion. There’s a good chapter in here somehow…

If you have any more to add to the discussion, could you please do so before the end of the year?!

I’m hoping – realistically – to send around / post a rough draft by 6th January, perhaps with invitations to groups of authors to edit/finish different sections. Hope that sounds OK.

Looking forward to this…

Thanks / festive feelings / happy holidays

Ian

Food/Performance/Art

Hi everybody, I am glad that this discussion has been revived.

Ian asked me to elaborate on some performative/artistic food work that I have found particularly interesting, so here goes:

On the top of my list is probably performance artist Caroline Smith aka Mertle’s one-woman performance “Eating Secret.” As part of this performance Smith transforms herself into a 1950s housewife who encourages strangers to confess their eating habits, peculiarities, and secrets. The secrets are disclosed in one-to-one sessions and then become part of Smith’s monologue. To increase her geographical radius for collecting secrets, Smith also started operating “Mobile Eating Secret Stations” (abbreviated M.E.S.S.). Smith’s new project “Eating Portraits” focuses on participants performing eating in front of Mertle and her camera. This is a response to the cultural taboo of being seen eating.

Another favorite of mine is London-based performance artist Bobby Baker who, amongst other stimulating explorations of daily life (and re-valuations of domesticity), made a life-size edible cake version of her family to be eaten by visitors. Both Baker and Smith’s performances tap into a long feminist art tradition, going back to Margret Atwood’s Edible Woman and Judy Chicago’s art installation “Dinner Party,” that explores our relationship with food.

The work of equally well-known Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic, who began her career in the early 1970s, explores the limits of the body. In her 1997 video performance “Balkan Baroque,” for which she received the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the Venice Biennale, she cleaned huge piles of beef bones with a brush while singing songs for the dead from her home country. Visually stunning, this installation does what I think all good performances do: it exposes the interpenetrations of identity, experience and social relations. Due to problems with the shipment of bones, a 2010 Abramovic retrospective at the MoMA caused the curators of the museum to learn about BSE, slaughterhouses, and places like Skulls Unlimited. This once again brings the relationship between art, food, and cultural geography to the forefront!

In a less artistic and more political variant of public performances of food and eating, Chris Voigt, head of the Washington State Potato Commission, recently put himself on a 60 days potato-only diet to prove that potatoes are nutritious and healthy. This “stunt,” reminiscent of (and maybe inspired by?) Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me, is an example how food “performances” can be and are being used for political reasons.

A good example of performance art meeting politics and civil engagement is Local Orbit in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This company that facilitates the distribution of local, sustainably farmed food is the brainchild of playwright Erika Block who started learning about food systems while doing research for a performance art piece. This once again shows how art can lead to new practices.

And last but not least an example from pop culture: Miss Platnum, born Ruth Maria Renner, is a flamboyant Romanian-German singer who in her 2007 music video “Give Me The Food” challenges societal demands on women to be thin. Here is a little excerpt of her bold and quirky song: “I don’t care what people say/About my weight./So if you want to take me out/For a date, make sure there is/Enough food on my plate/And maybe I let you/Get a taste of my cake!/Ha!/ Give me the food, give me the food.”

Ok folks, I could probably come up with more examples but I think that’s enough for today. Have a great weekend,

Heike

 

Where the discussions are…

What seems to be happening on day one of this project revival is that conversations are starting again in different places. To give everyone a sense of where things are happening, I’ve done two things. One is to write this post which I will update as things develop, and the other is that I’ve changed the comment widget on the right to include the latest 15 comments, so we can see the latest what’s happening where.

Hot topics at the moment

• Sebastian and Peter have brought up the importance of theorising food in our cultural geographies of ‘it’, its ‘vital materiality’, which must be an central element of what we write about, see here and here. Please join in!
• Mimi, Ann, Heike, Shoko and I are discussing performance/art-food-cultural geography here. [I have thrown in some quotations from Crang’s and Wylie’s (2010) papers to show what we’re bouncing off. This will keep us focused, hopefully… If you have written a previous post on the topic elsewhere, and want to place it and more in this discussion, please cut and paste it into a comment on this post. In terms of the chapter, this seems to be an important discussion/section. Please say what you think, summarise some arguments, and  chuck in some quotations! All will provide good raw chapter writing materials.]
• Ann and Damian (maybe me too) might be discussing diverse food economies here… [another side of the ‘performative’ geogs of food, ‘new scripts for the drama of food’, just a thought at the moment…]

Please comment on this post if you can see, or want, other themes, and/or think that these need some rethinking. Thanks! I’m trying to think ahead to the chapter structure… Apologies if your name isn’t on this list… my head is spinning…

This blog and paper are still alive! Please respond

Hi Everyone

My apologies for letting this blog and project go to the bottom of my ‘to do’ pile. The deadline for this blog->chapter writing project passed by a long time ago. The editors are still keen for us to produce a chapter, and we have a new final deadline of mid-January 2012! If you still want to be involved.

I don’t think we have yet produced enough text, brought into the discussion enough cultural geographic research on food, or perhaps kept or developed the kind of focus we need for this collaborative project to work.

This project needs a shot of adrenalin (mainly from me, I think) and maybe some new authors in order for us to meet this new deadline. On reflection, the success of previous collaborative online-to-paper co-authorship has been based on:

• all authors having a small number of papers to read and bounce off (this was the purpose of the Crang and Wylie papers we started with, which I may circulate via email to those who didn’t read them);
• inviting people to co-author a paper who would normally be the people whose work was talked about in the paper (meaning that authors talk about their own and other people’s work, and that discussions develop);
• my role is both as a co-author (see above) and as a prompter/nudger (asking people to clarify, explain, link different arguments, draw in more literature to their arguments, and ask new authors whose work is mentioned to join the group);
• after the discussion is more or less complete, my role is then to lead the coding, cutting and pasting of bits of text and to produce a draft of the co-authored piece (in this case, a paper which is written in one authorial voice, even though in practice it may not be entirely singular…), and to circulate that piece for comment, editing, etc.. until a chapter is agreed;
• it’s not only me that has to do this, I think, but I have to take more of a lead. Other people can chip in and, as was the case in the ‘Geographies of food: afters’ paper/blog, this process can also be the subject of discussion and agreement on the blog.

So, I would like to know 3 things from those who have contributed so far:

1. are you willing/able to devote some time to these conversations within the next 6 weeks, and to be nudged by me now and again (I realise that for some this kind of writing can be very difficult, and for others relatively easy – please let me know if there’s anything I can do to make this more like a discussion of what we do, and less like a full-blown piece of paper writing)?
2. if you haven’t read the Crang and Wylie pieces, would you be able to do so ASAP (they are short and I can email them to you)?
3. can you suggest other authors to invite who can talk about their work here (suggestions have been made, and I was also thinking of looking through the 2011 AAG handbook, as there were lots of food sessions with lots of potential authors to invite)?

Please answers these questions in a comment on this blog…

Thanks!

Ian

Food and consumer practice

I’ve enjoyed the recent exchanges about cultural geographies of food, prompted by John Wylie’s arguments in favour of a greater emphasis on the performance of cultural geography.  While I sympathise with these moves, my own preference would be for a greater emphasis on practice which would include the performative dimensions of everyday practices (like shopping, cooking and eating) but which would extend beyond a narrowly-defined emphasis on the performance of social life (defined as scripted, staged and self-consciously enacted for a real or imagined audience) to include more routinised and habitual forms of behaviour.  While restaurant food and the work of ‘celebrity chefs’ undoubtedly has a theatrical element, concerned with dramatic performance and display, these ideas have less purchase in the domestic setting of everyday life where ‘feeding the family’ is more readily understood in terms of mundane practice and routinised behaviour than as performance or display (though see Finch 2007).  Indeed, much recent work on ‘the family’ has emphasised the significance of family practices, examining the dynamic processes through which families are created and reproduced, revealing the multiple ways of ‘doing family’ in contemporary social life (see Jackson 2009 for a review of this literature).

In Theodore Schatzki’s account of practice theory, social practices are defined as organized bundles of human activity (2002: 59), or more succinctly as ‘bodily doings and sayings’ (ibid.: 72).  Consistent with this view, there is now a growing literature on the food-related practices of everyday life, inspired by De Certeau’s pioneering studies of living and cooking in the second volume of The practice of everyday life (1998).  More recently, too, there has been a welcome extension of practice-based research from cooking to eating, approaching food ‘through the gut’ in Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) compelling phrase.

By focusing on ‘bodily doings and sayings’, practice theory is also well placed to respond to the ‘materialist turn’ in food research (and in social science more generally), as flagged up by Jane Bennett’s recent work on ‘edible matter’ (Bennett 2007).  In this work, Bennett praises recent food research in the commodity chain tradition (tracing commodities along the supply chain ‘from farm to fork’), arguing that it connects people and places at different points along the chain, giving consumers greater insight into what they eat and highlighting the exploitation of food workers and the greed of agri-business.  But she argues that its anthropocentric allegiances are a significant weakness, figuring food as a resource or a means rather than engaging seriously with its agentic capacities as vital matter.

One model for what an alternative food geography might look like, attendant to food’s materialities and routinised practices, is Annemarie Mol’s work on consumer-citizens.  In this work, Mol (2009) attends to the dual meaning of ‘taste’, referring simultaneously to physical sensations (experienced by the tongue and mouth) and to the kind of symbolic meanings associated with the possession of ‘good taste’ (as a series of social distinctions).  Exploring the pleasures of health and fairness as revealed in contemporary food advertising, Mol argues that we should not oppose pleasure-seeking consumers with socially responsible citizens, defined by their pursuit of the common good.  Rather, Mol argues, we should search for alternative models of the consumer-citizen where the exercise of good taste in relation to health or fairness brings together the expression of private pleasures and public goods (‘healthy and yummy’, ‘fair and delicious’).

Emphasising the embodied, skilled and socially-embedded nature of contemporary food practices (as well as taking their materialities seriously) provides a valuable antidote to current government rhetoric which often assumes a deficit model in terms of modern parenting practices and cooking skills.  It is then only a short step to social policies that emphasise individual responsibility and consumer choice, conveniently ignoring the way those ‘choices’ are socially ordered, materially shaped and culturally normativised.  As such, consumer practices are less easily ‘nudged’ in the directions that even the most well-intentioned government policies may desire.  Adopting a practice-based approach to contemporary food geographies might therefore have significant policy relevance as well as intellectual appeal.

 

Peter Jackson, Geography, University of Sheffield, UK

 

References

Jane Bennett (2007) Edible matter. New Left Review 45 (May-June).

Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol (1998) The practice of everyday life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Janet Finch (2007) Displaying families. Sociology 41: 65-81.

Peter Jackson ed. 2009. Changing families, changing food. Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan.

Annemarie Mol (2009) Good taste: the embodied normativity of the consumer-citizen. Journal of Cultural Economy 2: 269-83.

Elspeth Probyn (2000) Carnal appetites: food sex identities. London: Routledge.

Theodore R. Schatzki (2002) The site of the social. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press.