Food/Eating
I have enjoyed reading previous posts here on the blog, especially the problem and question about performance. I will try to frame this around that discussion, and sorry in advance for the length of this post. Hope you can bear with me! In his piece on the future of cultural geography, Wylie identifies a possible future in which geography would be moving closer to the performative and creative arts. Not only in terms of “studying and engaging with the work of artists, writers, performers” but also, or rather, “conceptualizing and practising cultural geography as performance.” (212) In the context of food I wonder what this could imply. There are hopefully many ways to do this. It depends of course, as Shoko writes in a previous post here on the blog, on how performance is defined. But it also depends on how food is
defined. In getting acquainted with the literature on food geographies it is interesting to note how little there is written about eating. Here three examples from papers that I really like:
- In her paper on “things becoming food” Emma Roe looks at cooking practices that transform material “stuff” into edibles – things that are eaten. In that text Roe identifies a difference between two methodologies and directions: from fork to farm and from farm to fork. In her paper she also acknowledges the ‘site of the stomach’ and the impossibility of “apprehending the geography of foodstuff solely through consumers’ descriptions of how they eat or what they eat” (112). Interestingly, very little is said about how food ends up in the body. Indeed, the “ending up in the body” part is described here as a terminus, and the body as a box where things are simply put.
- In a somewhat similar context Stassart & Whatmore write about the un/re-making of Belgian beef. In doing so they wish to highlight the “shadowy regions between field and plate” (449) looking at how risk is “metabolised” as a passage of connection between human and non-human bodies. Interesting because it highlights metabolic relations between animals and humans, and the ways Belgian beef is done, this paper still obscures eating as a practice. Again two sites are mobilised: the field and the plate.
- In another paper Cook writes about “following” as a strategy. The difficulty of such a strategy is “where exactly are the beginnings and ends of such a [following] story?” This is of course about drawing a line, and interestingly that line is often drawn between plate and mouth. With food many things come together: unseen and unknown others, e.g. farmers, pickers, packers. But as Cook also acknowledges, in a paper which follows a papaya (661) none actually ate the fruit (although a by-product was likely to end up in jumpers they wore and beer that they drank).
What I think is striking in these examples is that there is a lot of interesting stuff to read about food as a commodity and as something that is made – i.e. that is farmed, un/re-made, packed, put on a shelf, sold, bought, cooked – but not as something that is eaten. Many papers “concern the ways in which commodities are (re)valued by those working with/on them on their complex, entangled journeys from farms to plates and beyond.” (Cook, 658) Many stories follow food (as a commodity or as “stuff”) from field to plate or from fork to farm but not from plate to stomach of from the shadowy regions between fork and toilet. Here, the beyond that Cook alludes to is all but absent. This is not to say that the papers I have mentioned above don’t have merit, but rather that in writing about food (and its geographies) practices of eating seem to remain beyond the scope of what geographers have busied themselves with. The geographies of the eating body – e.g. the passage between plate/fork and stomach/toilet – remains a shadowy region. I wonder why this is so? And what would happen if we shifted from food to eating, and/or conceptualize all this work in terms of eating?
This brings me back to where I began: how do we define food? Food, as all of the above texts illustrate in different ways, is something that is made (whether this is through cooking, packing, engineering, or modifying). Beef, fish, and papaya are not necessarily edible but have to be made so. Food also involves distant/unknown others on which eaters rely. But unless eaten, the beef, the fish and the papaya will (sooner or later) rot, become “waste” and non-food. In this sense food is (also) something that is (potentially) eaten by a body. Something that is farmed, un/re-made, packed, put on a shelf, sold, bought, cooked etc. and eaten; swallowed, chewed, (hopefully) appreciated and absorbed, digested, metabolised, and excreted. Mind you, however, eating does not necessarily end when the plate is empty: the yoghurt I had earlier this morning (it’s now 4 hours ago, and I’m beginning to feel hungry again) is now making its way through to my stomach and later to my intestines. The dinner I had yesterday night is somewhere else entirely. This “following story” does not end at the plate or on the fork but also, or rather, in the mouth, in the stomach, the intestines, the blood, or even in the toilet (and from there, again, it continues). I’m not sure exactly where that story leads, begins and ends, but performing food in such a way shifts the focus from food as an object/commodity “out there” that we can follow, an object “that has a clear focus. Like a chicken. That never goes out of sight. (Cook, 657)” to something that is not so easy to follow and keep track of: where or what is the “chicken” once it has been chewed, swallowed and mixed with saliva? (compare, for example, with Annemarie Mol’s “I eat an apple” in Subjectivites (2008)) Or, rather, keeping track of it would mean to follow it by different means. By engaging for instance with eaters and their bodies, with medical practitioners and dieticians, with blood/faeces samples, perhaps with the histories and concepts of fat and the calorie and the way they are folded into eating practices, with physical impairment and disease, with sporting bodies, with waste management, with concepts like metabolism and digestion, with taste amateurs and laboratory trials.
So to somehow end this, I too like Wylie’s call to locate cultural geography within the performative arts and the humanities. However, I am wondering what sort of a performance he/we are talking about. As I see it, Wylie’s position (if a position it is) takes sides with a particular notion of performance (e.g. creative writing, photography and video, site-specific art, mapping and diagramming [interestingly no mentioning of food and/or eating here]). There is nothing wrong with this. But for me this also reads like a call to create a distance between cultural geography/geographers and the kind of performances that we could find in laboratories, science, clinics, nursing homes and medicine, or for that matter around dinner tables, in kitchens and in restaurants.
Cook, Ian et al. (2006) “Geographies of food: following” Prog Hum Geog, 30(5): 655-666
Mol, Annemarie (2008) “I eat an apple: on theorizing subjectivities” Subjectivity, 22: 28-37
Roe, Emma (2006) “Things becoming food and the embodied material practices of an organic food consumer” Sociologica Ruralis, 46(2): 104-121
Stassart & Whatmore (2003) “Metabolizing risk: food scares and the un/re-making of Belgian beef” Environment and Planning A, 35(3): 449-462
Cultural geographies: food blog 
Hi Sebastian
A great post. Fascinating. This opens up a series of arguments which might, perhaps, merit a section in the chapter. This is a powerful and important argument. What you have set up in this post, it seems to me, is the critique of his work in terms of food, its consumption and travels/transformations through and beyond the body.
What would be fascinating to hear more about is the work that *does* take this into consideration. Can you, for example, describe in some detail what Annemarie’s apple paper argues? What other examples could you talk about? What happens to the arguments and to food politics when this is done? What are you finding out on your research? What are the boundaries between food and not-food? I struggled with this in an autoethnographic paper I wrote about hydrocortisone, which does what you argue food research tends not to do…
I do not have any further questions(!). Can you find some time to post again?
Thanks and best wishes
Ian
Ian Cook et al
December 5, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Me again… wondering if you had seen this paper (absract below) which might help link these arguments to cultural/human geographies:
McCormack, D. (2007) Molecular affects in human geographies. Environment & planning A 39, p.359-377
Abstract: “In this paper I engage critically with the relation between affect and the molecular – the former touching upon but not limited to questions of mood and emotion, and the latter registering the power of processes including, but not limited to, the neurochemical. The backdrop to this engagement is an emerging diagram of the molecular processes and pathways in which affect is implicated. The emergence of this diagram not only foregrounds the importance of thinking critically about how affect is caught up in a range of techniques and technologies: it also raises the question of how to attend to molecular affects – and their implication in the matter and movement of thinking – without falling back upon a kind of biological or physiological reductionism. I provide a provisional answer to this question. In doing so I draw support from a range of thinkers, including Lucretius, Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, each of whom points to the possibility of cultivating a kind of molecular logic of sense. In moving towards a conclusion, I speculate about how this logic productively complicates the thinking space of human geography.”
Ian Cook et al
December 5, 2011 at 2:14 pm
From Sebastian:
There were many points that I wanted to raise with my post. The first one – the simple one – was that there seems to be a “gap in the literature” in the geographies of food (I can of course be wrong here) where the complex, in many respects intangible and elusive, performances of eating are blackboxed. So, if I’m right there is not a lot to add about this in terms of references to work that does take this into account. The second point, probably less articulated, was that a shift from “food” to “eating” not only implies shifting between sites (from farms, supermarkets, restaurants, cooking to mouths, stomachs, intestines, toilets, blood, landfills etc) but also a shift that calls for some theoretical and empirical creativity (hard work in other words, so here I will limit myself to fleshing out the paper I mentioned in my post, and try to contrast this with Bennett’s paper on Edible Matter).
In her paper on the apple, Mol argues, that a body that eats is not a body that passively observes at a distance, but rather engages actively with its surroundings by incorporating – chewing, digesting, metabolizing, excreting – what it performs as “edible matter” as Jackson suggests via Bennett. One of her points concerns the problem of localization: where is the apple, and where is the eater of the apple? At one point, the apple is there in the hand, on a plate in a shopping bag, and at another point it is here, in the mouth, in the oesophagus, in the stomach. But then it is also “inside” the eater. When – or where! – does the apple stop being an apple and become the eater? But this can be turned around as well: the apple grower, the one who transports the apple, and the one who sells it all anticipate the (potential) eater. The apple is, in this sense, never “only” there in one place and one situation as an object, as food, but eating and the eater are implicated throughout: from farm to fork, from fork to toilet, and beyond. In a sense, this argument can be found also in Whatmore & Stassart’s paper where the metabolism of Belgian meat and meat eaters respond and adapt to one another. In a different context, Marvin and Medd (2006) look at how fat, a substance we might normally think of as located either “inside” bodies or “inside” food, is entangled in complex relations between bodies, food, sewers and cities.
“Rather than seeing the metabolism of cities, bodies, and sewers as single entities they should be regarded as assemblages with fat capable of crossing the boundaries between metabolisms to form particular sets of linkages. This is not to stress the unity of an idealised ecological balance but a set of interrelationships that involve a series of flows that are brought together and drawn apart in a series of temporary alignments.” (2006: 323)
What shifts here is that metabolism – the process by which food is broken down, absorbed, excreted – becomes a concept through which not only bodies, but also cities and sewers “eat”. To locate fat only “inside” an individual body would in this sense be a mistake. Taken together these papers seem to suggest that we approach food and eating as processes that link up different sites, bodies and situations and that we pay attention to, and play with, how concepts such as metabolism or transubstantiation can help to understand the processual character of food.
But in shifting attention from food to eating what can shift is also how the subject is performed, and the kind of a subject that is performed. Mol’s paper is about an “I” who is eating an apple. A mundane activity indeed. This “I”, just like the one I think Bennett is interested in (see e.g. “my meal both is and is not mine; you both are and are not what you eat”, [Bennett, 2009: 49]), is decentered and relational. So who, then, is eating the apple? First, the “I” that eats apples is situated geographically and historically: the bible teaches us that apples, the forbidden fruit, are also the fruit of knowledge; historically apples were grown and eaten mostly in cool climates, but nowadays they – just like the bible and Christianity – travel wide and far (perhaps at the expense of other books, and other fruit); some apples, in some places and times – e.g. Granny Smiths produced in Chile during the rule of Pinochet – can easily become “political matters” (cf Braun & Whatmore, 2010); and finally, today eating apples could be a sign of a healthy “aware” lifestyle. These are some of the stories Mol tells us in her paper. The conditions of possibility for eating apples are, in this sense, located in geography and history in complex, but also familiar ways; it situates the eater as the end point of a complex network involving and depending on distant and unknown others.
But there are other shifts as well. In her paper Mol (drawing upon Kuriyama 1999) suggests that there is another way to situate the eater, which also speaks to different models of what an actor could be. What matters here, is that there is a difference between a muscular subject and an eating subject:
“A person cannot train the internal linings of her bowels in a way that begins to resemble the training of her muscles. I may eat many apples, but I will never master which of their sugars, minerals, vitamins, fibres are absorbed; and which others I discard…There is a lot of activity going on here, but no control.” (30)
So it is not only how the subject is performed that shifts, but also the ways in which we can know what an actor can do. When I eat an apple, I am not only situating myself in space and time I am also giving up control. Or rather, I may be able to control – to a certain extent – what kind of apples I buy (should I buy Granny Smiths or Jonagold?), what I choose to do with them (should I make apple crumble, save them for later, or eat them immediately as they come?). But when I put the apple in my mouth and start to chew it begins to disintegrate. Once it has begun its journey through my gastrointestinal tract, I cannot choose to absorb only some of the sugars in that apple. That said, my body is not passively awaiting the sugars: for the sugars to enter my blood stream, my body has to decompose the apple, and add insulin to the process for the sugars to enter my blood. And if I don’t put it in my mouth to begin with, the apple will sooner or later decompose, rot and start to smell – to avoid the smell I will have to put it in a bin.
In this sense, eating an apple is both simple and complex. In a vocabulary that should appeal to a cultural geography that wishes to pay (more) attention to performances (of all kinds) Mol provides some clues as to what eating an apple is or could be. In her own paper, apple eating is performed as:
“Sharing food and flesh with Adam; depleting supplies that one might better save; linking up with distant places where one’s food has grown; tasting, chewing and digesting. Eating an apple is not just a single situation. Instead it presents ever so many exemplars to explore.” (33)
But, as hinted, it can be much more, and that is one of the points: one cannot exhaust the situations that eating an apple conjures; rather, different apples, different eaters and different practices of eating perform situations that are specific.
Bennett is also interested in eating, and how it configures what edible matter could be. As she puts it,
“If the eaten is to become ‘food’, it must be digestible to a formerly foreign body. Likewise, if the eater is to be nourished, it must accommodate itself to a formerly foreign body. Both, then, have to have been mutable, to have always been a materiality that is hustle and flow as well as sedimentation
and substance.” (2007, 134-5)
And, she continues, social scientists – when they do take food into account – tend to avoid the question of what food does, and instead they
“mainly focus on human acts in, for example, the rhetoric of culinary self-expression or the socio-cultural rituals and practices through which meaningful food objects are produced, or the aesthetic-commercial techniques through which desire for a new food product is induced. With the exception of the cookbook author or restaurant reviewer who describes the colour, texture and aroma of ingredients, food writing seldom attends to the force of materiality.” (2007, 138-9)
Bennett, in other words, is not interested in eaters and what they may or may not do do per se, but rather sides with what food does to eaters. One of her examples, Omega 3 fatty acids, is said to have agential properties in that it can alter mood, improve reading and spelling skills, and reduce signs of depression if eaten. This, at least is what a “double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized controlled trial” involving “231 young adult prisoners show” (sure, in line with the science she draws upon, Bennett leaves open the possibility that “results such as these are always subject to further research”). The research she draws upon, she suggests,
“support[s] the idea that lipids have the power not just to increase human flesh but also to induce human moods, modes of sociality and states of mind.” (2007: 137)
As the authors of one of the papers she draws upon conclude,
“[a]ntisocial behaviour in prisons, including violence, are reduced by vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids with similar implications for those eating poor diets in the community” (Hallahan & Garlan, 2005).
Omega 3, in Bennett’s paper (as well as in the papers she draws upon), does indeed have an agential power that seems to offer seemingly quick fixes to all sorts of urgent problems, violent behaviour being the most obvious one. Now, how could anyone not want or desire that? Well, to begin with there could be many reasons for not eating fish and/or the omega 3 fatty acids derived from it. I, for instance, do not eat fish because I am a vegetarian: the very thought of eating any kind of meat disgusts me. Besides that, I am also concerned, with many others, about the fishing industry and the continuing depletion of fish. And where does the Omega 3 come from? Less than a year ago, Swedish media could reveal that Swedish fishing industries were extracting fish for Omega 3 outside Western Sahara, territory controlled/occupied by Morocco (http://www.wsrw.org/index.php?parse_news=single&cat=105&art=1365). The omega 3 that comes out of the fishing industry does not only have the power to induce human moods in eaters; it also stirs up conflicts and struggles over fishing rights, and ethical, sustainable, consumption. To paraphrase Bennett: the omega 3 that people in Scandinavia were both theirs and not theirs. Or, in yet a different sense: the fish that Scandinavian fisheries used to produce Omega 3 for a Scandinavian market could also have been used to feed the population in Western Sahara. Omega 3 is thus, as Bennett herself recognizes, an effect of an assemblage that stretches across various sites, sites that belong, in Crang’s words to “the mundane and trivial and with the remarkable and significant” (2010: 197). The question is which of these sites we, as academics, wish to highlight and draw upon: that fish and fatty acids not only produce fat bodies, but also induce all sorts of other effects should not exactly come to a surprise.
While a view of edible matter as agential is both a welcome and intellectually stimulating shift in food studies, the subject that Bennett performs (c.f. Crang, 195) remains, for me, caught in a very specific image of what it could be to act. It chooses to eat Omega 3 and other foods in order to avoid depression. It controls, it chooses and picks. And then it stops acting and is acted upon. With the “agential capacities” of food at the table, it becomes far more important, and intellectually challenging to ask when, where and how edible matters are able to induce different kinds of “moods, modes of sociality and states of mind” (2007: 137). Instead, Bennett transports the results from randomized clinical trials to a general theory of how matter matters. My point would be for cultural geography to explore the divergent, complex and extended situatedness of the eating of food, such as omega 3 fatty acids from fish. The trial that Bennett draws upon, for instance, was conducted in a prison in the UK. Why, we may ask ourselves, was the trial conducted in a prison? How did that affect the results? A prison does not resemble, in many ways, a restaurant, or a household. It is a controlled environment, much like a lab. And as a lot of the work done in STS has shown us, if results in a lab are transported outside the lab, those results are also transformed or, as Callon (1986), would put it, they are translated. What I want to suggest by evoking this exempla is not that Bennett is wrong. Rather, I want to suggest that eating Omega 3 – just like eating apples – is many situations at once.
And if we foreground this, what remains is the very difficult task of experimenting with what kind of realities (again, of Omega 3, of apples, of other food, and of eaters) that we might want to highlight, critique, praise or otherwise engage with. In short: which realities we want to perform.
Bennett, J (2007) “Edible Matter” New Left Review 45, May-June 2007, pp. 133-145.
Bennett, Jane (2010). Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braun, Bruce & Whatmore, Sarah (eds.) (2010). Political matter: technoscience, democracy, and public life. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Callon, Michel (1986) “Some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay” in Law, J (ed.) Power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? London, Routledge, 1986, pp.196-223.
Hallahan, Brian and Malcolm Garland, ‘Essential fatty acids and mental health’,
British Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 186, no. 4 (April 2005), pp. 275–7.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa (1999). The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine. New York: Zone Books.
Marvin S, Medd W, 2006, “Metabolisms of obecity: flows of fat through bodies, cities, and sewers” Environment and Planning A 38(2) 313 – 324.
Mol, Annemarie (2008) “I Eat an Apple. On Theorizing Subjectivities” Subjectivity (2008) 22, 28–37.
Ian Cook et al
December 13, 2011 at 9:37 am