The Agency of Eating : Mediation, Food and the Body

206 Pages·2017·2 MB·English

by  Emma-Jayne Abbots

The Agency of Eating
Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics Series Editors:
David Goodman and Michael K. Goodman ISSN: 2058-1807
This interdisciplinary series represents a significant step toward unifying the
study, teaching and research of food studies across the social sciences. The series
features authoritative appraisals of core themes, debates and emerging research,
written by leading scholars in the field. Each title offers a jargon-free
introduction to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social
sciences and humanities.
Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston, Food and Femininity Peter Jackson, Anxious
Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture Philip H. Howard, Concentration and
Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?
Terry Marsden, Agri-Food and Rural Development: Sustainable Place-Making
Emma-Jayne Abbots, The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body
Further titles forthcoming
To Dad,
with love, always
The Agency of Eating
Mediation, Food and the Body
Emma-Jayne Abbots
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction the agency of eating
1 Eating bodies and bodies of eating: Theoretical foundations
2 Eating at home: Kinned, shared and acquired bodies
3 Eating away from home: Displaced and (re)rooted bodies
4 Eating heritage foods: Proximate and distanced bodies
5 Eating ‘Global Food’ and its alternatives: Anxious, obscured and active bodies
6 Eating for self and society: Responsible, acceptable and abject bodies
7 Eating futures: Reflections and directions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Over the course of writing this book I have been blessed with support,
encouragement, feedback and friendship from a host of individuals. My foremost
thanks go to my ‘co-conspirator’ on the topic of eating, Anna Lavis. An
incidental conversation at a Goldsmiths Christmas party has led to a
collaboration that has not only produced a conference, two edited collections and
a research network, but also has significantly shaped the way I think about food,
the body and eating. I am a better academic for our discussions and I worry she
is not acknowledged enough in the following pages. Many thanks also to the
SOAS Food Studies NKUMI group comprising Harry West, Jakob Klein, Lizzie
Hull, Johan Pottier, Anne Murcott, Sami Zubaida and James Staples. Their
critical, yet always constructive, comments, insightful questions, and close
reading of various chapters helped cohere my thoughts and clarify my writing. I
enjoy our lively conversations enormously. Thanks are also due to Ben Coles for
commenting on an early stream of consciousness that masqueraded as a draft
chapter and for asking me what I meant by eating. By suggesting we co-write the
next book, Ben further gave me the motivation to finish this one.
I am grateful to Mike Goodman for his input at the development stage, and to
David Goodman and an anonymous reviewer for providing comments on the
first full draft. In addition, I benefited from feedback from participants at the
anthropology and UVBO seminars at the University of Oxford and the
indigenous food conference at Humboldt University, Berlin. Part of the book
was drafted during a short stay in Oxford and my thanks go particularly to Karin
Eli and Stanley Ulijaszek. My thinking on materialities was further informed by
two ‘Food Stuffs’ workshops at UWTSD and my gratitude is extended to all the
workshop participants and especially to my two co-conveners, Louise Steel and
Katharina Zinn. Further thanks are also due to my students, particularly those in
the ‘Material Worlds’, ‘Body, Culture and Society’ and ‘Political Anthropology’
modules for their thoughtful questions, feedback on draft chapters, and engaged
discussions.
UWTSD provided practical support in the form of a two-term sabbatical, as did
the RAI/Sutasoma Trust and Wenner Gren Foundation, which funded my
doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork, respectively. The Wenner Gren also funded
the later Food Stuffs workshop. At Bloomsbury, Clara Herberg and Jennifer
Schmidt have been instrumental in getting this book to press and have been a
wonderfully supportive team with which to work.
The original ethnography contained in this book would not have been possible
without the support, friendship and collaboration of a whole range of individuals
in Ecuador, who are too numerous to name individually here. The warmth of the
community in Jima and their readiness to open their doors and share their lives
with me is beyond compare and I am truly grateful for their hospitality and
generosity. Particular thanks go to Maria, Teresa, Marcelo and Zoila, who were
my guides through the Cuenca foodscape and who did so much to make me feel
at home. My gratitude also extends to the privileged migrants who openly shared
their hopes, dreams, fears and experiences with me. Closer to home, my thanks
go to Margaret Birt for her never-ceasing support and to David Harries and
Philip Brocklehurst for their never-ceasing supply of gin and laughter. And
finally, a very special thanks to Gemma, Lizzie, Leonie and Kasia, who are the
most beautiful, amazing, creative and inspiring group of women I could ever
hope to meet and the best friends anyone could wish for.
Introduction the agency of eating
This book explores how eating, as an embodied experience, mediates and is
mediated by the relationship between food’s matter and meaning. My first aim is
to tease out how the human eating body, the material stuff of food, and cultural
knowledges about food (and the individuals and institutions who produce such
knowledges) all dynamically interplay to shape social understandings of what
and how we should – and should not – be eating. I am particularly interested in
where power lies in such interactions and how it is enacted in and through
bodies: I therefore raise the questions ‘Do eaters absorb knowledges and values
about foods as they are eating them?’ ‘Does this bestow authority to those who
encourage us to eat certain foods or position themselves as food “experts,” such
as food activists, doctors, or even family members?’ and ‘Can eating contest
these political relations and produce new knowledge?’ Asking these questions
leads me to consider what agency – meaning the power to affect change (Bennett
2010) – looks like in relation to food and eating and I consider ‘Who has agency
– the eater or experts?’ ‘Can agency be located in the matter of food itself?’ ‘Is
agency to be found in the interactions between eaters, food and knowledge-
(makers)?’ ‘Is agency distributed across a food’s network or does it coalesce
around certain individuals, institutions or even objects?’ and, most importantly,
‘In what ways can eating be an expression of agency?’ This book can, then, be
largely read as addressing the political dynamics and power relations of eating.
Incorporating eating bodies, the material stuff of food, and knowledges about
food into the same frame leads me to examine how matter and meaning interact,
and my second aim is to interrogate how this gets played out in the reality of
everyday life. My interest and overall approach to this question is, in part,
influenced by the recent turn to ‘new materialisms’ (Coole and Frost 2010; see
also Bennett 2007, 2010) and Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005; Law
and Hassard 2004), in the sense that I am open to the possibility that non-human