Paper short abstract:

Children diagnosed with MCADD develop a sense of self within the constraints of habitus, daily behaviour radiating around food practices and preventative medical intervention shaped by the genetic diagnosis. This experiential, sensory knowledge is learned by the body in the first few years of life.

Paper long abstract:

Medium chain Acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD) is an inborn error of metabolism, where children cannot metabolise fat. Treatment includes regular meals. Fasting for any length of time could lead to death and common childhood illnesses causing vomiting or loss of appetite often leads to hospitalisation until the child is well. This research analyses the experiences of the first generation of children in New Zealand to be diagnosed under the expanded newborn screening programme. Results indicate that the first year of life post diagnosis constructs MCADD in a relationship with two main themes: food and drink; and its association with illness. I argue that how children diagnosed with MCADD see themselves will develop within the constraints of habitus, daily behaviour radiating around food practices and preventative medical intervention shaped by the genetic diagnosis. This experiential, sensory knowledge is learned by the body in the first few years of life. If, as James and Hockey state: "particular kinds of bodies are produced through experience" (2007:45) what bodies are being constructed through the cultural positioning inherent in meals? How is their identity, already fluid in terms of childhood and a wellness/ illness continuum, reflexively shifting through the performance of routines and rituals of everyday nourishment? As parents learn a new 'illness habitus' of parenting, children develop a normative habitus based on this, a set of cultural dispositions imprinted upon the body that amplify already prevalent food messages.

Paper short abstract:

Care in the context of Parkinson's disease is grounded in and expressed through affective and relational practices. As neurodegeneration progresses, everyday care practices become increasingly intimate - and these intimacies are reflected through the preparation and sharing of food.

Paper long abstract:

Disabling and chronic conditions prompt transformations within individuals and between people. While a 'good life' is often sought, what constitutes this, how it can be achieved, and for whom it applies varies across cultural settings. This paper considers variance in these aspects in the context of Parkinson's disease, a common neurodegenerative disease. Practices of care are central to the 'moral laboratories' which comprise the everyday experiences of people living with Parkinson's. Participants in my study often spoke of soup - developing recipes, making the soup, and the shared experience of eating in the mobile Parkinson's body. Attending to soup allows an exploration of the phenomenological uncertainties that characterise everyday life, while simultaneously representing the search for a good life. In this paper, I explore the complex relations between people, with and between bodies, and shaped by broader contexts in creating an inhabitable world in which a 'good life' can be made possible by focusing on the relational, affective and contextual transformations of interpersonal encounters that arise as a result of chronic illness or disability.

Paper short abstract:

Malnutrition is common among cancer patients, but often not a focus of the doctor. Caregivers and cancer patients seek to gain agency by turning to food as a form of medicine when facing cancer. This article explores the challenges faced in, the midst of, contradicting strategies and information.

Paper long abstract:

Malnutrition is common among cancer patients. According to numerous studies published insufficient nutrition is a major concern in the treatment of cancer patients. A recent small study among doctors in Denmark, points out that if doctors focused more on nutrition lives could be saved (Onkologisk Tidskrift, 7 October, 2017). In my fieldwork to date I have participated in cooking classes for cancer patients, spent time with caregivers and cancer patients and found that many seek to gain agency by turning to food as a form of medicine when facing cancer. These same caregivers and patients are faced with conflicting information and are challenged when trying to maneuver through the information available to them at the clinic, in the media, online on e.g. the Danish website www.cancer.dk and in articles related to cancer and cancer self-help books. I have recently expanded my fieldwork to an oncology ward at a Danish hospital. I will be following doctors as they do their rounds, I will be spending hours with the cancer patients as they receive their chemo therapy and I will spend time with nurses and the affiliated dietitian. This article draws on my fieldwork and explores the challenges faced when caring for a cancer patient in, the midst of, contradicting nutritional strategies and information.

Paper short abstract:

We focus on food as a node in the study of caring for people with advanced stages of dementia living at home. We contend that families construct an agency for the "demented bodies," through food-related caring practices; one which is differentiated from their non-existing subjectivity

Paper long abstract:

Emanuel Marx (1980) suggested that anthropologists should focus on nodes; i.e. a reference point, an aggregate of social relations to which they devote considerable time and effort in their observation. We employ this approach and consider food as a node in the study of caring for people with advanced stages of dementia living at home.

We analyze data gathered from online forums for family members caring for these people.

Our findings suggest that people with advanced stages of dementia are "unbecoming subjects." Family members tend to their physical needs but are unable to intelligibly communicate with them. They are restricted to their rooms, and more specifically, to their beds. Their hands are bound to prevent them from pulling out medical equipment that makes them suffer; and, they are not allowed to wander outside of their designated space. However, families focus on feeding as a caring practice that reintegrates social relations and cultural preferences of taste and smells into their life. They try to postpone as much as possible artificially feeding their loved ones. They sing to them while feeding them with teaspoons (or a syringe); they allow them to smell food they once loved; they include them in family dinners (especially during holiday meals,) even if they are unable to eat; and they try to evoke mutual long forgotten memories through the tasting of food.

We contend that family members utilize these tiny "crumbs" to construct an agency for the "demented bodies;" one which is independent of their non-existing subjectivity.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, we explore food as medicine in eating disorders care, examining tensions between refeeding as a technical process and eating as a commensal process. These tensions highlight the ontological liminality of food, as the means to both (social) recovery and (physiological) survival.

Paper long abstract:

In this podcast presentation, we examine constructions of food as medicine in eating disorders care. Our podcast traces the uneasy boundaries between feeding and eating, medicinal food and social food, as they were continuously drawn and redrawn in an inpatient eating disorders ward in Israel. Through ethnographic stories, remembrances, reflections, and flash-interviews, we explore food on the ward as it inhabited simultaneously medicalized and socialized realms. Specifically, we interrogate the tension between refeeding as a technical process that decontextualized food from eating, and eating as a commensal process that made food sociality a prerequisite to recovery. In its medicinal form, food was essentializing matter, reducing the patient to a universalized human body in need of nourishment, with mealtimes and their attendant practices stripped away. Medicinal food, then, presented a bare infrastructure of feeding: the patient, a medically-prescribed calorific liquid, and the measuring cup or naso-gastric tube that mediated between them. In its social form, food was bounded temporally and spatially - by mealtimes, by the dining hall, by the calendrical rhythms of Friday night dinners and Jewish holidays - with patients not only consuming their requisite calories but also resocializing into a normative eating habitus. Yet social food was also bounded by the measuring devices and rigid timings that regulated eating events, continuously pulling food away from commensality and toward medicalization. These tensions, we suggest, highlight the ontological liminality of food in eating disorders care, as the means to both (social) recovery and (physiological) survival.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the transformation of food in the clinical management of obesity and diabetes through metabolic surgery, and concomitant shifts in selfhood, identity, intimacies, and commensality as the surgery's power extends beyond the individual upon whose body it has intervened.

Paper long abstract:

Bariatric surgery, also referred to as metabolic surgery, involves a considerable reduction of the size of the stomach and major permanent changes in diet and eating habits. With the medicalization of obesity in the 2000s, and the association in the last few years of the surgery with the remission of type 2 diabetes, food has transformed significantly in the clinical management of disease, and in the resocialization of patient selfhood and relations to others. Based on research with the patients of a weight services clinic in a large health care system in the US, we describe the ways food is reconceptualized from being at the center of "lifestyle choices" aimed at a healthful and balanced approach to "living with diabetes," to a form of medicine "to sustain" rather than enjoy in post-metabolic surgery life meant to be free from diabetes medications. We explore the transformations of intimacies, commensality, and power that the preparation for and adaptation to post-surgical bodies demand, focusing on the entanglement of food socialities in practices of care and reconfigurations of the self-body world. We examine the co-transformation of patient identities, social and political landscapes, as the surgery's power extends beyond the individual upon whose body it has intervened.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines food as medicine at the biosocial aspects of healing. It explores the medicinal power of foods among the indigenous people of Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh.

Paper long abstract:

The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) is a unique part of Bangladesh, with a mountainous ecosystem rich in biological and cultural diversity. The CHT hosts 11 indigenous communities, who depend mostly on jum (swidden) for foodstuff. Besides jum, they also gather necessary foods and plants from nearby forests. The long-cherished food practices protect them from illness and heal when needed. This paper explores the medicinal power of 'hill foods'.

The ethnographic study finds that 'hill foods' are both food and medicine to the indigenous people. Without knowing the biological aspects of healing, they practice them for long. Here, food and medicine synchronize well both ecologically and culturally. Thus, this paper also deals with the biopolitical dimensions of food as medicine. In the past, local 'hill foods' were sufficient to provide meals to the indigenous people that eventually fulfilled nutritional as well as medicinal needs. However, because of increased population and land encroachment, now the jums are unable to meet the demands of the indigenous people. As a result, they also depend on 'imported foods'. In the past, they were very strong and healthy; but nowadays, they do not possess sound health. With 'imported foods,' they face several kinds of unknown diseases. Still, they largely depend on local foods for nutrition and health. While modern medicine fails to cure some diseases or too expensive to afford, the majority Bengali people also rely on 'hill foods' for treatment. Indigenous people urge the importance of government support and promotion for local medicinal foods.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores embodied encounters with anti-psychotic medications. It traces the ways in which the act of swallowing draws food and medicine into visceral entanglements that disrupt psychiatric imaginings of illness, treatment and recovery, and transform food into medicine.

Paper long abstract:

Arguing for a greater attention to materiality in anthropological approaches to mental health, this paper engages with the act of swallowing to interrogate material and metaphorical encounters between food and medicine in the context of lived experiences of psychosis.

The paper traces how particular psychiatric imaginings of illness and healing, as well as citizenship and responsibility, enter the body as anti-psychotic medications are placed on the tongue and washed down the throat. Attending to the textures and tensions of this process invites reflection on swallowing in the more figurative sense of 'putting up with;' participants' narratives illustrate how selves, bodies and affects may be uncertainly and processually mediated around these medications as their unwanted effects are traded off against the promises they transact.

Yet, as recent analyses of eating have shown, ingestion may be an act replete with resistance; it is particularly by engaging with food practices that may accompany the swallowing of anti-psychotics that this becomes apparent. Eating becomes a tool, employed to disrupt and reconfigure the meanings and effects of the medications. This renders boundaries porous as food is transformed into medicine in the agential yet haptic liminality of visceral encounters.

The paper locates this material transformation as central to the often poignantly precarious recovery of bodies, selves and lives that are ambivalently caught up in the unpredictable exigencies of both illness and medication.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research in Finland and Poland, this paper attends to living experiences of patients with LCHADD and their caregivers at the intersections of food regimes, the body, and technologies.

Paper long abstract:

LCHADD (Long-Chain 3-Hydroxyacyl-CoA Dehydrogenase deficiency) is a rare, albeit life-threatening metabolic disorder. There currently are no drugs available that would "cure" patients with LCHADD. Treatment itself is clinically challenging and it subjects patients to a dietary regimen for the rest of their lives; it entails a low-fat and high-carbohydrate diet as well as avoiding long periods of fasting and physical exertion. Feeding problems that occur in children and adolescents with LCHADD often necessitate tube feeding. Finland and Poland probably show the highest number of patients with LCHADD worldwide. Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research in these two countries, this paper attends to living experiences of patients with LCHADD and their caregivers at the intersections of food regimes, the body, and technologies. In particular, it focuses on three foci. First, it examines patients and their caregivers' appropriation and translation of apparently standard dietary regulations into daily lives as exemplified by, for instance, the usage of syringes to measure the exact amount of certain foods to be consumed. Second, it attends to the process of learning how and when to feed the body so as to avoid adverse symptoms (e.g. muscle pain, hypoglycemia). Third, it analyzes tube feeding practices in these two countries as sites and materialities through which biopolicies towards patients (often children) with feeding problems are highlighted.

Paper short abstract:

Using ethnographic data, I illustrate how the promotion of "healthy eating" in weight-loss groups utilises biopodegogies of food as "enabling practices" that reproduce normative ideas of biocitizenship and consumer choice through nutritional knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

The authoritative knowledge around the "obesity epidemic" identifies caloric imbalance as the main cause of weight gain and promote weight-loss diets as the most effective form of treatment. Within this discourse, food is biomedically constructed as the cause of and treatment to excessive weight, defined as "fuel" and measured in calories.

Weight-loss programmes play a central role in obesity management and represent biosocial realities where knowledge around food and health is originally produced.

In this paper, I suggest that in these contexts, losing weight to restore health involves a resocialisation of participants, their body and self, into responsible biocitizenship and educated consumers through biopedagogies of food and taste. Drawing on my fieldwork in a free weight-loss programme in the UK, I highlight how this resocialisation passes through a discursive shift from diet to healthy eating.

I illustrate how this shift questions the therapeutic efficacy of calories counting and promote nutritional knowledge as a long-term strategy to restore and maintain a healthy weight and suggest that it enables the different actors negotiate "food as medicine" and lived experiences of "food as commensality".

Moreover, I suggest that nutritional knowledge is promoted through biopedagogies of food, eating and cooking, such as meal planning, mindful eating and label reading. And that these biopedagogies are perceived as "enabling practices" through which groups' participants feel empowered and able to work not only on their physical health, but also on their general wellbeing as well as on their identity as informed consumers and citizens.