Paper Short Abstract:

Drawing on my research in three field sites of urban food innovation, I propose eating as more-than-human practice and tracing the complex socioecological relations “our” eating bodies are caught up in as productive mode of (re)doing food anthropology in the Anthropocene.

Paper Abstract:

With my approach situated at the intersection of food anthropology, feminist STS and interdisciplinary discourse on sustainable (food) transformations, I want to contribute to the questions raised by this panel by reflecting on my empirical insights from three sites of urban food innovation by tracing how different actors engage in diverse modes of (un)doing (un)sustainable eating relations.

Instead of assuming food as a pre-existing and stable category in a functionalist way of thinking, my research departs from an understanding of eating as socially situated practice that decenters the human eating body and follows the multispecies entanglements of eating.

In times of capitalist overexploitation and destruction we are witnessing in the Anthropocene, eating emerges as important site for negotiating human-environment relations. As analytical lens, it constitutes a productive way of tracing relationality, agency and power beyond the traditional scope of our subdiscipline.

A perspective on food as exposure (Landecker) and of eating as socioecological relation takes its cues from recent insights from e.g. microbiome science and nutritional and environmental epigenetics. In line with ongoing attempts in anthropology that take seriously decolonial critique, this opens up new modes of challenging narratives such as those of individual autonomy and human agency of “our” multispecies bodies that in fact are intrinsically caught up in socioecological entanglements, and consequently allows to reconceptualize notions of “the human” as such. Therefore, a food anthropology that goes beyond food and towards more-than-human eating practices, I argue, carries theoretical and methodological potential for anthropology that should not be overlooked.