Paper short abstract

Based on my food installation, the paper presents a social encounter that reimagines the living room as a shared ecological commons. Through tasting as a method of inquiry into forgotten flavors and vernacular knowledge, this research explores how governmentality shapes what counts as edible.

Paper long abstract

Can we eat waste? This paper situates the notion of biosensory politics within Foucaultian governmentality. It examines how sensory practices, embodied perceptions, and material entanglements with the environment can become sites where self-regulatory processes emerge. These concepts are grounded in a participatory food installation conducted by the author at Dutch Design Week 2025. “Welcome to the Living Room” is a social encounter that invites visitors to a space where all beings - human and more-than-human - are welcomed as guests. By reimagining the domestic “living room” as a shared ecological commons, food becomes a medium of welcome, and tasting becomes an opportunity for dialogue between standardized regimes and localized experiences. However, as plants and their roots move across borders, whether through trade, migration, or accident, they can become invasive or be dismissed as waste. Such movement challenges the boundaries between native and foreign, edible and inedible, and care and control. Eating these plants is a way of negotiating what is welcomed, what is governed, and what is allowed to take root. In this sense, food becomes a form of world-making, where the politics of edibility permeates everyday life.

Building on these practice-based insights, this paper contributes to the field of environmental humanities, deepening the concept of biosensory politics. It therefore frames the living room as a porous space in which guests co-compose an edible landscape, opening up practical and theoretical avenues for imagining future food systems that promote ecological balance and collective sensibilities across human and more-than-human realms.