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Short abstract:

Caring for interlocutors sometimes meant suspending self-care while I researched taste experiences at a processed meats factory outside Kuala Lumpur. In this presentation, I will reflect on eating foods with my interlocutors that they considered bad for them—and often made me feel bad, too.

Long abstract:

My paper explains how food does not always “do care” (Harbers, Mol, and Stollmeyer 2002). Studying taste at and around a processed meats factory outside Kuala Lumpur, I discovered that eating some foods pitted two forms of care against each other: tending to the embodied experiences of my interlocutors alongside my own. This conflict I faced as a researcher encapsulates the quotidian struggles of my interlocutors in Malaysia, modern consumers striving to eat well within social contexts abundant with foods they consider bad for them (Guthman 2015).

The factory’s Malaysian women workers belonged to the target demographic for the chicken nuggets they taste-tested. Yet these foods, which they called “unhealthy,” no longer appetized them; the obligation to continue eating such products indicated the factory’s lack of care. Taking care of themselves meant not eating (Mol 2021). They spit out half-chewed bites over trash cans, even skipped tasting altogether for the occasional batch, or thrusted a tray of nuggets at me instead: “You try.” I ate so my interlocutors did not have to proceed farther down another path of “slow death” (Berlant 2007). But the care I showed them resulted from denying myself that same form of self-care they applied to themselves.

To make sense of these events, I reflect on my positionality as a PhD student from the US accustomed to cooking her meals. I thus contextualize my embodied experiences of eating with my Malaysian interlocutors at the factory and outside, as further evidence of food’s ambivalent relationship to care.