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Short abstract:

This multimodal presentation examines the potentials, tensions, and limits of enacting more equitable and sustaining futures through learning to cook Romani dishes with Romani women in a series of cooking workshops.

Long abstract:

In a world that has exceeded the limit of 1.5C warming over a 12-month period, how can we nurture the practices of informal food provisioning, minor acts of solidarity and repair not written into state policies that Smith and Jehlicka (2013) name ‘quiet sustainability’? This multimodal presentation examines the potentials, tensions, and limits of enacting more equitable and sustaining futures through learning to cook Romani dishes with Romani women in a series of cooking workshops. What could it mean to approach a just transformation through the lens – and the taste – of Romani recipes and a cooking epistemology that improvises with what is at hand? How might we face our entangled inheritances when Roma cuisine, like Romani language, is disappearing and with it a whole way of living?

Our culinary lecturers’ desire to share Roma history with us, their white sous chefs, was evident in the constant detours of stories connecting a meal’s ingredients with past events and circumstances. Drawing on fieldnotes, video recordings, and interviews we trace the visceral, sensuous, and material registers and atmospheres in which connections and disconnections of cooking-eating-thinking (Heldke 1992) were performed. This does not only concern the kinaesthetic movements and remembrance in the hands, ‘the mouth machine’ (Probyn 2000) and tongue but also required contending with unequal metabolic inheritances and the biochemical chatter of foodstuffs, microbes and intestines (Landecker 2020) and the climate of anti-blackness (Sharpe 2016).