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- Convenors:
-
Alexandra Endaltseva
(Assistance publique Hôpitaux de Paris (APHP))
Kateřina Holá (Charles University)
Nina de Bakker (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer (Charles University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel asks how STS scholarship can shift from moralities of individualized consumption toward collective, situated, and processual ethics of food care in more-than-human worlds. We invite empirically grounded contributions exploring alternatives to dietary prescriptions or "healthy recipes".
Description
In contemporary food cultures-in-transition, eating is increasingly framed as an individualized act, a means to manage, quantify, and prevent both health and environmental risks. Yet nutrition-centered discourses often detach eaters from their socio-material, cultural, and economic environments. This detachment fuels hyper-responsibilization and intensifies anxieties, domestic pressures, marginalisations, and emotional burdens. Moreover, it disembeds eaters from the situated intimate work of weaving solidarity ties and metabolic communities that connect bodies, kinship networks, food systems, and ecologies, thus obscuring the situated care labor that eating in a more-than-human world brings into focus (Lorenz-Meyer, 2022; Law & Mol, 2008, Abbots et al, 2015). Nutritional governance stripped of its relationality and situatedness thus carries urgent ethical and political implications (Abrahamsson et al, 2015).
This panel asks how STS scholarship might help shift from moralities of individualized consumption toward collective, situated, and processual ethics of food care in more-than-human worlds (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Endaltseva & Dupuy, 2025). We approach eating as a compound practice — encompassing provisioning, cooking, organizing meal occasions, making aesthetic judgments of taste, and maintaining relations, traditions, and ecologies. We invite contributions that problematize the modalities, aims, and target audiences of dietary interventions designed to build resilience for human or planetary health.
Potential contributors are encouraged to reflect on their empirical findings and field practices at the intersections of food, health, and more-than-human relations, offering alternative “prescriptions,” “recipes,” or definitions of “dietary recommendations.” We welcome traditional presentations with a speculative touch, as well as creative or experimental modalities. Through this collective, empirically grounded, and imaginative effort, the panel seeks to reimagine eating as a practice of interdependence, solidarity, and care in a world-in-transition.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how food was literally prescribed through rationing during the 2022–2023 blockade of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh and how people navigated these diets through care, mutual help, and exchange. It shows survival, measured in grams, depended on social relations.
Paper long abstract
Between December 2022 and September 2023, Azerbaijan’s blockade of the Lachin Corridor severed the only road connecting Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh’s predominantly Armenian population to Armenia, disrupting food, energy, and supply infrastructures. In response to escalating shortages, local authorities introduced rationing systems, issuing bread cards and food tickets that defined what could be eaten and in what quantities. This paper draws on ethnographic interviews with displaced Artsakh Armenians conducted between 2023 and 2025, alongside analysis of social and news media, to examine how survival was administered through prescribed portions and reorganized through everyday practices of care and exchange.
While dietary prescriptions are often understood as medical guidance, in blockade Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh they operated in a literal, bureaucratic sense: survival was measured and distributed in grams. Yet prescription did not guarantee provision. Many nutritionally necessary foods remained unavailable, while the usability of available ingredients depended on disrupted infrastructures such as electricity, transport, and storage.
Under these conditions, food access depended on social relations. Families relied on kinship ties, informal exchange, and mutual help to redistribute scarce resources between villages and cities. Rationed food was ethically managed, with many reducing their own portions to prioritize others, while visible consumption became morally sensitive. Mothers experienced anxiety over their inability to meet nutritional standards. Media representations of improvised foods further politicized everyday eating. Together, these materials show how survival under blockade was shaped not only by bureaucratic prescription but by collective care, exchange, and the reorganization of everyday life.
Paper short abstract
Inspired by propositions that cooking and eating can enrich the STS methodological toolkit this presentation re-turns to practices of cooking-eating-thinking-metabolising in their potentials for curating encounters that can lure other kinds of relationality.
Paper long abstract
The diets of European Romani communities are often considered unhealthy: rich in fats, lacking fruit and vegetables, and using cheap or processed meat they articulate economic deprivation, lower life-expectancy, and chronic illnesses (Budajova 2021). But Romani food care practices are also the art of ‘making something out of nothing’, nourish sociality, and use parts of the animal that others do not want. Together with new gardening practices that emerged in the COVID pandemic, this compelled a participatory research cooking project with Czech Romani women that asked what feminist researchers might learn from Romani food and gardening practices for living in more convivial ways.
Inspired by propositions that cooking and eating can enrich the STS methodological toolkit (Endaltsvea et al 2026), this presentation returns to practices of cooking-eating-thinking-metabolising in their potentials for curating encounters that can lure other kinds of relationality. Smells and taste are differential, not integrating senses; working with the ‘Unstable moire, mingled body‘ (Serres 2016), we trace how learning to cook re-arranges our dealings with others: it takes time and it makes time as it shifts relations of teacher-student when learning to ‘just feel it’ or experimenting with veganizing Romani dishes; it activates words and alimentary tracts, creating joy in nourishing the other, relaying histories of dispossession and dislocation, making participants heavy, exhausted. Fleshing out an ‘ethics of connections that also insists on deep rifts’ (Probyn 2000), the analysis pays attention to negativity within cooking as a method that cannot ‘simply be repurposed to good ends’ (Wilson 2015).
Paper short abstract
In a Shenzhen urban village cafe, people explore permaculture together. I use ANT to describe how they build the ethics of food care through shared fermentation practices. This cafe is just like a SCOBY, re-embedding and co-fermenting eating in the intimate work of more-than-human communities.
Paper long abstract
This paper grows out of my participation in gardening and fermentation at a cafe in a Shenzhen urban village. Laboring alongside friends on the rooftop garden and tending jars of kombucha, I write from within the practice. We explored how microbial collaborations reshape a community's way of living.
At the center of our activities is an ongoing fermentation cycle. Kombucha brewed at the cafe becomes the base for pickles and breads. Kitchen scraps feed the compost. Compost nourishes vegetables in the rooftop garden. Harvests return to the table as shared meals. This is a more-than-human collaboration involving human participants and non-human actors. The community exhibits a strong ethos of inclusivity. People share food and resources, build relationships of mutual support, and labor and harvest together. In doing so, it embodies what the panel calls a collective, situated, and processual ethics of food care in more-than-human worlds. It re-embeds eating in the intimate work of weaving solidarity ties and metabolic communities that connect bodies, networks, food systems, and ecologies.
This cafe community, like a SCOBY, functions as a fermenting network that continuously recomposes relations between humans, microbes, plants, and urban space. This is precisely the kind of compound food practice the panel describes. The cafe is not merely a site for fermentation. It is itself a fermentation: a living assemblage where care, patience, and multispecies coexistence are cultivated. Here, eating becomes what the panel calls a practice of interdependence, solidarity, and care in a world-in-transition.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Hildegardian natural therapy has been introduced from Germany to Taiwan and reshapes local healing and healthy eating practices. Through a qualitative case study of the St. Hildegard Association in Taiwan, it explores the local translation of Hildegardian dietary knowledge.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how dietary practices associated with the medieval German mystic and healer Hildegard von Bingen have been transplanted to Taiwan and reconfigured through local healing practices. Focusing on the St. Hildegard Association in Taiwan, it explores how Hildegardian natural therapy is localized through herbal cultivation, fasting retreats, and everyday food practices among healing seekers.
The association introduces German scholarship on natural medicine and medieval herbal knowledge through translations of classical texts, the organization of gentle fasting retreats (Fasten), and the establishment of Hildegard healing herb gardens. Within this framework, the body is understood as dynamically entangled with the natural environment, and herbs and natural foods are used to restore bodily balance and vitality.
Central to Hildegard’s thought is the concept of Green Vitality (Viriditas), which emphasizes relational connections among humans, plants, and the wider natural world. Drawing on the ethics of care in food practices and the concept of “food work of care”(Endaltseva & Dupuy 2025), this paper conceptualizes eating as a practice of interdependence and care in more-than-human worlds. Incorporating medicinal herbs into everyday meals becomes a form of dietary care through which healing seekers cultivate bodily awareness and ecological attentiveness.
Based on textual analysis, participant observation in fasting groups and healing gardens, and semi-structured interviews, the study shows how fasting retreats transmit dietary care ethics, how spelt-based foods shape emerging food networks, and how herb cultivation foregrounds plant agency and collective well-being.
Keywords: food work of care; situational ethics; green vitality; transplantation; Hildegardian natural therapy
Paper short abstract
DACH literature on vegan diets documents substantial demand to include more-than-human communities in considerations of worth and care, beyond CT’s pivot of a 'common humanity'. To account for contemporary ethical and sustainability crises, a posthuman perspective and justice lens view are proposed.
Paper long abstract
When people debate about food that is adequate, right or good for themselves, their families, society or the planet, they implicitly or explicitly refer to justifications, in an attempt to move beyond expressing a personal motivation towards building a legitimate, generalizable claim that is relevant for a common good. From this theoretical lens of Convention Theory (CT) and drawing, in particular, on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ approach, (food) preferences routinely get challenged for the coherence of the justification logic they invoke. The interrelated two research questions of this systematic literature review address the motivations and justifications influencing veganism in the German-speaking countries of Germany (D), Austria (A), and Switzerland (CH), providing a comprehensive understanding of the cognitive conditions substantiating vegan diets. Results confirm previous research findings that, in a European context, vegan dietary choices are predominantly motivated by animal, environmental and health considerations. The application of Convention Theory to examine justifications for veganism documents substantial demand for the extension of justice beyond the theory’s pivotal assumption of a ‘common humanity’ which fails to find representation in the original framework. To overcome the theory’s conceptual limitations in adequately reflecting more-than-human value and being able to account for contemporary ethical and sustainability crises, a posthuman perspective and justice lens focus are proposed that include more-than-human communities in considerations of worth and care.
Key words: vegan, more-than-human communities, justification, justice
Paper short abstract
This paper shows healthy eating practices, exercising and muscle building as situations that indicate a possible risk. I thus claim that clinicians’ interpretations of ‘clean’ eating and muscle building signs of disorder could be a part of more situated, processual and creative approach to care.
Paper long abstract
Male eating disorders are increasingly recognised as a significant public health issue globally. In this paper, I will examine clinicians’ accounts to explore how male bodies, particularly those involved in practices such as ‘clean’ and healthy eating, exercise, and muscle building, are enacted as ‘disordered’ while investigating how eating choices that are often admired or seen as ‘healthy’ can, in specific clinical contexts, be reframed as problematic. I show how clinicians problematise healthy eating practices, exercising and muscle building as situations that indicate a possible risk. I thus claim that clinicians’ interpretations of ‘clean’ eating and muscle building signs of disorder are part of more situated, processual and creative approach to care. Thus, I show that the exercising, ‘clean’ eating and muscly bodies accentuate and uncover tensions and splits in the architecture of health care practices regarding the disordered body. Consequently, by unpacking how the disordered male bodies become as such in clinical encounters, this paper concludes that health care delivery for male eating disorders could benefit from greater flexibility while asking whether there is room for a different diagnostic standard in terms of a more relational approach to care.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores what different notions of healthy food come to the fore when centring care and caring relations by looking at community-based initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast - and what this then means for interventions and inequities.
Paper long abstract
Dominant health paradigms increasingly frame healthy eating as an individual responsibility guided by standardized nutritional knowledge, often overlooking the social, material, and relational conditions that shape everyday food practices. Using the concept of care and care relations (cf Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) as an analytical lens to look at health differently, this paper explores how healthy food is understood and practiced within community initiatives. This was done through ethnographic research involving courses on cooking, wild-picking and gardening; symposia; interviews; and other neighbourhood events, within community initiatives in Amsterdam Southeast that deal with issues on poverty, crime, housing, labour, health, etc. on a daily basis. I have specifically worked with: an all-male support network for men with African roots; a local foodbank and community centre; and an initiative providing cooking and gardening courses.
The ideas and activities of these different communities, like cooking with urban wild-picked plants or putting sugar and soy sauce in food boxes, show a going together of different knowledges that revalue current epistemic hierarchies – leading to different notions and interventions on healthy food. It showed that thinking on and doing healthy food differently created space for other forms of health (i.e. mental, physical, communal, ecological), as well as making food accessible for a larger group of people, giving agency back to people in a vulnerable position and renegotiating power relations. Taking other notions of healthy food and communities that enact them seriously, could therefore create possibilities for sustainable interventions on healthy food.
Paper short abstract
Based on food workshops with migrants in Trondheim, this talk explores how “healthy eating” is negotiated through collective cooking. Health emerges as a practical accomplishment shaped by work rhythms, resources, and everyday constraints instead of a fixed norm.
Paper long abstract
This talk draws on a series of food workshops conducted with migrants in Trondheim, Norway, where participants cooked together and discussed their ideas around "healthy eating". Participants wrote their own associations with healthy eating on 3d printed tokens and they resurfaced during cooking, while chopping vegetables, adjusting oil, discussing portion sizes, and negotiating taste, cost, and time. Through collective cooking, dietary categories were enacted in practice. “Healthy” didn't fell into a single standard and it's meaning shifted depending on work schedules, religious commitments, family obligations, bodily fatigue, and the availability of ingredients. Decisions emerged through gestures, substitutions, and small compromises made while preparing the meal.
I suggest that these workshops functioned as small experimental spaces of distributed food care. Cooking together redistributed authority and made visible how dietary advice is shaped by socio-material conditions. Ingredients, tools, economic constraints, and migration histories all participated in shaping what counted as appropriate or workable food. Approaching these situations through perspectives on enactment and care, the talk reflects on how collective cooking can reveal eating as a relational and practical activity embedded in everyday coordination.
Paper short abstract
This paper/presentation outlines the evolution of Medically Tailored Meals (MTMs) in the United States and characterizes the "problems" with food-as-treatment as described by innovators, scientists, clinicians, and other non-profit and for-profit organizations in this domain.
Paper long abstract
Science and Technology Studies and Medical Sociology have collectively neglected exploration of the evolution of food-as-treatment for a variety of diseases and illnesses. This is surprising for several reasons – Food has existed since at least the Hippocratic era as a treatment for a variety of illnesses and is developed in contemporary society in many forms as an intervention and treatment for disease(s). The STS and Medical Sociological research that has been done on food-as-treatment or food-as-medicine reveals an ontological continuum of food and drug in science, describes the ways people move between food and drug in the treatment of illnesses, and outlines the actor-networks implicated in the development of what I call “food drug fixes” in the Global South for conditions like hunger and starvation. For this paper, I take up the call to empirically explore the evolution of what I call ontologically ambiguous food drugs (e.g., food drug fixes) in the United States. I define food drug fixes as food-based interventions and treatments for biomedical and social problems. In this paper I describe the evolution of Medically Tailored Meals (MTMs) and characterize the “problems” with food as described by innovators, scientists, clinicians, and non-profit/for-profit organizations/actors, including the “medicalization” of clinical trial outcomes for MTMs for conditions like diabetes, cancer, HIV, and food insecurity.