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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).