Emma-Jayne Abbots - The Agency of Eating : Mediation, Food and the Body

The Agency of Eating

Contemporary Food Studies: Economy, Culture and Politics

Series Editors: David Goodman and Michael K. Goodman

ISSN: 2058-1807

This interdisciplinary series represents a significant step toward unifying the study, teaching and research of food studies across the social sciences. The series features authoritative appraisals of core themes, debates and emerging research, written by leading scholars in the field. Each title offers a jargon-free introduction to upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities.

Kate Cairns and Jose Johnston, Food and Femininity

Peter Jackson, Anxious Appetites: Food and Consumer Culture

Philip H. Howard, Concentration and Power in the Food System: Who Controls What We Eat?

Terry Marsden, Agri-Food and Rural Development: Sustainable Place-Making

Emma-Jayne Abbots, The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body

Further titles forthcoming

To Dad,
with love, always

The Agency of Eating

Mediation, Food and the Body

Emma-Jayne Abbots

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Over the course of writing this book I have been blessed with support, encouragement, feedback and friendship from a host of individuals. My foremost thanks go to my co-conspirator on the topic of eating, Anna Lavis. An incidental conversation at a Goldsmiths Christmas party has led to a collaboration that has not only produced a conference, two edited collections and a research network, but also has significantly shaped the way I think about food, the body and eating. I am a better academic for our discussions and I worry she is not acknowledged enough in the following pages. Many thanks also to the SOAS Food Studies NKUMI group comprising Harry West, Jakob Klein, Lizzie Hull, Johan Pottier, Anne Murcott, Sami Zubaida and James Staples. Their critical, yet always constructive, comments, insightful questions, and close reading of various chapters helped cohere my thoughts and clarify my writing. I enjoy our lively conversations enormously. Thanks are also due to Ben Coles for commenting on an early stream of consciousness that masqueraded as a draft chapter and for asking me what I meant by eating. By suggesting we co-write the next book, Ben further gave me the motivation to finish this one.

I am grateful to Mike Goodman for his input at the development stage, and to David Goodman and an anonymous reviewer for providing comments on the first full draft. In addition, I benefited from feedback from participants at the anthropology and UVBO seminars at the University of Oxford and the indigenous food conference at Humboldt University, Berlin. Part of the book was drafted during a short stay in Oxford and my thanks go particularly to Karin Eli and Stanley Ulijaszek. My thinking on materialities was further informed by two Food Stuffs workshops at UWTSD and my gratitude is extended to all the workshop participants and especially to my two co-conveners, Louise Steel and Katharina Zinn. Further thanks are also due to my students, particularly those in the Material Worlds, Body, Culture and Society and Political Anthropology modules for their thoughtful questions, feedback on draft chapters, and engaged discussions.

UWTSD provided practical support in the form of a two-term sabbatical, as did the RAI/Sutasoma Trust and Wenner Gren Foundation, which funded my doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork, respectively. The Wenner Gren also funded the later Food Stuffs workshop. At Bloomsbury, Clara Herberg and Jennifer Schmidt have been instrumental in getting this book to press and have been a wonderfully supportive team with which to work.

The original ethnography contained in this book would not have been possible without the support, friendship and collaboration of a whole range of individuals in Ecuador, who are too numerous to name individually here. The warmth of the community in Jima and their readiness to open their doors and share their lives with me is beyond compare and I am truly grateful for their hospitality and generosity. Particular thanks go to Maria, Teresa, Marcelo and Zoila, who were my guides through the Cuenca foodscape and who did so much to make me feel at home. My gratitude also extends to the privileged migrants who openly shared their hopes, dreams, fears and experiences with me. Closer to home, my thanks go to Margaret Birt for her never-ceasing support and to David Harries and Philip Brocklehurst for their never-ceasing supply of gin and laughter. And finally, a very special thanks to Gemma, Lizzie, Leonie and Kasia, who are the most beautiful, amazing, creative and inspiring group of women I could ever hope to meet and the best friends anyone could wish for.

This book explores how eating, as an embodied experience, mediates and is mediated by the relationship between foods matter and meaning. My first aim is to tease out how the human eating body, the material stuff of food, and cultural knowledges about food (and the individuals and institutions who produce such knowledges) all dynamically interplay to shape social understandings of what and how we should and should not be eating. I am particularly interested in where power lies in such interactions and how it is enacted in and through bodies: I therefore raise the questions Do eaters absorb knowledges and values about foods as they are eating them? Does this bestow authority to those who encourage us to eat certain foods or position themselves as food experts, such as food activists, doctors, or even family members? and Can eating contest these political relations and produce new knowledge? Asking these questions leads me to consider what agency meaning the power to affect change () looks like in relation to food and eating and I consider Who has agency the eater or experts? Can agency be located in the matter of food itself? Is agency to be found in the interactions between eaters, food and knowledge-(makers)? Is agency distributed across a foods network or does it coalesce around certain individuals, institutions or even objects? and, most importantly, In what ways can eating be an expression of agency? This book can, then, be largely read as addressing the political dynamics and power relations of eating.

Incorporating eating bodies, the material stuff of food, and knowledges about food into the same frame leads me to examine how matter and meaning interact, and my second aim is to interrogate how this gets played out in the reality of everyday life. My interest and overall approach to this question is, in part, influenced by the recent turn to new materialisms (Coole and Frost 2010; see also and the argument that humans give meaning to objects, I find a wholesale adoption of the agency of objects thesis unsatisfactory. I cannot discount the structures and inequitable distribution of political and economic power within the contemporary food system. Nor can I gloss over the cultural politics of food and the role certain actors and institutions play in shaping what people eat and the values and beliefs they hold about food and bodies. To do so would do an injustice to the wealth of food studies scholarship that has painstakingly drawn attention to these dynamics in considered and robust ways, as well as potentially bypassing the lived reality of peoples experiences of food. However, this is not to say that established political economic approaches to food cannot be enhanced by a (re)turn to materialisms food is, after all, political, symbolic and material. Hence, a path that attempts to draw these two seemingly estranged perspectives together in a workable framework is required. What follows is my attempt to do so.