Posthumanism Invited to Dinner: Exploring the Potential of a More-Than-Human Perspective in Food Studies

Abstract

A chicken thigh seasoned with the lemony accents of sumac. On the side, rice cooked with small brown lentils topped with onions, fried until brown and crispy. Leafy greens, steamed, salted, dressed with olive oil. What is happening here? Well, dinner awaits the diner, a hungry human wishing to nourish the body and satisfy the taste buds. Food will be tasted, digested, and transformed by bodily functions into nutrients and waste. Or maybe not.What happens at the dinner table if we take a posthumanist perspective and consider the agency of the nonhuman? Posthumanism is the term I use to group the theories and approaches that seek to remove humans 1 from a self-appointed role as supreme actor on planet earth and recognize meaning and agency in other life forms-and even phenomena and matter. Posthumanism levels the playing field-flattens the ontology-and provides a framework for a radically different world of networks, assemblages, companionship, relating and interrelating.Food studies has yet to fully reckon with nonhuman agency. Typical in food studies is what Bennett (2007: 133) calls the "conquest model of consumption," a conception of eating that involves humans consuming and digesting inert matter. I add production to this model since the prevailing conception of farming and agri-food systems casts the human as the grower, producer, and transformer of food (as noted by Goodman 1999). This conquest model of production and consumption disregards the agency of the vegetable or animal, bacteria, soil biota, watersheds, climate, and all the nonhuman things and systems that act, influence, shape, and make food for humans possible-or not. The theoretical framework of posthumanism upends so much of what we know and think about food and how it is produced, transformed, and even what happens when

Shopping for Meaning: Tracing the Ontologies of Food Consumption in Latvia

“…Thus, for now, it seems sufficient to conclude that traditional food networks in the Latvian community can serve as an example of the merits of process-oriented ethics of food in sustainability contexts, and as such, could add to the global discussion of environmental ethics. This is especially crucial at a time when environmental humanities warn against the intangibility of the environment and the depoliticization of environmental concerns (Neimanis, Åsberg, Hedrén 2015), while scholarly discussions express the need to reconceptualize the idea of sustainability to bring it closer to the community (Ingold 2021), and posthuman theorists point out the importance of considering the processual embeddedness of food (Elton 2019;Whatmore 2002).…”

Ball jars, bacteria, and labor: CO-producing nature through cooperative enterprise

“…Answering these questions will require food studies to consider the discursive, material, and economic "work" that microbes do in realizing biological and economic diversity in food systems (Cameron andWright 2014, Trauger andPassidomo 2012). This research agenda can contribute to a vibrant body of post-humanist, new materialist, and feminist scholarship in food studies that attends to the vital agency of non-human actors, visceral feelings, affect and emotion (Sarmiento 2017, Beacham 2018, Hayes-Conroy 2010, Bennett 2007) -and calls to decenter the human and contemplate the more-than-human in food studies (Elton 2019). As Elton writes, "Nonhuman systems and nonhuman beings (sentient and not) are food system actors (Goodman 1999).…”