What is eating?

Recent posts and publications

Notes from the network sit alongside published work on taste, metabolism and weight management.

• Oliver Human and Carolina Domínguez Guzmán, post on the Valuing Plants Workshop (23 Nov 2017).
• Justine Laurent and Carolina Domínguez Guzmán, post on the Water Walk in the Waterleidingduinen.
• Cristobal Bonelli, post on care, destructions, development and equivocations, and on the many natures of water in Latin-American neo-extractivist conflicts.
• Ordering tasting in a restaurant: experiencing, socializing, and processing food.
• Sensory science research on taste. An ethnography of two laboratory experiments in Western Europe.
• Metabolism and Movement: Calculating Food and Exercise or Activating Bodies in Dutch Weight Management.
• Operating (on) the self: transforming agency through obesity surgery and treatment.

Asking what eating is turns out to be a question that resists a simple answer. Eating is never only a matter of food entering a body; it is a set of relations that pulls together metabolism, appetite, habit, memory, and the company we keep at a table. The network begins from that uncertainty rather than from a settled definition, treating not knowing as a productive starting point. Researchers come to the topic from anthropology, science and technology studies, and biology, and each brings a different sense of what counts as evidence. Holding those differences together is part of the work.

Food travels, and so do the questions that follow it. Following a meal means following the fields where things grow, the kitchens where they are prepared, the shops and clinics where they are discussed, and the bodies where they are eventually transformed. The network treats these as connected sites rather than separate domains, so that a study of a laboratory experiment can sit alongside an account of a household dinner. This attention to movement gives the project its fluid character, an insistence that bodies and foods are always in transit between places, practices, and meanings.

Commensality is a recurring concern, because eating is so often shared. To eat with others is to enter a small social arrangement with its own rhythms, obligations, and exclusions. Some people are invited to the table and others are not, and those boundaries say a great deal about belonging. The network is interested in how commensal relations are made and unmade, how care passes through food, and how hospitality and refusal both shape what a body receives. These are ordinary matters, but they open onto larger questions about kinship, community, and obligation.

Health and eating are entangled in ways that are rarely straightforward. Advice about weight, nutrition, and disease arrives through clinics, public messaging, and everyday conversation, and it lands differently depending on who is listening and what resources they have. The network studies how norms about eating are produced and circulated, and how people negotiate them in practice. Rather than judging bodies against a standard, the researchers ask how standards themselves come into being, what they assume about bodies, and what kinds of care they make possible or foreclose. Treatment and illness are examined as lived experience, not only as categories.

Method matters here, and the network takes seriously the tools it uses to know eating. Ethnography in laboratories and kitchens, sensory experiments, interviews, and careful description all appear in the work, often in combination. Tasting is treated as a form of knowledge rather than a mere pleasure, and sensory experience is taken as data that deserves the same scrutiny as a measurement. The aim is not to flatten different kinds of evidence into one register but to let them speak to one another, so that what a body feels and what an instrument records can both inform the account.

Eating also reaches beyond the human, into plants, animals, microbes, and the environments that sustain them all. The network thinks with multispecies relations, asking how bodies are fed by and feed into worlds that exceed them. This widens the frame from individual choice to collective arrangement, from appetite to infrastructure, and from the present to the temporalities of growth, decay, and repair. Alongside this, the project attends to wasting as much as to consumption, since what is discarded is part of the same circulation. The result is a picture of eating as an ecological and political act, not a private one.