About the Network

What the network studies

Members follow eating and metabolism as they move through clinics, kitchens, laboratories, and households. Research interests include metabolism, obesity, care practices, epigenetics, and multispecies interactions.

The team is interested in the ordinary and the technical at once: how bodies are measured and narrated, how food economies shift, and how care is enacted in practice. Themes such as care, destruction, development, and disease run through much of the work.

Findings and writing are gathered in the network's Library, and gatherings are listed under Past Events.

The Eating Bodies Fluid Network treats eating as far more than a simple act of intake. It follows food as it moves through bodies, kitchens, clinics, laboratories, and households, asking how metabolism, care, and health are woven together in everyday life. Researchers here draw on anthropology, science and technology studies, and biology, refusing to let any single discipline settle the question of what eating is. Instead, the network holds that question open, studying how bodies process, socialize, and make meaning around food, and how those practices shift across different settings and temporalities.

A guiding concern is the way eating bodies are measured, managed, and imagined. Members examine obesity, surgery, disease, and treatment alongside the quieter labors of growing, tasting, and caring for others. They attend to the norms and technologies that shape how bodies are sensed and represented, and to the multispecies relations that gather around food. Rather than treating weight or health as fixed facts, the network asks how such categories are made, contested, and lived, and what kinds of subjectivities and agencies emerge when bodies are studied as fluid, relational, and always in motion.

The network also works as a shared space for thinking in public. Through workshops, walks, tasting sessions, and publications, members activate conversations that cross disciplines and reach beyond the academy, from sensory ethnography to questions of wasting and care. Themes such as equivocations, extractivist conflicts, and the valuing of water and food connect bodily practices to wider social and ecological questions. The aim is not to close debate but to keep it moving, offering a place where researchers and others can gather, experiment, and think together about eating as a matter of ongoing concern.