About the Network

Our Approach

We pursue an interdisciplinary agenda that connects laboratory ethnography with social theory. By studying tasting practices, metabolic science, weight management, and bodily transformations, we trace how eating is shaped by culture, technology, and environment.

The Eating bodies fluid network examines how eating connects living beings to the waters and metabolic flows that sustain them. Rather than treating food as a static substance, researchers approach ingestion as an event—a moment where bodies, environments, and multispecies relations converge. This perspective challenges conventional distinctions between inside and outside, self and other, by tracing how nutrients, contaminants, and microorganisms move through organisms and ecosystems. The network's work draws on sensory science, ethnography, and social theory to understand how tasting, digesting, and excreting shape subjectivities. By studying what it means to take something in, the network reveals eating as a process that transforms both the eater and the eaten.

Metabolism is explored not merely as a biochemical process but as a site where social norms, technologies, and power relations operate. Weight management programs, obesity treatments, and dietary guidelines are examined as practices that calculate, measure, and discipline bodies. Researchers ask how metabolic science produces particular understandings of health and disease, and how these understandings travel through clinics, laboratories, and everyday life. The network attends to the ways eating becomes a moral and political concern, especially when bodies are classified as too heavy or too light. This critical approach reveals equivocations in how we value food, water, and bodily processes across different contexts.

Water flows through the network's inquiries as a vital substance that connects eating to broader ecological and political struggles. From the waterleidingduinen of the Netherlands to Latin American neo-extractivist conflicts, researchers trace how water infrastructure, management, and destruction shape what can be eaten and by whom. The network asks how valuing water care might transform our understanding of food systems and metabolic justice. By attending to the materiality of water—its movements, contaminations, and distributions—the research reveals how eating bodies are always entangled with hydrological cycles. This watery perspective challenges anthropocentric approaches to food and metabolism.

The network's workshops, walks, and tasting experiments create spaces for collaborative inquiry into sensory experience and sociality. Researchers and participants engage in exercises that activate alternative ways of knowing eating—through touch, smell, and shared attention to texture and temperature. These methods draw on laboratory ethnography and sensory science to explore how taste is trained, how socializing shapes food preferences, and how processing technologies transform ingredients into edible commodities. By experimenting with formats that blur research and practice, the network generates knowledge about eating that is embodied, relational, and situated. Such approaches open new questions about agency, representation, and the temporalities of consumption.

Research Themes

The network engages a wide set of concerns — from the sensory experience of food to the politics of water, from clinical interventions on bodies to everyday practices of care and valuation. Our work spans multiple sites and species.