Commensals

The network brings together scholars from diverse disciplines and institutions who share an interest in the complex relationships between eating, bodies, fluids, and environments. Our commensals contribute research spanning sensory science, ethnography, social theory, and beyond.

Commensals, in the context of this network, refers to those who share a table—literally, those who eat together. The term draws from ecological biology, where commensalism describes a relationship in which one organism benefits while the other is neither helped nor harmed. Here, it expands to include researchers, artists, activists, and communities who gather around questions of food, metabolism, and bodily transformation. These collaborators do not merely study eating from a distance; they participate in the messy, entangled processes of ingestion, digestion, and waste. By sharing meals, methods, and critical frameworks, commensals generate knowledge that is embodied, situated, and relational rather than abstract or detached.

The network’s commensals work across disciplines that include sensory science, ethnography, and the anthropology of eating. They examine how taste is shaped by culture, technology, and political economy, and how bodies become sites of intervention through dietary regimes, surgical procedures, or pharmaceutical management. Some researchers focus on the metabolic pathways of water and nutrients, tracing how fluids move through human and nonhuman bodies alike. Others study the food industry’s role in producing certain norms around health, weight, and disease. What unites these diverse approaches is a shared commitment to understanding eating not as a private act but as a deeply public, ecological, and political practice.

A significant portion of the commensals’ work addresses the politics of water and waste. In contexts where clean water is scarce or contaminated, eating becomes inseparable from questions of infrastructure, toxicity, and environmental justice. Researchers trace how industrial agriculture and extractivist economies degrade watersheds, affecting the quality of food available to communities. Others explore how bodies process and excrete residues of industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and microplastics, raising urgent questions about metabolic responsibility. These investigations challenge the notion that digestion is a purely biological process, revealing it instead as a site where social inequality, ecological damage, and bodily autonomy converge.

The commensals also engage with practices of care and destruction that surround eating. Cooking, fermenting, preserving, and composting are understood as forms of labor that sustain life while also generating waste and transformation. Workshops and public programs organized by the network invite participants to taste, handle, and reflect on ingredients in ways that foreground sensory experience and collective learning. These gatherings often take place outside conventional academic settings—in kitchens, gardens, or public walks through water infrastructure. By foregrounding the materiality of food and the relationships that sustain it, the commensals cultivate forms of knowledge that are attentive to the fragility and resilience of the more-than-human worlds we inhabit.