Podcast Dispatches from Issue 21.3: Aya H. Kimura

For our sixth season of podcasts produced in collaboration with Meant to Be Eaten on Heritage Radio Network, we sit down (virtually) with authors who have contributed to our third issue of 2021, edited by Krishnendu Ray, and featuring articles and creative pieces which collectively address the issue of “gastropolitics,” as described in that issue’s editorial letter.

In this episode Editorial Co-Chair Daniel Bender is joined by Associate Professor Kimura to discuss her recently published article, “Tsukemono (Japanese pickles) and Their Traditional Vegetables,” which offers a fascinating insight into the history and practices of Japanese pickles, as well as the effect of modern agriculture and chemical additives on a revered tradition of fermentation.

Suguki barrels at Kamigamo Shrine
(Image courtesy of Aya H. Kimura)

Podcast Dispatches from Issue 21.3: Benjamin Schrager

For our sixth season of podcasts produced in collaboration with Meant to Be Eaten on Heritage Radio Network, we sit down (virtually) with authors who have contributed to our third issue of 2021, edited by Krishnendu Ray, and featuring articles and creative pieces which collectively address the issue of “gastropolitics,” as described in that issue’s editorial letter.

In this episode, Editorial Collective member James Farrer is joined by the author of “Risky but Raw: On (Not) Regulating One of the Most High-Risk Dishes in Japan,” to discuss the ‘underlying social and ecological forces that shape situated expressions of risk’ in the context of increasingly popular raw chicken dishes in Japan.

Consumer Citizenship: A Preview of the Gastronomica/SOAS Distinguished Lecture | Amita Baviskar

Since 2014, Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies has partnered with University of London’s SOAS Food Studies Centre to co-sponsor a Distinguished Lecture Series for leading scholars, students, journalists, practitioners and members of the public to engage in critical conversations about the nature of food, the interconnectivity of contemporary food systems, the role of food in daily life, and emerging trends in food studies.


Maggi_masala_noodles (1)Across northern India, roadside stalls and restaurants announce themselves as ‘Maggi Point’ and ‘Maggi Corner.’ Maggi, a brand of instant noodles introduced in the late 1980s, is now not only a popular snack, but the favorite comfort food of an entire generation of young urban Indians. What is the secret of Maggi’s success? And what does it tell us about taste and desire in the heart of a consumer economy in a deeply unequal society?

I began noticing products like Maggi noodles when they first appeared in village shops. Surely the novelty of splurging on these brightly packaged bits of junk must be limited to the well-off few, I wondered. However, such products were soon crowding each other on grocery shelves. What I was witnessing was part of an explosion in the consumption of industrial foods, as Jack Goody called mass-manufactured edible commodities produced and distributed by corporate firms.

256px-Maggi_GorengMy growing interest in the life of industrial foods has led me to students and migrant squatter settlements, street vendors and supermarkets, advertising companies and processing plants, television studios and government offices as I follow the threads of how instant noodles are produced, distributed and consumed. At first glance, this seemed to be a familiar story about the commodification of diets in an era of economic liberalization. Soon, however, I came to realize that it was also about citizenship, about poor and low-caste people who continue to be denied social and economic rights striving for respect and dignity. The success of instant noodles is partly sparked by their aspiration to belong to a nation increasingly defined by the consumption of fetishized commodities.

Instant noodles also compel us to look more closely at youth and how their tastes dictate food practices within households, overturning the standard narrative about Indian families, age, and patriarchal power. This simmering broth of social relations which industrial foods add to and transform is a critical part of India’s cultural landscape. It’s exciting to be able to contribute to a subject that concerns public policy on nutrition and health.

 

IMG_1419Amita Baviskar is Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.  She studies the cultural politics of environment and development in rural and urban India. Her current research looks at food practices and the transformation of agrarian environments in western India. Baviskar has taught at the University of Delhi, and has been a visiting scholar at Stanford, Cornell, Yale, SciencesPo and the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded the 2005 Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for Distinguished Contributions to Development Studies, the 2008 VKRV Rao Prize for Social Science Research, and the 2010 Infosys Prize for Social Sciences.

 

 


The SOAS Food Studies Centre is an interdisciplinary centre dedicated to the study of the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of food, historically and in the contemporary moment, from production, to exchange, to preparation, to consumption. The Centre’s primary purposes are to promote research and teaching in the field of food studies at SOAS and to facilitate links between SOAS and other individuals and institutions with an academic interest in food studies.


Image credits: Maggi Masala noodles by Sixth6sense – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40729391; Magi Goreng noodles, as served at Restoran Khaleel, Gurney Drive, Penang, Malaysia By amrufm [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Food, Bodies, and the “Stuff” of (Not) Eating in Anorexia | Anna Lavis

from 

Abstract: The diverse materialities that form part of lived experiences of mental ill-health and its treatment have been largely overlooked in research. Arguing that such a focus is key to enhancing understandings of eating disorders, this article engages with food-centered practices in anorexia nervosa. Against the background of work that has recognized the desire to maintain their illness among some individuals, the article suggests that holding onto anorexia is a dynamic process enacted through eating as well as by avoiding food. blurred intersections between eating and not eating, edible and inedible. hat is experienced as eating may not look like eating and vice versa. As contingent forms of eating thereby emerge and dissolve through anorexia-focused practices, vectors of ingestion and assimilation come to be remapped and eating delineated as an act that may take place across corporeal surfaces and among multiple bodies. While such an engagement with materialities offers key insights into anorexia, it also contributes to a wider theorizing of the act of eating within food studies literature; the article asks what eating is, as well as what forms it takes. This problematizes taken-for-granted relationships among eating, bodies, and food. Their dislocations demonstrate eating to produce and reconfigure, as well as displace or break down, materialities.

Keywords: anorexia nervosa, corporeality, desire, eating, (im)materiality, self-starvation


Introduction

With a focus on the materialities and immaterialities of bodies and food, this article explores (not) eating practices among individuals with anorexia. Through these it asks two key questions: How might an attention to material encounters between bodies and food offer insights into key aspects of the experience of anorexia? And, in turn, how does tracing these encounters within the specific context of anorexia enhance critical understandings of eating? The former, then, calls for an attention to the often-overlooked role of materialities in lived experiences of mental ill-health, while the latter seeks to contribute to food studies literature by interrogating the act of eating and theorizing its myriad forms.

To explore these questions, the discussion draws on data from two qualitative studies within large National Health Service (NHS) inner-city mental health trusts in England: The first involved participant observation and interviews with individuals being treated in an eating disorders inpatient unit (EDU) (2007–8) and the second comprised interviews with users of eating disorders outpatient, daypatient, and inpatient services (2013–15). Alongside these, the article draws on anthropological participant observation and interviews conducted on pro-anorexia websites (2005–13) as well as on academic and media discussions of eating disorders.

The aim of this analysis is not to unearth the causes of eating disorders. Rather, acknowledging anorexia to be profoundly dangerous and distressing, this article extends a recent recognition of the “desire” (Lavis 2011, 2016) to hold onto their existing anorexia among some individuals. This has illustrated that not eating maintains an illness that is profoundly dangerous and distressing and yet that may offer a painful and precarious way of coping with day-to-day life and distress.

Such desire gives rise to a very felt and lived paradox, which underpins the following discussion: to be anorexic one must eat as little as possible and yet to hold onto anorexia (if that is desired) one must also eat enough to stay alive. Situating our analysis within this moment of contradiction elucidates that holding onto the illness is a dynamic process enacted through practices which draw into encounter the messy and malleable materialities of food and anorexia. Through these, eating is constantly reconfigured so that it may feel as unlike eating. These affective navigations of food give rise to fractures and multiplicities of eating; it is disassembled and reassembled, and takes multiple forms.

Thus, having begun by asking what anorexia is, the article unfolds by increasingly problematizing what eating is. It does this by engaging with the three forms that most frequently emerge from participants’ narratives: bodily incorporation; eating through the skin; and shared eating. These are presented in a narrative sequence that increasingly problematizes what eating is and does, as well as its relationship to food and bodies. Beginning with a normative imagining of eating as the individual taking of food into the body, it is first spatially repositioned to take place across bodily surfaces before becoming an act that can be shared among bodies. These permutations illustrate that eating may be agential or fearfully accidental, and they demonstrate individuals’ struggles with both food and anorexia, as each is extremely distressing.

Paying attention to food in relation to an illness more habitually framed in terms of its absence thereby offers a way to trace how body/food encounters are simultaneously positioned outside, and yet central to, anorexia. This has significant implications for understandings of the complexities of anorexia. Acknowledging these, throughout its analysis, the article importantly maintains a focus on the realities of living through the illness—the slippages and losses of agency, the fear and suffering. It comprises a recognition of the way in which not eating may not be fully agential, or even desired, and yet it balances this with an engagement with the voices of individuals themselves. To disallow either to overshadow the other, the article seesaws between these diverse forms of eating and consists of an exploratory feeling around the edges of eating, food, and bodies, rather than an analytical fixing of their boundaries.

This materially-informed analysis thereby also intersects with wider scholarly concerns. As the food-centered practices of anorexic participants problematize any easy assumptions regarding what eating is, this article seeks to contribute to food studies literature by theorizing the act of eating; it interrogates and challenges eating’s relationships with tasting, swallowing, and digesting, and explores the agencies of both eater and eaten.

It has been suggested that to take account of food as a nexus of material, symbolic, and political “stuff,” it is necessary to pay attention to eating bodies (cf. Abbots and Lavis 2013). Engaging with the food-centered practices of individuals with anorexia underscores a similar but further need to focus attention on that eating body—on “what bodies are and do when they eat” (Probyn 2000: 14) and, importantly, do not eat.

This elicits interrogation of the role of the eater, and non-eater, in the production of materiality as bodies and foods are made and displaced in relation to one another. Engaging with recent discussions of food’s “vibrant materiality” (Bennett 2010) and the ways in which objects become edible (cf. Evans and Miele 2012; Roe 2006), the article traces the many moments during which food slip-slides into what we might term, for want of a better word, “non-food,” and vice versa, as eatable and edible are drawn into conflict through the (non)eating body.

As such, these explorations of (not) eating elucidate the “liminality” (Turner 1967) of food as participants mobilize it across conceptual and corporeal thresholds by salivating and swallowing, viewing and chewing. This highlights the necessity of taking account of uncertainty and contingency in relationships among eating and bodily materialities, as these may become dislocated both in the context of anorexia and more widely. Recognizing that eating absents or materializes food, as well as anorexia, demonstrates how the very “stuff” of food and bodies is drawn into question through mundane moments of consumption and starvation.

 

What Is Anorexia? Desire and (Not) Eating

There is no doubt that anorexia nervosa is a painful, frightening and dangerous illness. Yet, while participants’ narratives are replete with distress and suffering, many also resonate with an ambivalent “desire” (Lavis 2011, 2016) to maintain the illness. Anorexia is often described as a “part of me” and during fieldwork, Eva, who was an inpatient at the time, illustrated this claim: “If a doctor took a scalpel and tried to cut him [anorexia] out, he’d just leave his shoelaces behind anyway.” Participants also frequently refer to the illness as a “friend” (see also Grahame 2009; Serpell et al. 1999), and in her interview Indira said: “I think it becomes a bit of like a friend, like it’s a… It’s almost like it’s a world that you live in, that’s separate from everybody else.” Many reasons have been put forth in interviews for describing anorexia in this way. Friendship is circumscribed with articulations of how it can be “helpful” and “protective,” and may even offer a “safe space” or a “cloud away from everyone else.” Such narratives are often interwoven with descriptions of the illness also as “torturing,” “awful,” and “hell,” with these juxtapositions occurring within the serrated space of the same sentence.

As such, participants’ accounts elucidate how anorexia can become an (extremely painful) way of being for some individuals with the illness. As “living through anorexia” is conceptualized in interviews as a way of “living through” day-to-day life or distress, the illness is described as a coping strategy. Participants can find it extremely painful, know that it is dangerous, and yet they may also want to hold onto it, at least temporarily. Anorexia can therefore be felt to be both an illness and a modality of caring for oneself (see Lavis 2015a).

Unlike the plethora of popular imaginings of anorexia as a quest for thinness against all odds, many research participants have not expressed a wish to become thin. Rather, the desire articulated by some individuals is, albeit ambivalently, directed at holding onto the illness. Against this background, thinness becomes important only as a temporally later way in which to visually check and measure the continuing presence of this “friend” anorexia (see Lavis 2014). Such a looking beyond thinness in analysis is in line with the work of other scholars who have also engaged with the practices, meanings, and subjectivities of individuals with anorexia (cf. Eli 2014; Gooldin 2008; Lester 2014). Reflecting on the desire to maintain anorexia thereby shifts our understanding of the illness. It highlights the necessity of acknowledging the extreme suffering that anorexia causes, while also suggesting that we need to take into account how it comes to be important to some individuals. Underpinned by subjectivities of anorexia’s protective “care,” it is this that sets in motion practices of (not) eating.

In her interview, Miriam said: “If you eat you’ve given in, you’ve stuffed yourself silly and… and that’s not right. You just shouldn’t do that.” She described eating as threatening—both to herself and anorexia. With this sense of threat in mind, it is clear how eating can come to be feared; in her interview, Lydia said:

If I was in a situation where I had to eat something that I was really uncomfortable with, erm…just to sort of, satisfy the people and keep it quiet I suppose, it could, it could play on me to the point of tears where I would get very, very upset and would not be able to sleep that night thinking about what I’d eaten.

This discomfort—even fear—of food also illustrates how not eating may not always be entirely agential; in her interview, Kayley said: “It’s not exactly a choice, kind of. Well, it’s not like you’re just thinking, like, ‘Oh, I won’t eat because…’ It, it’s more, kind of, like, it’s more that you can’t, really.” In spite of this blurring of agency and its loss, it is clear what eating and not eating do in (and to) anorexia. But, it is less obvious what eating and not eating are, where the boundaries between them lie, and what counts as “food” in this context.

Participants’ narratives thereby illustrate the fundamental and viscerally felt tension of living with anorexia that I set out in the introduction to this article: to be anorexic you must eat as little as possible, and yet to hold onto anorexia, if that is desired, you must also eat enough to stay alive (see also Lavis 2013). From this, anorexia emerges as maintained not only by not eating but also, seemingly paradoxically perhaps, by eating. In this paradox lies the key to forging more nuanced understandings of anorexia, as well as of eating itself. It is this simultaneity of needing to eat and yet not eat that sees the act of eating perpetually reshaped and reconfigured because participants’ engagements with food suggest that eating needs to be made to be (and perhaps, fundamentally, feel) as unlike eating as possible; it needs to be contained and confined, squashed and reshaped. This underscores the practices explored throughout the rest of this article. Perhaps suggesting that reflecting on eating always necessitates a rather strong stomach, this tracing of eating’s various guises will begin by exploring how eating and bodies are turned inside out through vomiting.

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An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender

from Gastronomica 15:3

SOAS FOOD STUDIES CENTRE DISTINGUISHED LECTURE

On December 11, 2014, James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology and founding director of the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, gave a Distinguished Lecture in the Food Studies Centre at SOAS, University of London (co-organized by the Agrarian Change and Development Research Cluster at SOAS). Lectures in this series are co-sponsored by Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies. On the following day, Scott answered questions put to him by Harry G. West, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Centre; Celia Plender, doctoral student in anthropology; and other SOAS students.

For decades, Scott has been a key figure in Southeast Asian Studies and in the comparative study of agrarian societies and peasant politics. His best-known works examine the state, hegemony, revolution, resistance, and anarchism, and include The Moral Economy of the Peasant (Yale University Press, 1976), Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Yale University Press, 1980), Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998), and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2008).

james_scott_featured
Photograph courtesy of James C. Scott

In this session, Scott reflects on his intellectual precursors and his place in the landscape of academic disciplines; the significance of food and agriculture in his work; the tenuous future of peasant agriculture and agrarian societies; globalization and the rise of corporate agriculture and the food industries; poverty and the struggle for justice; and his own experiences with farming and farm land conservation.

PANEL:

JAMES C. SCOTT [JS]

HARRY G. WEST [HW]

CELIA PLENDER [CP]



HW:

Jim, what drew you to “agrarian studies”—specifically with a focus on the peasantry and its relationship with the state—and what drew you to Southeast Asia? Is there a backstory that you can share with us that gives us a sense of this emergent intellectual agenda?

JS:

I stumbled into Southeast Asia. I had bungled my honors thesis as an undergraduate, my professor dismissed me, and if I wanted an honors degree, I had to find someone who would adopt me. I was an economics major and someone said, well, I think I’d like to understand more about the economic development of Burma and if you do this I will adopt you as an honors student. And I said fine, and then when I closed the door behind his office I said to myself, where’s Burma? I got a Rotary Fellowship to go to Burma and one thing led to another and I became a Southeast Asianist. As far as agrarian studies is concerned, that’s actually a simpler story and maybe typical of my generation. I started to teach as a Southeast Asianist during the middle of the Vietnam War and the expansion of the Vietnam War at the University of Wisconsin. The university had a long progressive tradition, which was one reason why I took a job there. The fall of 1967 when I arrived to begin teaching there were the so-called “Dow Riots” protesting the war and the manufacture and use of napalm ordnance by Dow as well as the contract research for the Department of Defense conducted on campus. These riots convulsed the campus and coincided with a strike by teaching assistants to secure unionization rights. The police responded badly and a good many students were beaten and arrested. The turmoil led to a series of all-faculty meetings in which I took an active part, speaking against the war and for the rights of the protestors. As a budding Southeast Asianist I spent a good deal of the following two years speaking against the war in Wisconsin and elsewhere. I became interested in peasant rebellion—understanding the Viet Cong and how peasant rebellions happened. I taught a course on peasant rebellion with a China specialist friend, Edward Friedman, and in those days we had 400, 500 students in the class who were fighting for the microphone to denounce us as insufficiently progressive. Finally I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world’s population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture. So when I finally went to Yale, we began something called the Program in Agrarian Studies and it brought together all those people who were interested in rural life generally: land tenure, agriculture, now food and environment. For me it was a wonderful interdisciplinary community in which I learned a tremendous amount. I think of the book Seeing Like a State as the book that agrarian studies helped me write, just by attending all of the seminars that we had—including ones which Harry presented.

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