Final thoughts(?) from Rachel

Hi everyone,

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the blog’s content and by blog as a method. I’m with those who find greater potential to incite in conversation and I hope that happens in Vegas. Anyway, definitely, supporting Julie and others’ posts, Ian, you should be head chef (good luck!—often what I feel I need when cooking or writing). I like the idea of conveying some of the multiplicity of interpretations in a rational form that need not preserve the actual text we’ve written. Ian has already committed to not silencing, hasn’t he? With others, I’d also suggest rather than conclusions, connections that generate further inventiveness (paraphrasing Elizabeth Grosz)—or that unsettle as Jean says.

More themes:

1. Politics:
What can be generated through the friction created when the perspective that alternative food is neoliberal biopolitics meets the idea of a politics of encounter through taste etc.? The blog seems to be often about this tension.

2. Bodies—taste,health, guts, life.
Here all the tangles of animals, aesthetics, people, yeast (Bobrow-Strain 2008), prions, exchanges, enteric disorders, size.

Cutting across both is identity/difference and food. More ways to theorize these in relation since Ian’s mixing paper.

Cutting across both is hunger: Early on Mimi mentioned the eating of dirt cakes sold in Haiti. An article I read somewhere said people were not able to afford even these,much less food without dirt in it.

Bobrow-Strain, A. (2008) Trouble with Microbes: Industry, Public Health, and the Politics of Biosafety in Turn-of-the-Century America, paper presented in the session Experimentation & Engineering: Materialities Between the Processual and the Aleatory II, AAG, Boston.

Rachel