- Goldsmiths, University of London, Anthropology, AlumnusSOAS University of London, Food Studies Centre, Department Member, and 3 moreadd
- Anthropology of Food, Political Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Gender, and 37 moreAnthropology of Knowledge, Consumption, Materiality (Anthropology), Sociology of Food and Eating, Cultural Heritage, Anthropology of the Senses, Global Consumer Culture, Food, Gender, Culture, Foodways (Anthropology), Phenomenology of Temporality, Intangible Cultural Heritage (Culture), Heritage Studies, Museum and Heritage Studies, Food Safety, Agriculture and Food Studies, Local food, Food Studies, Food, Consumption and Material Culture, Sociology of Food, Geography of food, Biopolitics, Mobility/Mobilities, Food (Anthropology), Anthropology Of Consumption, Anthropology of Waste, Anthropology of Capitalism, Material Culture Studies, Anthropology of eating, Environmental Anthropology, Materialities, Affect (Cultural Theory), Ethical Consumption, Political Ecology, Fat Studies, The Body, and Human-Nonhuman Assemblagesedit
- My research and teaching interests centre on the cultural politics of food and drink and the production of food knowl... moreMy research and teaching interests centre on the cultural politics of food and drink and the production of food knowledges, with a specific focus on: food and migration; food histories, stories and heritage; environmental relations, social justice, and food labour; and eating, materiality, and the body. I currently explore these interests through two projects: ‘Food Stories: Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue through Food’ and ‘Consuming Materialities and the Eating Body’. Previous projects have explored craft cider production in the UK, and food, migration and time politics among the peasantry in Highland Ecuador. A qualitative researcher with particular interests in sensory ethnography, biographies, and archives, I lead and work within interdisciplinary teams across the Social Sciences and Humanities, and collaborate with non-HEI partners to engage with a range of wider public on critical food issues and debates. My research has attracted funding from the AHRC, the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the RAI / Sutasoma Trust. In addition to a number of peer-reviewed articles, I am the author of The Agency of Eating (Bloomsbury 2017) and co-editor of Why We Eat, How We Eat (Ashgate 2013) and Careful Eating (Ashgate 2015).
Current Projects:
Food Stories: Fostering Cross-Cultural Dialogue through Food
Food Stories partners academic expertise with the social enterprise Stories On Our Plate (SOOP) to foster cross-cultural understanding through cooking, eating food, and sharing stories of culinary heritage and cultural identity via a series of cooking workshops, a cookbook, and café-style cookbook launch seminars in London, Coventry and Bradford. The project reflects how food, and personal stories about food, can become vehicles for translating the histories and cultures of different parts of the world to one another, as well as empowering individuals to value their own culinary heritage as part of their identity.
Consuming Materialities and the Eating Body
This interdisciplinary umbrella project theoretically and substantively asks what eating is and does, with a particular focus on embodied interactions between humans and the material world. It draws together approaches in Human Geography, Anthropology, Medical Sociology, STS and Cultural Studies amongst others.
Previous Projects:
Assembling Craft Cider in Wales and the Marches
This research addressed the ways in which craft – as an application of embodied knowledge, skill and instinct developed through material interactions with the environment – is learnt, discerned, represented and commodified by small-scale cider producers. It further examined how these producers constructed and valued their own practices as ‘craft’ and situated the everyday processes of making, transmitting, enacting and mediating knowledge and skill within a broad political ecology that celebrates ‘heritage’ and ‘authenticity’.
Food, Migration and Time Politics among the Ecuadorian Peasantry
This project, which includes my PhD and postdoctoral work, examined the consequences of outward migration and remittance incomes in the Southern Ecuadorian Highlands, with a particular focus on: consumption and exchange, particularly food practices; land use; kinship and gender; class relations; and time politics. Later developments focused on fast food consumption, the consequences of inward migration of North Americans on food markets, and the politics of dietary and obesity programmes.edit
Research Interests: Human Geography, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Sociology of Food and Eating, and 13 moreSocial and Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Geography of food, Food History, Food and Nutrition, STS (Anthropology), Sociology of the Body, Agriculture and Food Studies, Food Studies, science and technology studies (STS), New Materialism, and Eating
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Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ‘why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape... more
Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks ‘why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?’ It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what ‘eating’ and ‘caring’ are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.
Research Interests: Cultural Geography, Medical Anthropology, Primary Health Care, Sociology of Food and Eating, Social and Cultural Anthropology, and 10 moreAnthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Geography of food, The Body, Food and Nutrition, Sociology of the Body, Food ethics, Agriculture and Food Studies, Food Security, and Food Studies
Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding... more
Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.
Research Interests: Sociology, Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Foodways (Anthropology), Sociology of Food and Eating, and 13 moreFood Systems, Food Security and Insecurity, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Local food, Food History, Food and Nutrition, Materiality (Anthropology), Food (Anthropology), Agriculture and Food Studies, Consumption and Material Culture, Food Studies, and Alternative Food Networks
This essay introduces a special issue on food stuffs—meaning both food’s material components and the objects through which food is transacted and mediated. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and a range of case studies situated across... more
This essay introduces a special issue on food stuffs—meaning both food’s material components and the objects through which food is transacted and mediated. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and a range of case studies situated across time and space, it explores the theoretical possibilities and limitations that renewed attention to the materiality of food and embodied encounters can bring to the critical study of food and eating. In so doing, it works to illuminate the myriad ways that materiality and meaning intersect in the context of food.
Research Interests: Material Culture Studies, Sociology of Food and Eating, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Embodiment, and 10 moreGeography of food, The Body, Food and Nutrition, History Of Food Consumption, Sociology of the Body, Agriculture and Food Studies, Consumption and Material Culture, Food Studies, New Materialism, and New Materialisms
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Research Interests: Sociology of Food and Eating, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Migration, Identity (Culture), and 9 moreGeography of food, Sociology of the Body, Migration Studies, Transnational migration, Migration (Anthropology), Agriculture and Food Studies, Geography of Mobility and Migrations, Food Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology of Agriculture and Food
This general audience book is the outcome of the AHRC project "Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of Authentic Foods and Drinks." It addresses the temporal relationships and ideas that contribute to the... more
This general audience book is the outcome of the AHRC project "Consuming Authenticities: Time, Place and the Past in the Construction of Authentic Foods and Drinks." It addresses the temporal relationships and ideas that contribute to the construction of narratives of authenticity in relation to four foods and drinks: pulque (an alcoholic drink from Central Mexico), flaounes (celebration Easter pies from Cyprus), Welsh craft cider and acarajé (a street snack from Brazil).
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Situated in a rural community of Jima in Highland Ecuador, this chapter reflects on how the intimacies of consumption reshape family life within a migratory context. Specifically, it examines how the wives of migrated men invest in the... more
Situated in a rural community of Jima in Highland Ecuador, this chapter reflects on how the intimacies of consumption reshape family life within a migratory context. Specifically, it examines how the wives of migrated men invest in the long-term reproduction of their household and maintain intimate relations with their geographically distant husbands – who are living in New York – through everyday material practices with commodities, such as household appliances, soft furnishings and clothing. Such conspicuous consumption provokes alarm among the middle-classes who regard it as antithetical to kinship, intimacy and Jimeño social values. I challenge these depictions and demonstrate how a focus on private engagements with household items illuminates how they are used create and maintain bonds of affection between family members. I thereby elucidate the emotional attachments and social logics of collectivity, intimacy and care which inform Jimeña consumption, arguing it can be better understood as ‘intimate investment’.
Research Interests: Economic Sociology, Economic Geography, Family studies, Children and Families, Economic Anthropology, and 11 moreMigration, Consumption Studies, Migration Studies, Anthropology of Kinship, Sociology of Migration, Transnational migration, Anthropology Of Consumption, Household Economics, Consumption and Material Culture, Kinship and Relatedness (Anthropology), and Consumption Culture
Celebrity chefs foster a relationship of intimacy with consumers, which is compounded by presenting styles, social media and the opening up of their personal lives. These intimacies are extended into domestic spaces through the material... more
Celebrity chefs foster a relationship of intimacy with consumers, which is compounded by presenting styles, social media and the opening up of their personal lives. These intimacies are extended into domestic spaces through the material objects, such as kitchen equipment, specialist ingredients and cookbooks, which are brought into the home. This article interrogates the ways a group of UK consumers interact with this ‘stuff’ of celebrity chefs and explores the ways these interactions (re)produce chefs and make them present in consumer homes. As such, it elucidates how focusing on the material objects that consumers personalise and associate with a celebrity chef can provide new insights into assessing the ways such chefs influence food and eating practices, as well as showing how these objects enable consumers to actively produce their food identities and social relations. As these relations are social and economic, attention is drawn to the manner in which the fostering of intimacies can obfuscate commercial relations.
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This chapter explores the ways in which care is politically deployed in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes. Specifically, I consider how particular groups mobilize care in myriad ways to critique, interfere and govern Other people’s eating by... more
This chapter explores the ways in which care is politically deployed in the Southern Ecuadorian Andes. Specifically, I consider how particular groups mobilize care in myriad ways to critique, interfere and govern Other people’s eating by appealing beyond the health of the eaters’ individual bodies to that of the broader social body. Put simply, I elucidate how particular social groups, in this context the local Cuencano population and the migrant-peasantry, are subjected to visions of ‘good food’ perpetuated by other social groups structurally positioned above them in the social order – privileged migrants and the governing class. As such, I interrogate what constitutes ‘careful eating’ and examine how subjective notions of care-full (Miele and Evans 2010) and care-less food work to establish social distance and produce otherness. My aim in this chapter is, therefore, to demonstrate how discourses of good food and proper eating that are ostensibly premised on caring-for the corporeal bodies of Others and appear benign are, instead, politically motivated and centred on caring-about wider social issues.
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This article interrogates how social media can provide a platform for contesting dominant discourses. It does so through the lens of competitive eating, demonstrating that amateur competitive eaters use social media sites to challenge and... more
This article interrogates how social media can provide a platform for contesting dominant discourses. It does so through the lens of competitive eating, demonstrating that amateur competitive eaters use social media sites to challenge and subvert mass media representations of their sport while concomitantly upholding normative notions of healthy eating and bodies. Competitors consider themselves to be skilful athletes that discipline and train their bodies to eat. They regard their eating practices, which are often depicted in the mass media as uncontrolled and gluttonous, as controlled ingestion, and present an alternative perspective of their ‘sport’ – a perspective that stresses health, physical expertise and a fit, trained body over voracity and insatiability. Social media acts as a ‘precipitating agency’ for the creation of these alternative definitions of disciplined eating, as well as the construction of new digital eating identities. Instead of focusing on the food being ingested and the ‘Carnivalesque’ practice of competitive eating, we draw attention to the performers’ voices and the ways they attend to the mechanics of gurgitation, including methods of chewing, swallowing and stomach stretching, and their ability to manage, regulate and operate ingestivity. As hegemonic discourses align the notion of ‘good eating’ to discipline, order and restraint, competitive eating is thus revealed to be a practice that mirrors and appropriates, yet also ultimately reproduces, conventional narratives. Social media is, in turn, shown to be a political tool for counter-discursive practices that are produced in dialogue with, and concomitantly uphold and contest, normative discourses of mass media.
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This commentary examines how consumption maintains affective relations and facilitates the long-term reproduction of the transnational household. Drawing on primary research among the peasantry in the Ecuadorian Andes, it shows that the... more
This commentary examines how consumption maintains affective relations and facilitates the long-term reproduction of the transnational household. Drawing on primary research among the peasantry in the Ecuadorian Andes, it shows that the female kin of migrants are not passive ‘victims’ of migration, but are active producers who transform remittances into material objects. To better reflect the moralities and reproductive intent informing these practices, I suggest that the term investment is better suited than consumption.
Research Interests: Kinship (Anthropology), Migration, Anthropology of Gender, Ethical Consumption, Consumption Studies, and 12 moreGender, Work and Labour, Anthropology of Kinship, Transnational migration, Anthropology Of Consumption, Family (Sociology), Consumption and Material Culture, Remittances, Biography of Objects, Domestic Labour, Migration, Remittances and Development, and Consumption Culture
Academic and ley debates about food variously articulate the ways in which contemporary food provisioning systems are inherently problematic and unstable. Drawing evidence from the seeming prevalence of adulteration scandals, moral panics... more
Academic and ley debates about food variously articulate the ways in which contemporary food provisioning systems are inherently problematic and unstable. Drawing evidence from the seeming prevalence of adulteration scandals, moral panics and other food crises, these debates reproduce a set of entangled moral discourses about food, its consumption and production. Within these discourses, ideological lines are drawn, and particular types of consumers (typically poor and working class), particular types of producers (those that produce for the agri-industrial food complex) and particular types of retailers (typically ‘budget’ and ‘corporate’ supermarkets) are vilified as the loci of all that is supposedly wrong with food. Missing however, is a more nuanced social and cultural reading that unpacks these discourses and analyses failings within food through the multiple lenses such as class, social-deprivation, and their multi-scaler geographical implications. Using the recent horsemeat scandals that dominated headlines in Spring 2013, the purpose of this commentary is to unpack and disentangle these discourses of food. We argue that ‘what is wrong with food’ is less related to its systems of provision, but rather more the ways its various agents are discursively cast and subsequently moralized as perpetrators of a globalised and industrial food system
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Research Interests: Sociology of Food and Eating, Actor Network Theory, Food Systems, Food Security and Insecurity, Anthropology of the Body, and 11 moreAnthropology of Food, Local food, Food History, Food, Gender, Culture, The Body, Food and Nutrition, Food Production, Sociology of the Body, Phenomenology of the body, Agriculture and Food Studies, and Food Studies
Research Interests: Human Geography, Food Safety, Transnationalism, Border Studies, Trust, and 13 moreSociology of Food and Eating, Anthropology of the Body, Anthropology of Food, Migration, Sociology of Risk, Local food, Risk and Vulnerability, Sociology of the Body, Migration Studies, Transnational migration, Migration (Anthropology), Food Studies, and Cultural and Social Anthropology
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A public engagment output from the AHRC funded project 'Consuming Authenticity'