gastronomy
I define gastronomy variously, starting with the word's etymological roots and early history, and moving through the many implications of a more systemic or cosmological interpretation. I view gastronomy not as a field or a subject, but an approach to food, or a way of describing food-system dynamics—the foodish equivalent of actor-network theory. This kind of lens reveals the inherent complexity of our foodways and the interconnections between them, and may help to de-silo some of the ways in which food is currently practiced.
From linguistics to anthropology to cultural studies to science and technology studies, performativity is a notion that I believe has great relevance for food. A product, a dish, a meal are all more than just food-objects: they are temporal-spatial manifestations in the here and now that represent a snapshot of some vastly extended assemblage of many different actants—people, plants, and animals, but also processes and discourses, economic patterns and transportation routes. Seeing what has been obscured by our food structures is what the performative interpretation can bring.
» Displace (Mediations of Sensation)
» The Chopping Block Lounge
Emerging from the idea of performance, a view of both inter- and intra- behaviours between food and people poses the question: Do we make food, or does food make us? If the answer is 'both' then it becomes necessary to rupture the subject-object relationship we've developed with our vittles, and act with a more fluid, co-constitutive awareness.
cocktails and identity
Molotov, shrimp, drug, virgin, weiners. People. Québec. A mixture that is greater than the sum of its parts, balanced, linked to classical tastes, but also subject to highly personal interpretations. Bibito ergo sum?
Matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed, they simply change state. When examining the food 'chain,' I believe that viewing the transformations through which food passes is more informative that discussing such dualities as production and consumption. An ecologies approach to food helps see when and whether boundaries between these states are useful or relevant, and to what extent we need to view food as a continual flow of energy-matter transformations.