EATING INTO THE GLOBAL
There is perhaps no area where the global inserts itself more into the intimate lives of people than in the realms of food production and consumption. While the worldwide circulation of food and people has been speeded up in a spectacular fashion through global technology and logistics, food has long traveled and connected very different peoples and lands. Whether it be in the Roman Empire, which circulated different crops and foodstuffs, or in the spice trade that brought Asia, India, and Europe into close contact, or the slave routes of sugar and other alimentary commodities, foodways have long been a privileged way for the proximities of place and taste to intertwine. As the economic historian Harold Innis argued in the 1920s and 1930s, staples such as fish were integral to the development of the economic world as we know it. Innis’s classic thesis on the cod fisheries of the Canadian Maritimes demonstrated the far-reaching effects of one staples economy.1 The Grand Banks of Newfoundland became a battleground between the Old World powers: “Cod from Newfoundland was the lever by which she [England] wrested her share of the riches of the New World from Spain.”2 In Innis’s terms, food staples caused empires to rise and fall as their routes rearranged the political and economic face of the world.
The role of food has continued to be the site through which global politics are played out in local ways. The field of food, understood in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense as a field of forces and a field of struggles can be seen as a minefield, which pits gender, globalization, and class privilege.3 In the past thirty years, enhanced technology and political intervention, especially in the United States, have resulted in amazingly cheap and plentiful food for the West. Of course, this has produced ecological catastrophes around the globe as the turn to monocrops and industrialized agriculture continues to destroy the world’s cultural and environmental biodiversity. And the Westernization of diets around the world has arguably homogenized tastes and produced a putatively global epidemic of obesity, with effects felt particularly by the poor and often by women.4
Conversely “feel-good” food politics have increased in many sections of the developed world, with the rise of farmers’ markets and other “alternative” food outlets in most urban Western regions. This plays out in public debates and at times in polemics about the “food miles” and carbon footprints of what we eat. As I’ve argued elsewhere, this has a tendency to become a fetishization of the local, which can lead to a rather parochial politics of food.5 For instance, the deeply intertwined economies and livelihoods of small farmers in developing nations often depend on the supply chains of specialty foodstuffs for the West. Their produce is now being condemned because of a simplistic view of “food miles.” This means that, for instance, Kenyan farmers of organic baby green beans are being threatened by supposedly progressive organizations such as the U.K.’s Soil Association, which may take away the prized organic sticker solely on the basis of the carbon costs of transport. Little does it matter that the average carbon footprint of someone in Kenya or elsewhere in the developing world is minuscule compared to that of the average Briton. This is what Michael Winter refers to as a “defensive localism,” which he sees as emerging from a mixture of “parochialism and nationalism.”6 Class, gender, and ethnic privileges and distinctions are often overlooked in this putative progressive food politics. One of the original founders of the Italian Slow Food movement, Fabio Parasecoli, warns that the place of women in slow food is worrisome: “In a world doomed by pollution, biological homogenization and globalization, women are transformed into the defenders of the holy environment that constitutes the family.” Their role would be to stay at home and protect it against the evil forces that haunt our present.7
Julie Guthman’s critique of the neoliberal force of such politics has incisively revealed the moralistic tone and the ethnicity- and class-blindness of many in the “alternative” food circles.8 Writing about the rise of the organic movement in northern California, which is most successful in terms of organic salad mix or what the growers call “yuppie chow,” Guthman questions the motivation of “those whose moral sensibilities increasingly privileged environmental concerns over social ones.”9 The key thrust of her critique concerns the ways in which the privileged have taken on the congratulatory mantle of self-reflexivity in eating at the expense of those others who are said to lack the capacity to know that local, organic, slow food tastes better. With her colleague Melanie Dupuis, Guthman performs a magisterial critique of the politics of fat that links the questions of availability and access to “better food” though the vectors of gender and class that so overdetermine food politics now.10 Likewise, Lauren Berlant’s recent work on the management of obesity skewers the “cruel optimism” where ‘living increasingly becomes the scene of the administration, discipline, and recalibration of what constitutes health’ for the vast majority of ordinary people.11 What Berlant calls “slow death” is fed by “particular modes of sweetness and fat [that] are metabolized with particular inefficiency and toxic effect by the human body, and, since they produce more fat storage and cravings for more both in terms of mouthfeel and in terms of insulin instability, the phrase supply and demand could easily be replaced with supply and need.”12
The importance of such feminist critiques is undeniable, especially given the ways in which food consumption and production adversely affect women and the poor. Their aim is understandably to scrutinize the subjectivities of women under circumstances not of their own making. Given the vastness and the intricacy of the pressures faced by so many, that other mainstay of feminist argument—agency—becomes ever harder to locate. In the end many analyses return to previous politics, and as Guthman reminds us, the question of food is still very much an institutional and structural problem exacerbated to an impossibly high degree by the global flow of the supply chain, which will not be solved by looking the farmer in the eye at your local market.13 In Berlant’s argument, agency moves sideways and is fleetingly found in moments of “episodic refreshment, for example, in sex, or in spacing out, or in food that is not for thought.”14 Obviously, this is not a particularly satisfying way to live, and as a political response her conclusion comes close to some previous feminist arguments, which privileged feint and irony as feminist and feminine modes of resistance.
Like many feminists, much of my own work has been on questions of subjectivity and was prompted by Adrienne Rich’s call to “begin… with the geography closest-in.”15 I responded to Rich’s politics of location and the politics of positionality with detailed descriptions of my body. That this body, my body, had a tangential relationship with eating led me into analyses of anorexia and control (“The Anorexic Body,” 1987) and then away from food and into sex (Outside Belongings, 1996) and then back to food and sex (Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities, 2000). Working through a Foucauldian and then a Deleuzian frame, I sought to examine subjectivity obliquely through eating.
However, in this chapter I want to go beyond my previous work, and also beyond a prevalent feminist focus on questions of human sovereignty and agency under the regime of neoliberalism. With Gerry Pratt and Victoria Rosner, I want to go “beyond the usual register of map-reading” (at which I am atrocious) to try to convey the sounds, smells, and tastes of the intimate.16 Drawing on fieldwork I want to consider how micro and very intimate practices intersect with the macro forces of supply chains and foodways—in many ways similar to what Ian Cook calls the “geographies of food: following.”17
The argument I construct of necessity takes me away from feminist debates about representation. With many notable exceptions, much feminist critique, especially in cultural studies, has been mainly cultural in nature. While the politics of representation, especially in terms of the media, has of course advanced an important intervention, this has recently been challenged by the call to ‘re-materialize” social science research. In geography, as Sarah Whatmore and many others have argued, the very matters of life and the planet need to be rethought.18 Whatmore argues that “cultural geographers have found their way (back) to the material in very different ways that variously resonate with… the most enduring of geographical concerns—the vital connections between the geo (earth) and the bio (life).”19 In turn, Ben Anderson and John Wiley are quick to point out that they “reject outright the rhetoric of rematerialising or ‘returning’ as often erroneously and reductively equating materiality with ‘ground,’ with ‘reality,’ and with the ‘social.’”20 While I take heed of the many feminist calls from science and technology studies to go beyond culture, it is important to note that over decades different strands of feminist research have moved in and out of the material. As this collection attests, the history of thinking and figuring the materialities of the intimate has been a feature of feminist research in many different areas for a very long time.
There are, however, tensions emerging about how to conduct feminist studies when the object of analysis does not overtly concern either women or gender as central categories of concern. To put it bluntly, can there be feminism without women? This is, of course, the title of Tania Modleski’s 1991 book, which summed up a certain stream of critique in the 1980s and 1990s.21 In those fraught days the battle lines primarily separated “women” from “gender,” with the accompanying division of certain articulations of “theory” (variously assorted under large and sometimes erroneous categories of “poststructuralism,” “postmodernism,” and “postfeminism”) against “women’s studies.” For those younger than me, it may seem hard to believe that so many bloody words were waged in fights that often pitted women against women. For instance, in Modleski’s critique of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (1984; a study of women readers that used ethnographic reader-response methods that at the time were groundbreaking in literary studies), it doesn’t matter that the object of analysis was clearly women; the method itself was said to be masculinist. As Kate Kramer argued in her otherwise favorable review, Modleski’s point was that ethnography is inherently flawed as a feminist tool because of “its disdain for any considerations of the unconscious of the subjects it seeks to describe.”22
The question of how to conduct research on the materialities of the human and nonhuman may seem of a different order than the critiques about the true object of feminist concern, but issues remain in terms of a proper reckoning of a feminist project focused elsewhere than on gender or women. Modleski’s attack on ethnography merits a pause, and a correction. I’ve argued elsewhere that researching the affective registers takes a toll on one’s body and sense of self.23 One can swallow others’ emotions, breathing in and taking on together emotional registers. Taking from Georges Devereux, we begin to understand how profound this may be. In the 1960s Devereux founded an area of research called ethno-psychiatry. One of his most influential books is entitled From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967). Having first studied physics under the tutelage of Marie Curie, he trained as a psychoanalyst after completing a PhD in anthropology. His work remains important in the clinical treatment of mental disorders in non-Western countries and has also been influential in Gilbert Herdt and Robert Stoller’s anthropological work on sexuality.24
Devereux’s ideas on how methods within social science both protect and promote anxiety in the researcher are central to my ideas here. He argues that the singularity of the social sciences is that they deal with affective material: “the analysis of man’s conception of himself.” Of the three great revolutions—Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud—he remarks that, “It was easier to be objective about the heavenly bodies than about man as an organism, and the latter easier than objectivity about man’s personality and behavior.”25 The trouble and, conversely, the great potential of the sciences of man (in particular, anthropology, sociology, and some branches of psychology) lies in “the difficulty in clearly distinguishing materials that come from outside (the subject, the field) and from inside (his or her own emotional reactions). The researcher has to struggle with these emotional reactions and anxieties.… The researcher is, in one way or another, the subject and object of the knowledge that he/she elaborates.”26
This framing of ethnographic research more than responds to Modleski’s critique that ethnography is a disembodied exercise in accounting for external realities. Indeed the inter- and intrasubjective encounters within ethnographic research are continually fraught with questions prompted with morphing boundaries. As I’ve written elsewhere, the problem is not that emotions are absent in the research process; it is that we need ways of being more precise about which emotions and which effects are at play, and for whom.27 The stakes on these questions are ramped up when the focus is on the materiality of encounters that are in themselves often seemingly mundane.
The research that fuels this chapter builds on ways of thinking intimacy and globalization in a different voice, and is part of a larger project on how the relationships between taste (consumption) and place (production) are being rearranged in the globalized food system.28 Here I want to explore taste in its various guises, in a conscious move away from the dominant sociological framing of taste as first and foremost, if not always, about social distinction. As with What-more’s approach, I will employ a “self-conscious act of storying,” what she calls “an envoy of the recuperation of ‘materiality’”29 or what I elsewhere call a rhizoethology of bodies.30 This casts research as a wending through ethnographic observation and the stories told by different individuals. My concern here is what I am calling the interests of taste and place. Taking “interests” as both economic and social, and as also driven by curiosity, the etymology of “interest” refers us to the “inter-esse,” and the materiality of the different forms of being in between. Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian feminist philosopher of science, uses the etymology of interest to talk “of bearing witness to the many aspects of entangled slow stories.”31 There are many interesting slow stories about the place of taste and the tastes of places. Telling them, listening to them, and passing them on are part of the process whereby we relearn to be interested in the material connections of taste and place. This is for me one aspect of a crucial ethics of eating, of taste and place.
Taste is, of course, so very intimate. Here I want to focus on how taste and tasting as material practices can also come to form communities: local places that are entangled in the global. I move from one particular organism, oysters, and follow the network they form. I chose oysters because at a micro level they are such a unique and intimate taste. Now seen as a luxury, and therefore associated with social distinctions of elitism, they have had a long history of being poor people’s food. At a macro level, studying the farming of the Pacific Crassostrea gigas reveals the connections between community, economy, and a sense of locality within the global. The local that emerges out of these connections is not to be valorized for its own sake. It is as mundane as an oyster lying in its bed before it meets its fate to be savored and praised as a branded “Loch Fyne” oyster in swanky restaurant. Simply put, oysters are good to think with, and they make me think differently about mundane and grounded natures of taste attachments.
LOOKING AN OYSTER IN THE MOUTH
Oysters have been eaten since the beginning of mankind’s time, or at least by those living by the sea. In Australia, oyster middens attest to Aboriginal appetites and good taste over tens of thousands of years. The poor and kings alike have partaken of their pleasures. In a visceral way, oysters divide people not so much into social classes—although the costs may divide ocean-dwellers from the landlocked—but into more primordial clusters. For instance, in her book Consider the Oyster (collected in The Art of Eating), M.F.K. Fisher describes how human oyster-eaters fall into three groups: “Those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other.”32
In general, I’d say that a taste for oysters polarizes humanity into two camps: for and against. I am firmly in the former and like them all ways, especially raw. There is the taste, of course—that briny, nectar, and zinky combination like no other. Then there is the texture—plump or fine and slightly gritty, or milky and unctuously smooth. But mainly it’s the sensation, a thrill that passes through membranes reaching to the tips of my toes. There is something so unworldly and exciting about the feeling of live flesh on flesh, as oyster and human combine.
The world of food writing has become democratized through online forums, and I like the ways in which this opens up descriptions and ideas about how things taste. For instance, listen to this food blogger: “Eating raw oysters is a uniquely invigorating experience; a bit like battery-licking for grown-ups. It seems that we can taste the elements they contain: zinc, calcium, copper, iodine, magnesium. And no other food conjures up a physical feature of the Earth as strongly as a bracing, salty, tangy oyster: the essence of the sea in edible form.”33
Like this writer I don’t discriminate in my love of oysters. I have eaten Pacifies in the Pacific Northwest of North America, Sydney Rocks in the Rocks in Sydney, Belon in Paris, oysters from Bouzigues grown in the brackish water of the Thau, fine Irish ones in a Dublin pub, and of course the splendid Coffin Bay oysters harvested in the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia, home to some of the world’s most isolated and pristine waters.
Years ago, conducting research on Scottish regionality, my gal and I stumbled upon Rogano’s Oyster Bar in Glasgow, a celebrated institution. We sat in a thin sun among the cheerful Glaswegian crowd and feasted on oysters, swearing they were the best ever. “Where are they from?” we asked, ordering more. The Scottish lass answered without a hesitation. “Loch Fyne, they’re the best.”
So began our quest to find Loch Fyne, to which I’ll return. But first let’s consider the sheer strangeness of the oyster. James I, in the seventeenth century, is reported to have said that “he was a bold man who first swallowed an oyster.”34 The indeterminacy of these bivalves extends to their sex, which changes seemingly at whim. They start off as larvae and then evolve as spats. In her chapter “Love and Death Among the Molluscs,” M.F.K. Fisher describes how:
Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine. If he is a she, her energies are equally feminine, so that in a single summer, if all goes well, and the temperature of the water is somewhere around or above seventy degrees, she may spawn several hundred million eggs, fifteen to one hundred million at a time, with commendable pride.35
The “true” or eating oysters are from the Ostreidae family, whereas the pearling oysters belong to the Pinctada genus. The two are not very closely related, so the chances of finding a pearl in your dozen au naturel are slim. Oysters breathe like fish, with gills. They also have a mantle lined with blood vessels (colorless blood); through which they take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. It’s a little disconcerting to learn that they have a heart, and indeed it is a three-chambered affair. They have two kidneys, which act to purify the blood of waste products. They are part of what are called keystone species, which means that they benefit their ecosystems in a disproportionate ratio to their size and abundance. For a relatively small entity they do a lot of good. One oyster can filter up to five liters of water an hour. Rowan Jacobsen calls them “ecosystem engineers” that enable a “flourishing web of life.”36
TASTE POSITIONS
Much of cultural theory laments the loss of the authenticity of taste and place. For instance, Albert Borgmann, an American philosopher, deplores the practices of consumption, which “displace things that have a life and a dignity of their own.”37 I take these terms literally: to think about how our tastes are displaced in our modern food system. My project takes a more productive turn, and I want to reframe how we understand consumption and production. Given half a chance, eating reminds us of the different ways we are connected: economically, globally, communally, and emotionally. As Jacobsen says of oysters, “the comparison for oysters is not a taste or another food but always a place… the sea-coast.”38 Oysters give us a taste of “somewhereness.”39 Taste and tastes are forms of attachments: to the strangers who grow or produce food, to friendships, which are made and remade in commensality and sharing, to the soil and water, the factories, ships, oyster leases and abattoirs. Taste ties us to history just as it does into various economic relationships.
For instance, you can’t understand the flourishing seafood industry in the Eyre Penisula, an isolated and rugged coast in South Australia that faces Antarctica, without understanding the connections forged by history, migration, and the clusters of settlement that form and reform around water, harbors, and land. The first occupants of the Eyre were the Nanuo Aboriginal mobs who would move between the sea and the land depending on the time of year. The early white settlers were “peasant fishermen” from Ireland, fishermen and farmers, who according to a retired fisherman I talked to, had an ethos of farming the sea rather than strip-mining it. This man deplored current practices of overcrowding the oyster leases, which leaves nitrates in the sea floor.40 He told me how the present-day oyster industry stands on a history of the disastrous effects of dredging, which killed off the native oysters. He recounted other disappearances, such as that of the Chinese who worked the land and the water, and left traces of their culture on the Anglo-Celt population. Standing in the bar he pointed at a younger fisherman who wore the “lucky 8”—the coiled snake conferring luck within Chinese culture.
I want to frame taste as “those things that hold us together,” to quote the French sociologist Antoine Hennion. “Taste,” he says, “is what links us, constrains us, holds us and what we love, what binds us, that of which we are a part.”41 “Taste is a problematic modality of attachment to the world.”42 This description begins to capture the way taste acts as a connector between history, place, things, and people. It contrasts with dominant sociological understandings of taste, which have tended to be rather utilitarian in their considerations of what taste does in society. Taste is often considered a fundamental marker of one’s position in society, which in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms serves to reproduce inequalities.43 Taste, for Bourdieu, is the mechanism through which hierarchies are affirmed: “taste classifies the classifier.” While, of course, Bourdieu’s theoretical points about tastes as the exercise of judgment was based on his copious questionnaire data, which queried people about their eating activities as well as other leisure practices, in his terms taste became reified as social casting and moved away from the sensory realm of tasting. The frame of class remains crucial, but it is important to remember that the ability to taste is not the province of the few (albeit the leisure and the money to let your tastes roam widely is increasingly seen as the domain of the rich). In their insightful article on taste and feminism, Alison and Jessica Hayes-Conroy examine the intersection of the labeled body, which is, as they say, affected by the labeling but “such affecting occurs in the visceral realm—the realm in which the whole molecular ensemble of the minded body feels the world, the realm from which life processes and events precipitate and hence in which political activation materially unfolds (or fails to).”44
Their argument joins those of other feminists such as Bev Skeggs45 and Lisa Adkins and others46 who have worked hard to render the place of gender more central to a Bourdieusian framework. But to only focus on those bilateral operations of taste-connections and connotation misses some of the wider mysteries that taste discloses. Perhaps ironically, taste in Bourdieu’s sense, and in those of many others who take from him, is treated as a property, which some own and use over others. Taste here veers off into the abstract. Which tastes? What sensations? If we think about taste as different types of attachment, we can begin to move beyond focusing just on humans and instead consider the different connections of human, nonhuman, technology, history, and culture. As Elizabeth Silva argues, instead of obsessing on the homologies set up in consumption, we might turn to the forms of appropriation and their effects, in which individuals (and most particularly women) operate as “conscious agents of change in the sphere of intimacy.”47 To think about how the world is rearranged through the material appropriation of new tastes, and the discovery of tasting anew, opens the doors to radically different visions of what intimacy means to whom or what. What I particularly like about this approach is that it foregrounds the mattering of taste. As Hennion writes: “Taste is not an attribute, it is not a property (of a thing or of a person), it is an activity. You have to do something in order to listen to music, drink a wine, appreciate an object. Tastes are not given or determined, and their objects are not either.”48
Taste is something you have to do. Hennion says that tasting is a “perplexed” activity, which is to say it makes you “on the lookout for what it is doing to you, or what it is doing to others. You have to lend attention when you taste, if you are to fathom the taste. One ‘observes oneself tasting.’”49
The body that tastes is also a body in training. It’s clear that through learning to taste people also acquire a different sense of their bodies and of the world, as well as of the different ways of describing how they fit within a complex web of things and tastes. In other words, through taste our bodies learn to be affected, and to reflect upon how and what affects us. Bruno Latour writes that learning to be affected and “training the nose” means “acquiring a body [in] a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world.”50 In a related study of professional tasters, Cécile Méadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa demonstrate that “the body is the main mediator between product and taster.… The production of a sensitive body is the basic operation in the process [of tasting].”51 As the body becomes a sensitized medium, relations between different parts of the body vibrate differently in tandem with different aspects of the thing being tasted. This activity remakes the world, makes up new worlds. Latour talks about how odor training changes the relationship between words and their objects. To talk about tasting oysters as battery-licking, as that blogger does, is to think differently about how body parts act and react to other non-human bodies.
It’s a lovely idea that taste carries worlds. But in practical terms, how does one go about researching such a seemingly ephemeral notion? As you can see, taste covers so much—from the cultural and the economic to the personal and the collective. My approach is to bring together an interdisciplinary range of ideas and theories and then to turn downward toward local case studies—to use the theories to catch meanings and then to land them in local studies. At this level I proceed with a mixture of methods and construct case studies from different documents as well as interviews and ethnographic observation. But as I flagged at the outset of this chapter, the encounters are deeply embodied—and in fact the ethnographer’s body becomes part of the processes of attunement, whereby bodies are brought into dialogic relationships. This type of research requires methodological sensitivity to the different forms of tacit knowledge and enskilment—for instance, the ways in which fishermen know fish,52 the embedded knowledge of fishing communities,53 and the expertise of ecologists and fisheries managements.54 This is what Harbers, Mol, and Stollmeyer call “involved description: ethnographic work that looks for contrasts, sets up differences, and seeks for what one practice might learn from another.”55
Let us now return to the story of Loch Fyne, a small but instructive knotting together of people’s lives, livelihoods, oysters, and tastes past and present. The Loch Fyne Oyster Company lies at the top of the loch in the little village of Cairndow in the west of Scotland, just beyond the stop called “Rest and be thankful.” The hand of the Highland Clearances is everywhere—from the limited infrastructure and sparse population to the beautiful wilderness that is a testament to the lack of people, modernity, industry, and money. Following the failed Jacobite rising in 1745, the clans began to disintegrate, as did the system of obligations and responsibilities that had long held Gaelic Scotland together. The vast estates began to be run by absentee landlords, or rather by their factors while their masters “lorded” it around London. Sheep were introduced because of the high price of wool. The English-bred landlords also brought in workers from the south and rendered the small tenants redundant. For a time the locals eked out a living by harvesting kelp, but as the rule of the landlords and their factors became ever more draconian, they were forced to emigrate in poor circumstances to faraway places: to the “pink bits” that were the British Commonwealth. It’s estimated that between 150,000 and 250,000 were evicted because they got in the way of the sheep.
It is not an overstatement to say that Highlanders still live the legacy of that time. The Highlands are a stark example of the often vexed interrelations of people, animals, and environment: it’s a habitus, if you like, but one which includes the elements, weather, climate, a history of empty stomachs, and fear and respect for the sea and for nature’s reproductions. There is always a thin but visceral layer of remembrance: that some humans, in their greed, placed sheep or cattle higher, on a strange hierarchy, than other humans. And of course some of those same people came to Australia and reenacted another hierarchy over the Aboriginal inhabitants, placing them on par with the flora and fauna of this bewildering new land.
Lack of employment and the sea is key to the story of the Loch Fyne Oyster Company, as is an enduring sense of responsibility to community. This is where Johnny Noble enters the picture. Noble was the son of an industrialist, Sir Andrew, who had made the family fortune in armaments and warship works in Newcastle. When his father died Johnny inherited the estate and was none too pleased to find that his father had heavily mortgaged the place. From all accounts Johnny was a good man, and he couldn’t stand to see the people who worked the estate for generations chucked out.56 Pondering what to do, he walked his seemingly bankrupt lands down to the loch. There he fell into conversation with Andrew Lane, a marine biologist and fish farmer. They hatched a plan to farm oysters. They bought the Pacific oyster spats because Pacifics grow faster. In 1980 they put a table outside on the road next to the Loch and started selling oysters and kippers. Lord knows how, but the enterprise took off. When they started farming oysters, the average consumption of oysters in the entire United Kingdom was 5,000 a year. Now, as the largest supplier in the country, they sell the majority of the 30,000 dozen eaten each year. Noble and Lane were smart, and thanks to Johnny’s flair and connections and Andrew’s careful tending of the stock, they were soon supplying all the top restaurants in the country, as well as far-flung parts of the former Empire, such as Hong Kong and Singapore.57
Tragedy struck Loch Fyne when Johnny died in 2002 at the early age of sixty-five. He had done what he set out to do, and had provided for the local people he cared about. He also ensured that money went back into the community for the “relief of poverty, the advancement of education and the protection of the environment particularly within Scotland and the area around the head of Loch Fyne.”58 With the death of Johnny the future looked grim. Then another player entered the picture. Baxi Partnerships is a trust set up to help employees buy their company. David Erdal, the chairman at the time, helped the employees set up a deal whereby they could buy Loch Fyne Oysters with the help of the Royal Bank of Scotland. The deal worked, and the employee/owners have since expanded the business further. It’s a lovely story of one community growing and trading in on a globalized taste for oysters that has enabled the community to grow, connecting past with present and future. For instance, the manager of the oyster bar is Christine MacCallum, who is the wife of the shepherd on the Ardkinglas estate, who is himself the son and grandson of shepherds before him. In her words you hear the defiance and pride: “We had been subjected to ridicule for many years as the idea of growing oysters in Loch Fyne was mad and the idea of having an oyster bar anywhere outside of London was, too.”59
ECONOMIES OF TASTE ATTACHMENTS
On one level, taste opens new worlds, and by lending ourselves to taste in its profundity we experience the very thingness of what we are eating, drinking, tasting. But how can we reconcile the present-day system of supply and demand, of consumers and producers, tightly regulated by price and profit, with these ideas? Studies on the production side of eating and drinking tend to frame small producers, consumers, and suppliers as passive in the face of big retail. Dominant theories of economics tend to be unilateral in their vision (although as I discuss later, this is being disrupted by the important intervention of J.-K. Gibson-Graham). Consumers are to be manipulated; conversely, they are attributed a power quite disproportionate to most circumstances. The convoluted relationship between consumers and the economy is much more complex: desires, structures, and financial clout all complicate any causal explanation of how people and economies are connected. Within this web there are further twists in the interrelationships of humans and nonhumans, technology and nature.
The ideas of Michel Callon, a sociologist of economics, offer an interesting take on how to think about the economy as sets of entanglements. Callon, along with Latour, works at the Ecole des Mines in Paris where actor-network theory was originally developed. Originating in the anthropology of science and technology, they study networks or assemblages of things—human, technical, non-human—and how they interrelate. For instance, in a study of the scallop industry he describes “a network of relationships in which social and natural entities mutually control who they are and what they want.”60
What I like about this approach is that it directs attention to “small events, little gaps, local innovations, limited reconfigurations.”61 Against the passivity that lurks in descriptions of both consumers and suppliers, this perspective offers agency and action. It’s a special take on action and agency akin to things exerting pressure on each other in particular ways rather than some all-conquering notion of control and power. Nature, technology, and humans make markets as entanglements in which we humans are but one factor.
So with these ideas in mind, I want to consider how taste economies might shed new light on the intimate entanglements of people, places, and markets. I’ll start by considering once more the oyster. Oysters obviously like Loch Fyne. While not the native variety, the hardy Pacific gigas took to the low-saline waters, where the ocean mix has lost some of its brininess. The Scottish lochs are ancient fingers pushing into the land, which makes the seawater change as it enters into the circulation system of the loch. While the weather is often less than kind to humans, to an oyster it’s a fine place to be an oyster. Scientists have recently discovered that oysters are gregarious. They like to put down their feet where other oysters hang out. However, adult oysters are cannibals who, with the starfish and weird entities that burrow into their shells, pose the greatest threat to young oysters. So wee larvae, cognizant (on some level) of the danger posed by their grown-ups, nonetheless prefer to be together. You can hear the excitement of the scientists as they describe how: “Oyster larvae make a life or death decision when they get their one chance to select where to attach themselves to the bottom. Our research shows that oyster larvae are willing to risk predation by adult oysters to cash in on the benefits accrued by spending the remainder of their lives among a large number of their species.”62
Oyster lovers, scientists or not, are such that our interest in the bivalve can veer toward anthropomorphism. However, I like to think of this interest as attachment. This sense of attachment goes far beyond the feeling one might have toward an inanimate commodity. And this is not just because they are animate, and because they animate our appetites and bodies. It is because—and this is especially true of the Loch Fyne story—the ties between consumers, suppliers, environment, history, and the bivalve are so close. This is an artisanal sea ecology that, as Tim Ingold argues, arises from “an active and mutually constitutive engagement between organisms and their environments, and in no way precede[s] that engagement.”63 Or in Gisli Palsson’s wonderful ethnography about enskilment at sea, humans and the ocean become attuned in symbiotic ways.64
One way to think of this is to turn the economic term of externalities on its head. In traditional economic theory, externalities are all those costs that producers do not have to—and therefore do not—include in their costings. Callon explains: “Economists invented the notion of externality to denote all the connections, relations and effects which agents do not take into account in their calculations when entering into a market transaction. If, for example, a chemicals plant pollutes the river into which it pumps its toxic products, it produces a negative externality.”65
Callon goes on to describe positive externalities as well, but he goes well beyond the binary implied by good and bad externalities to his interest in the ways in which there are always overflows—of information, interest, money, etc.—that then foreground or perform what he calls hybrid forums where actors and their interests are in constant fluctuation. This is a variation on what Latour calls “attunement.”66 As Anderson and Wylie explain, “An attunement [is] how heterogeneous materialities actuate or emerge from within the assembling of multiple, differential, relations and how the properties and/or capacities of materialities thereafter become effects of that assembling.”67
In the case of Loch Fyne Oysters, there are numerous externalities at play, which make us think differently about the assemblages formed in the “in between” of taste and place. As I’ve said, the oyster itself seems to like the loch. Part of the money provided by the sale of oysters is versed into the Loch Fyne Trust to care for the loch. This then aids the oyster to do its own work of cleansing—as we saw earlier, it is a keystone species, and if allowed to, it does a lot of good. A symbiotic relationship begins. Probably unknown to the oyster, humans too have had a long interconnected relationship with the environment oysters call their home. Gathering kelp, harvesting the peat saturated with seawater, gathering mollusks, and fishing have been a way of life interrupted only when the greed of some men turned attention away from the sea and onto the land to raise sheep. Through the Loch Fyne Trust, groups like Here We Are have been set up as a resource that they call an interface between the locals and the incomers, the young and the old. As Here We Are says on its Web site, the objective is “to explain how a rural community, while loyal to its roots, makes its way in the modern world. Its subject matter is people in a place.”68
History is certainly an externality that may be only tangentially associated with the oyster as a commodity. But the fact remains that it changes the relationship of people to the oyster, morphing it into a form of attachment rather than a pure economic exchange. If we then turn to the story of the laird looking to care for his community, we enter into the scene that economists might more readily recognize as “economic.” But while Johnny Noble made money from his enterprises, the obituaries and stories about him portray a man not particularly interested in furthering an individual economic gain. He was, of course, motivated by interest, but self-interest or altruism don’t quite capture the ways in which his business spread over land, sea, oysters, fish, people, and history.
While we could call this outlook feudal, it is more correctly a profound sense of responsibility, which can be seen as a positive externality—a radically deep attunement of bodies and histories. The multiple forms of attachment within the community, which come to operate as a kind of ecosystem, impart a form of assurance. That assurance was traded upon, in the case of the Loch Fyne oyster enterprise, when Johnny Noble died and the possibility was offered that the employees could own their own company. In sociological terms, you could call it the conversion of cultural capital into economic capital. While many might contemplate how good it would be to have a stake in their own company, few succeed. As David Erdal, the man who brokered the deal, explains, “Employee ownership gives people more satisfying working lives than they ever thought possible.”69 The power to think beyond “what they ever thought possible” can be included in the long list of positive externalities associated with Loch Fyne Oysters.
Instilling a taste for oysters in this case builds on the interests, or in the etymological sense, the inter-esse, of beings and being in the “in between” of place and taste. I want to briefly turn to another example of how oysters may grow communities. Cowell is a small town on the other side of the Spencer Gulf, and down from Whyalla, on the Eyre Peninsula on the wild side of the state of South Australia. This is mining country, which grew out of copper explorations in the 1850s. Mining communities are now sutured into global multinationals—Whyalla is a one-industry town dependent on One Steel, previously a division of BHP. Iron ore is mined around the Eyre, and you can see the tops of mountains that have been lopped off. The red dust covers everything. It mars the beauty of the outback and the sea, but it was iron ore and the sales to the Chinese that protected Australia from the full extent of the global economic meltdown.
When the ferry is running, Cowell is the first stop on the Eyre Peninsula across from Walleroo. However, the traffic for years has been generally the other way around as people leave toward the east. As with so many small communities built on farming, the town was losing its young people to larger towns or to the mines inland. In 1991 the local oyster growers approached the Cowell Area School with a plan to foster skilled workers in the oyster farming business—to urgently try to interest young people in oysters as a way of stopping the out-migration and to further the future of the local oyster business. They donated two hectares of oyster leases in Franklin Harbour, a secluded bay rich in sea grass and algae. For a while the aquaculture course worked beautifully and served as a beacon to rural schools in places as far afield as Hawaii and Idaho. However, by the beginning of 2009 it was in pieces, with DECS (Department of Education and Child Services, South Australia) threatening to close it down.
It seems that oysters and the taste attachments they could forge had become the property of a few. According to the new principal70 it had become a “hobby” and no longer was seen as a public and community investment. Some of the negative externalities they faced included increased competition from other schools turning to aquaculture; paradoxically, the huge rise in oyster farming on the Peninsula may have served to close down rather than open up opportunities. Fifteen years ago there were very few oyster farms, and now there are more than 400. The industry has become highly professionalized and water is tested several times a day to ensure quality. This makes sense when oyster producers such as Pristine Oysters, located in Coffin Bay, ship two tons of oysters a week to Dubai, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
When I went to visit the school in 2010 there were signs of new life. A banner outside the school proudly proclaimed their revitalized aquaculture program and thanked their sponsors, including Turner Aquaculture and BST (oyster farming equipment specialists, who coincidentally sell to Loch Fyne Oysters). Jan Potter, the incredibly hardworking principal, led me around the back of the school and introduced me to Mark, an enthusiastic young man who had returned to the school, where he did his aquaculture training, after having toured the world—including a stint working at Loch Fyne. They showed me a fascinating array of tanks, which teachers, parents, pupils, and other volunteers had painstakingly scrubbed and fixed. Someone had come up with the idea to put windows lower down in the large oyster tanks so that the “littlies” could see what was happening with the oysters. Every school year (or grade) has its own projects—from growing the local marine habitat and farming sharks and barramundi to growing the spats. Alongside the adults, they have a hand in the maintenance of the equipment and the leases. And of course there is the hard work oftending to the oysters, as well as grading and cleaning them.
In terms of what we might call the positive externalities of this business, what seems to be emerging is an assemblage of local growers, such as Turner Aqua, as well as a network that connects with Tasmania, where two growers donate spats. The network also connects the schools with buyers in Japan, who love buying oysters harvested by schoolchildren. Crucially, the oyster scheme is now treated as a business and not a hobby. It has become, in Latour’s terms, an attunement of community, oysters, and environment. Jan Potter has put in place a solid business plan that should see that the returns pay for Mark’s wages. But equally important are the ways in which oysters now play a part in the academic curricula in the school, from business studies, food technology, and art and culture to, of course, marine science. All of these factors are instilling a taste for oysters and a desire to learn about their taste and place in their area, and the school has become a microcosm of the wider ecology in Franklin Harbour. As we walked among the permaculture gardens fed by the recycled hydroponic nursery, I still was curious. “But do the young kids like the taste of oysters?” Mark laughed and said that when they were shucking, the kids popped oysters in their mouths as if they were sweets.
GLOBAL INTIMACY AND FEMINIST RESEARCH
I will now turn to draw out the import and consequence of such research—which for want of a better term we might call taste economies. It aims to be quite radically interdisciplinary in that, working in the inter-esse—in the “in between” of being and beings, of taste and place—it disrupts boundaries and reforms the object of study. This has important consequences for (some) feminist research. Of course, many of the human actors are women, and it matters that these women are seen and that the gendered dimensions of taste production are recognized for what they are—a huge factor in the production and preparation of food around the world. But what matters for the feminist approach I am trying to propose and embody is in the quality of the accounting and the ways in which we account for different attachments and connections. We might call this a feminist attunement to the little details so crucial to adequately understanding the big picture. This attention is nothing new and characterizes the work of feminists working across areas that are too many to mention but notably include literature,71 cultural studies,72 and media studies;73 younger scholars such as Jane Simon74 have painstakingly returned to the question of detail in a new vein. What is also new, perhaps, is a critical impatience with the dictates of fashion and theory. Not for nothing were feminists back in the 1990s wary of the shifts to ever higher plains of theory that often clearly announced the end of one thing after another (including women, it sometimes seemed).75
Along with others, I hope to advance the move away from the dominant negative tone of constructionism. For some of us it has become increasingly important as a matter of life and thinking to try to seek out new aspects of intricate arrangements of animate and nonanimate life. As J.K. Gibson-Graham argues strongly, what is important now is first to practice “an experimental attitude toward the objects of our research”; second is “an orientation toward collective research practice involving academic and non-academic subjects.”76 I’ll expand on the second point, but I want to dwell for a moment on the exigency of an experimental stance or attitude. Graham-Gibson takes her lead in this from Eve Sedgwick’s question: “What if we were to accept that the goal of theory is not to extend knowledge by confirming what we already know… what if we asked theory instead to help us see openings, to provide a space of freedom and possibility?”77 It was Sedgwick’s remarkable critique of what theory thinks it knows, in her introduction with Adam Frank to an edited volume of the writings of Silvan Tomkins,78 that set me off on my own determined, oblique path to study the wide workings of shame some years ago. It is perhaps surprising that an American clinical psychologist writing in the 1940s and 1950s should galvanize economic geographers and a literary critic. But maybe not. As Sedgwick and Frank write of Tomkins’s effect: “In a sodden landscape of moralistic or maudlin idées reçues… Tomkins’ formulations startle.”79
While this is not the place to rehash my own infatuation with Tomkins (and with Sedgwick), suffice it to say that reading him/them was like battery-licking (to again quote the oyster blogger). For instance, Tomkins’s description of how shame is intimately entangled in interest hauled me in: “that the pulsations of cathexis around shame, of all things, are what enable or disenable so basic a function as the ability to be interested in the world.”80 Interest in Tomkins’s sense can be seen as the range of stimuli that constantly hit us, move around and through us, and most important of all connect us… to people, to feelings, to memories, to water, to land, to oysters, to women, to parts of the world near and far. In this way I learned to read across a very wide assortment of ideas and theories (albeit few of them in my “home” disciplines), not in the judgmental way (in which I was trained—“what are the conditions of possibility, of truth and falseness”) but in terms of “wow, isn’t that interesting?”81
It’s important that this stance (or what we might call an attitude in Foucauldian, or style in Deleuzian, terms)82 is not newness for the sake of newness itself. It is not particularly feminist to declare that “a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path,” as Bruno Latour recently declared in his review of why critique has run out of steam.83 And, in fact, the mini-industry now following Latour might do well to turn their critical attention to what it is that capitalized ventures such as ANT actually do. For as Deleuze so patiently reminded us, concepts and ideas must be generative or else they no longer deserve their appellation as such.
Traveling alongside the many actors, human and nonhuman, my tale of oysters, told from the stories of so many, may allow for an oblique but hopefully useful conception of the field of taste as it is being formed and re-formed in localities and regions seemingly outside of the mainstream. As Callon recounts, “The growing complexity of industrialized society, [and] a level of sophistication due in large part to the movement of technosciences, are causing connections and interdependencies to proliferate.”84 But to extend his thoughts, we need to foreground gender within the materiality of hybrid forums. The complexities cannot be solved or resolved by (the often recognized male) experts working on their own alone in labs. As Gibson-Graham so clearly urges, experts and nonexperts must continually interact. Research as a clustering of objects, different experts, and contexts—a feminist ecology of research—brings together very different actors to work at understanding large-scale issues through grounded and localized action. Those not from the university share their interests, knowledge, and attachment to particular facets, while in turn some of our academic interests rub off on them.85 In terms of the research I have been doing in remote areas, this plays out in long and fascinating conversations with fishermen, with restaurant owners trying to promote local gourmet food, with the owners and managers of pubs, with oyster growers and sellers, with principals trying to invigorate their schools and communities, and with representatives of different industry and government bodies.
And of course, there is the eating of countless yet all distinct oysters, each creating different sensations of flesh on flesh. Together this assemblage can cast forward ideas about how to further taste economies deeply entrenched in communities yet reaching far beyond to tantalize tongues around the world.
NOTES
My thanks to Clif Evers, Jane Park, Kane Race, and Shvetal Yvas for their comments on earlier drafts, and to Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner for their close and generous editorial advice. Thanks too to Sarah Donald, who shares a love of oysters.
1. Harold Innis, The Cod Fisheries.
2. Innis, Cod Fisheries, 52
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction.
4. The issue of obesity is mired in often unspoken assumptions about class and gender. A team of researchers from a transdisciplinary base recently set off a heated debate in the pages of the International Journal of Epidemiology (2006). Led by Paul Campos, a legal scholar, they argue that the global obesity epidemic is a moral panic, which, as they say, “often displaces broader anxieties about changing gender roles.” They cite as evidence an advertisement that ran in the Washington Times: “30 years of feminist careerism… with most mothers working, too few adults and children eat balanced, nutritious, portion-controlled home-cooked meals.” The ad goes on to predict that 50 percent of Americans will develop diabetes, “creating a medical and financial nightmare, likely to crush our healthcare system” (Campos et al., “The Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity”).
5. Elspeth Probyn, “Feeding the World,” 55.
6. Michael Winter, “Embeddedness, the New Food Economy and Defensive Localism.”
7. Fabio Parasecoli, “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds,” 38.
8. Julie Guthman, “Can’t Stomach It.”
9. Julie Guthman, “Fast Food/Organic Food,” 54.
10. Julie Guthman and Melanie DuPuis, “Embodying Neoliberalism,” 427–28.
11. Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency),” 756.
13 Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California.”
14. Berlant, “Slow Death,” 780.
15. Adrienne Rich, Bread, Blood, and Poetry, 17.
16. Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, “Introduction: The Global and the Intimate.”
17. Ian Cook et al., “Geographies of Food: Following,” 656–66.
18. Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns.” If Whatmore is careful to distinguish herself from cultural geography, I might underscore that I am not a geographer, although my interest has always been close to that widely defined field in terms of seeking out ways of understanding and describing the material and the tangible aspects of life.
19. Whatmore, “Materialist Returns,” 601.
20. Ben Anderson and John Wylie, “On Geography and Materiality.”
21. Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women.
22. Kate Kramer, “Tracing the Vanishing Woman,” 161.
23. Elspeth Probyn, “Eating for a Living.”
24. Alain Giami, “Counter-transference in Social Research.”
25. Georges Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, 3.
26. Giami, “Counter-transference.”
27. Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves.”
28. Elspeth Probyn, Taste and Place: The Transglobal Consumption and Production of Food, Australian Research Council Discovery Project, 2009–2011. I would like to thank the Institute of Geography at the University of Edinburgh for hosting me as a visiting professor in 2008, which enabled me to conduct research in Scotland on taste and place.
29. Whatmore, “Materialist Returns,” 601.
30. Elspeth Probyn, “Eating for a Living.”
31. Isabelle Stengers, “Another Look.”
32. M.F.K. Fisher, Consider the Oyster, 125.
34. Rowan Jacobsen, “The Taste of an Oyster.”
35. Fisher, Consider the Oyster, 125.
36. Rowan Jacobsen, A Geography of Oysters.
37. Albert Borgmann, “The Moral Complexion of Consumption,” 421.
38. Jacobsen, A Geography of Oysters, 2.
39. Jacobsen, A Geography of Oysters, 3.
40. “Peter” is a long-term resident of the area. His father was a farmer, but he decided to go to sea, as had his forebears in Ireland. He still owns a crayfish boat and license, the latter worth some $5 million dollars. (Interview conducted 12–13 September 2009)
41. Antoine Hennion, “Those Things That Hold Us Together,” 103.
42. Antoine Hennion, “Pour une pragmatique du gout,” 1.
43. Bourdieu, Distinction.
44. Alison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy, “Taking Back Taste,” 462.
45. Bev Skeggs, “The Making of Class and Gender Through Visualising Moral Subject Formation.”
46. Lisa Adkins and Bev Skeggs, eds., Feminism After Bourdieu.
47. Elizabeth Silva, “Gender, Class, Emotional Capital and Consumption in Family Life,” 154.
48. Hennion, “Pour une pragmatique,” 101.
50. Bruno Latour, “How to Talk about the Body?” 2–3.
51. Cécile Méadel and Vololona Rabeharisoa, “Taste as a Form of Adjustment Between Food and Consumers,” 242.
52. Gisli Palsson, “Enskilment at Sea.”
53. Kevin St. Martin, “The Impact of ‘Community’ on Fisheries Management in the U.S. Northeast”; Holly Hapke, “Petty Traders, Gender, and Development in a South Indian Fishery.”
54. Thomas McGuire, “The Last Northern Cod,” 1997.
55. Hans Harbers, Annemarie Mol, and Alice Stollmeyer, “Food Matters,” 207.
56. Craig McQueen, “The Unlikely Friends Behind Scots Oyster Firm That Became International Hit.”
57. R. Hoar, “Coming Up Fast.”
59. Craig McQueen, “Unlikely Friends.”
60. Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation.”
61. Michel Callon, “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence,” 3.
62. Mario N. Tamburri, Richard K. Zimmer, and Cheryl Ann Zimmer, “Mechanisms Reconciling Gregarious Larval Settlement with Adult Cannibalism.”
63. Tim Ingold, “Evolutionary Models in the Social Sciences,” 242.
64. Palsson, “Enskilment at Sea.”
65. Michel Callon, “Actor-Network Theory,” 5.
66. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social.
67. Anderson and Wylie, “On Geography,” 320.
70. Jan Potter, the principal of Cowell Area School, previously worked at another school in the Eyre and before that in the Aboriginal territory known as the APY Lands (governed by the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Council). (Interview conducted 11 September 2009)
71. Naomi Schorr, Reading in Detail.
72. Meaghan Morris, “A Gadfly Bites Back.”
73. Tania Modleski, “The Rhythms of Reception.”
74. Jane Simon, “An Intimate Mode of Looking.”
75. I am thinking here of the late 1980s and the heated debates and battles waged over postmodernism. Some landmark interventions by feminists served to bring some semblance of common sense and procedure to questions that threatened to swirl into hyperbole. See, for instance Meaghan Morris’s introduction to her The Pirate’s Fiancée, where she calmly lists feminist work that was engaged with postmodernism without the attendant male angst, or Linda Nicholson’s edited volume, Feminism/Postmodernism (where, incidentally, I began my interest in locality).
76. J.-K. Gibson-Graham, “Diverse Economies,” 628.
77. Eve K. Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 19.
78. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.”
82. For instance, many years ago, following Foucault’s injunction, I tried to formulate “sexing the self” (Probyn, Sexing the Self). Later I attempted an argument indebted to Deleuzian style (Probyn, Outside Belongings).
83. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 231.
84. Callon, “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence,” 12.
85. I have, for instance, learned so much from being involved in the South Australia Food Science cluster led by Dr. Tim Rayner, where scientists, social scientists, and “end-users” engage in an incredibly constructive (and sadly often unusual) conversations.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adkins, Lisa, and Bev Skeggs, eds. Feminism After Bourdieu. Oxford and Boston: Blackwell, 2004.
Ambjörnsson, Fanny. “Talk.” In D. Kulick and A. Meneley, eds., Fat: The Anthropology of an Obsession, 109–20. New York: Penguin, 2005.
Anderson, Ben, and John Wylie. “On Geography and Materiality.” Environment and Planning A 41 (2009): 318–35.
Berlant, Lauren. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33 (Summer 2007): 754–80.
Borgmann, Albert. “The Moral Complexion of Consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 26, no. 4 (2000): 418–22.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Callon, Michel. “Actor-Network Theory—the Market Test.” In J. Law and J. Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After, 181–95. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
——. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay.” In John Law, ed., Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge?, 196–223. London and New York: Routledge, 1986.
——. “Why Virtualism Paves the Way to Political Impotence: A Reply to Daniel Miller’s Critique of The Laws of the Markets.” Economic Sociology 6, no. 2 (2005): 1–15.
Campos, Paul, Abigail Saguy, Paul Ernsberger, Eric Oliver, and Glenn Gaesser. “The Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity: Public Health Crisis or Moral Panic?” International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (2006). http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/dyi254v2 (accessed 6 June 2008).
Cook, Ian, et al. “Geographies of Food: Following.” Progress in Human Geography 30, no. 5 (2006): 655–66.
Devereux, Georges. From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences. The Hague: Mouton, 1967.
Erdal, D. Local Heroes: How Loch Fyne Oysters Embraced Employee Ownership and Business Success. London: Penguin, 2008
Fisher, M.F.K. Consider the Oyster (1941). In The Art of Eating. New York: Wiley, 1954.
Giami, Alain. “Counter-transference in Social Research: Georges Devereux and Beyond.” London School of Economics, Papers in Social Research Methods Qualitative Series no. 7, 2001.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. “Diverse Economies: Performative Practices for ‘Other Worlds.’” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 5 (2008): 613–32.
Guthman, Julie. “Can’t Stomach It: How Michael Pollan et al. Made Me Want to Eat Cheetos.” Gastronomica 7, no. 3 (2007): 75–79.
——. “Fast Food/Organic Food: Reflexive Tastes and the Making of ‘Yuppie Chow.’” Social & Cultural Geography 4, no. 1 (2003): 46–58.
——. “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California.” Geoforum 39, no. 3 (2006): 1171–83.
——, and M. DuPuis. “Embodying Neoliberalism: Economy, Culture, and the Politics of Fat.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, no. 3 (2006): 427–48.
Hapke, Holly. “Petty Traders, Gender, and Development in a South Indian Fishery.” Economic Geography 77 (2001): 225–49.
Harbers, Hans, Annemarie Mol, and Alice Stollmeyer. “Food Matters: Arguments for an Ethnography of Daily Care.” Theory Culture Society 19 (2002): 227–45.
Hayes-Conroy, Alison, and Jessica Hayes-Conroy. “Taking Back Taste: Feminism, Food, and Visceral Politics.” Gender, Place & Culture 15, no. 5 (2008): 461–73.
Hennion, Antoine. “Pour une pragmatique du gout.” Papiers de recherche du CSI 001 (2005).
——. “Those Things That Hold Us Together: Taste and Sociology.” Cultural Sociology 1, no. 1 (2007): 97–114.
Ingold, Tim. “Evolutionary Models in the Social Sciences.” Cultural Dynamics 4 (1991): 239–50.
Innis, Harold. The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940.
Jacobsen, Rowan. A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Oyster Eating in North America. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.
Kramer, Kate. “Tracing the Vanishing Woman.” The Drama Review 36, no. 4 (1992): 158–62.
Latour, Bruno. “How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.” Body & Society 10 (2004): 205–29.
——. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
——. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225–48.
Lorimer, Hayden. “Cultural Geography: Non-representational Conditions and Concerns.” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 4 (2008): 551–59.
——. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘More-Than-Representational.’” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 1 (2005): 83–94.
Méadel, Cécile, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. “Taste as a Form of Adjustment Between Food and Consumers.” In R. Coombs et al., eds., Technology and the Market Demand: Users and Innovation, 234–53. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2001.
Modleski, Tania. Feminism Without Women: Culture and Criticism in a “Postfeminist” Age. New York: Routledge, 1991.
——. “The Rhythms of Reception: Daytime Television and Women’s Work.” In E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Regarding Television, 67–75. Los Angeles: AFI, 1983.
Morris, Meaghan. “A Gadfly Bites Back.” Meanjin 51, no. 3 (1992): 545–51.
——. The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Nicholson, Linda, ed. Feminism/Postmodernism New York: Routledge, 1990.
O’Neill, Phillip, and Sarah Whatmore. “The Business of Place: Networks of Property, Partnership and Produce.” Geoforum 31 (2000): 121–36.
Orbach, Susie. Fat Is a Feminist Issue. New York: BBS Publishing, 1978.
Palsson, Gisli. “Enskilment at Sea.” Man 29 (1994): 901–27.
Parasecoli, Fabio. “Postrevolutionary Chowhounds.” Gastronomica 3, no. 3 (2003): 29–39.
Pratt, Geraldine, and Victoria Rosner. “Introduction: The Global & the Intimate.” WSQ 34, nos. 1 and 2 (2006).
Prentice, Andrew, and Felicia Webb. “Obesity Amidst Poverty.” International Journal of Epidemiology 35 (2006): 24–30.
Probyn, Elspeth. “The Anorexic Body.” In Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker, eds., Panic Sex, 201–12. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987.
——. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005.
——. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
——. “Eating for a Living: A Rhizo-ethology of Bodies.” In H. Thomas and J. Ahmed, eds., Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory, 215–40. Oxford and Boston: Blackwell, 2004.
——. “Feeding the World: Towards a Messy Ethics of Eating.” In E. Potter and T. Lewis, eds., A Critical Introduction to Ethical Consumption. London: Routledge, 2010.
——. “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity and the Research Process.” In S. Gallagher, ed., Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
——. “How Do Children Taste? The Battle of Young Tums and Tongues.” In K. Hörschelmann, and R. Colls, eds., Contested Bodies of Childhood and Youth. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009.
——. Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge, 1996.
——. Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Rich, Adrienne. Bread, Blood, and Poetry. New York: Norton, 1985.
Schorr, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. London: Methuen Press: 1987.
Sedgwick, Eve K., and Adam Frank. “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins.” In Eve K. Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, 1–28. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Silva, Elizabeth. “Gender, Class, Emotional Capital and Consumption in Family Life.” In E. Casey and L. Martens, Gender and Consumption: Domestic Cultures and the Commercialization of Everyday Life, 141–62. London: Ashgate, 2007.
Simon, Jane. “An Intimate Mode of Looking: Francesca Woodman’s Photographs.” Emotion, Society & Space 3, no. 1 (2010): 28–35.
Skeggs, Bev. “The Making of Class and Gender Through Visualising Moral Subject Formation.” Sociology 39 (2005): 965–82.
Sloan, D. “The Postmodern Palate: Dining Out in an Individualised Era.” In D. Sloan, ed., Culinary Taste: Consumer Behaviour in the International Restaurant Sector, 23–42. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
St. Martin, Kevin. “The Impact of ‘Community’ on Fisheries Management in the U.S. Northeast.” Geoforum 27 (2006): 169–84.
Stengers, Isabelle. “Another Look: Relearning to Laugh.” Trans. P. Deutscher. Hypatia 15, no. 4 (2000): 41–54.
Tamburri, Mario N., Richard K. Zimmer, and Cheryl Ann Zimmer. “Mechanisms Reconciling Gregarious Larval Settlement with Adult Cannibalism.” Ecological Monographs 77, no. 2 (May 2007): 255–68.
Thrift, Nigel. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge, 2007.
Warde, Alan, Lydia Martens, and Wendy Olsen. “Consumption and the Problem of Variety: Cultural Omnivorousness, Social Distinction, and Dining Out.” Sociology 33, no. 1 (1999): 105–27.
Whatmore, Sarah. Hybrid Geographies. London: Sage, 2002.
——. “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a More-Than-Human World.” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 600–9.
Winter, Michael. “Embeddedness, the New Food Economy and Defensive Localism.” Journal of Rural Studies 19, no. 1 (January 2003): 23–32.