Duke University Press Eating Beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Foods and Bodies

"Eating Beside Ourselves expands the work of food studies by approaching eating and feeding as sites of transformation across a diversity of bodies and selves. In turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create webs of relations, interconnected and organized by relative conditions of edibility, through which eaters may in turn become eaten. Focusing on such relations, this volume explores how eating and feeding mediate thresholds between different conditions or states of being (e.g., living/dying; edible/inedible); between organisms of different species; and between living beings and their surrounding environment. The volume is organized around the analytic of the "threshold," which the contributors mobilize to think about how food serves as athreshold for human and inhuman relations. In addition to the single-authored chapters, the volume contains five conversational exchanges, which offers contributors the opportunity to discuss their work and the themes of the volume"-- The contributors to Eating beside Ourselves examine eating as a site of transfer and transformation that create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations. Eating beside Ourselves examines eating as a site of transfer and transformation across bodies and selves. The contributors show that by turning organic substance into food, acts of eating create interconnected food webs organized by relative conditions of edibility through which eaters may in turn become eaten. In case studies ranging from nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial animal husbandry in the United States, biodynamic winemaking in Aotearoa New Zealand, and reindeer herding in Arctic Norway to the creation of taste sensation in pet food and the entanglement of sugar and diabetes in the Caribbean, the contributors explore how food and eating create thresholds for human and nonhuman relations. These thresholds mediate different conditions and states of being: between living and dying, the edible and inedible, and the relationship between living organisms and their surrounding environment. In this way, acts of eating and the process of metabolism partake in the making and unmaking of multispecies ontologies, taxonomies, and ecologies. Contributors. Alex Blanchette, Deborah Heath, Hannah Landecker, Marianne Elisabeth Lien, Amy Moran-Thomas, Heather Paxson, Harris Solomon, Emily Yates-Doerr, Wim Van Daele Autorid: Heather Paxson