The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body
Emma-Jayne Abbots, "The Agency of Eating: Mediation, Food and the Body "
English | ISBN: 1472598547 | 2017 | 192 pages | PDF | 1201 KB
English | ISBN: 1472598547 | 2017 | 192 pages | PDF | 1201 KB
Deciding what to eat and how to eat it are two of the most basic acts of everyday life. Yet every choice also implies a value judgement: 'good' foods versus 'bad', 'proper' and 'improper' ways of eating, and 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' bodies. These food decisions are influenced by a range of social, political and economic bioauthorities, and mediated through the individual 'eating body'. This book is unique in the cultural politics of food in its exploration of a range of such bioauthorities and in its examination of the interplay between them and the individual eating body. No matter whether they are accepted or resisted, our eating practices and preferences are shaped by, and shape, these agencies.
Abbots places the body, materiality and the non-human at the heart of her analysis, interrogating not only how the individual's embodied eating practices incorporate and reject the bioauthorities of food, but also how such authorities are created by the individual act of eating. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from across the globe,
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