Eating beside Ourselves: Thresholds of Food and Bodies is a new publication from Duke University Press, edited by Dr Heather Paxson.
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, between the edible and the 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.
Heather Paxson is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America and Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece.
Reviews
“Eating beside Ourselves is a beautifully curated collection of work by authors doing some of the most exciting and groundbreaking work at the food-body-environment nexus. Savor the elegant writing and relish the paradigm-pushing thinking.” — Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry
“Eating and being eaten: here’s to a compelling collection of stories highlighting that eating is not a solitary practice, but involves humans and other creatures coming into each other’s worlds. Learn how present-day metabolic relations, rather than being circular, include all but endless intervening elements—and stretch out.” — Annemarie Mol, the author of Eating in Theory
Special Discount Code offer
A 20% off discount code can be applied for the purchase of this publication. Use LLS23 when on the checkout page. Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31st December 2023. Discount only applies to the CAP website. To order via the CAP website, click on the book cover below.