Food and Violence: Eating Our Way Into the World

Abstract (English)

From the weaponization of food to reinforce social hierarchies to the centrality of culinary practices in resisting oppression, food is integral to our moral and social fabric (Kikon, 2021; Kikon and Rodrigues, 2023). Cooking and eating provide entry into life’s structuring forces. They offer glimpses of the worlds that take root during violence; the delicate ways life is re-claimed (Aijazi, 2023; Dossa, 2014). Food also allows us to enter a fleshier relationship with others (Ray, 2022). Annemarie Mol (2021) wonders: “What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating?” (3).

Taking food practices as modes of world-making and relationality, the panel interrogates how food creates and recreates moral and ethical life amidst conflict, disaster, militarization, and colonial occupation. We ask: What can the entanglements of food, such as foraging, cooking, and eating, reveal about violence and moral reconstruction? How do culinary practices contribute to refinding joy and strength while navigating histories of oppression and diminishment? How can cooking and eating reframe ethnography? What does attention to food illuminate about social and political life?

We invite papers that interrogate these questions and more, foregrounding cooking and eating as urgent practices and compelling forms of risk-taking, revealing unique understandings of what is at stake in the world.