230157 SE Comedo Ergo Sum: Food and Diet, Science and Technology (2012W)

Food studies scholars regularly claim that 'food is cultural', by which they mean that food and eating are situated in local or regional practices or foodways. Meanwhile scientific knowledge about diet and nutrition purports to be universal. This course explores an emerging literature on the ways that science and technology, and scientists and engineers, work to reconstitute food as a stable immutable subject despite its plural cultural contexts and transitive material nature. The course will touch upon a variety of central topics in this recent literature at the intersection of food studies and STS: standards setting and the nature of commodities; food safety and the politics of risk; the food consumer-citizen as an (imagined) agent in (neoliberal) politics; the moralization of everyday eating and dietary practices; and the branding, labeling, and market-making of science for consumption. Across these diverse topics we will focus on how the material is leveraged (either tamed or exploited) to settle cultural or political disputes. The goal is to look at this new literature and the new techniques from this intersection of food and STS to build a toolkit for thinking about food and power.

As the course title playfully suggests, food and eating form an intimate part of everyday life and are therefore closely linked to identity and notions of the self. Throughout we will therefore discuss the ways these technoscientific reconfigurations of food constitute new subjectivities, new notions of the eater and consumer self, as well resistances and counter-narratives.