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This study explores the task of doing ‘visceral geographies,’ enrolling many areas of body‐centered scholarship in the task of better understanding the visceral realm including geographies of affect and emotion, non‐representational theory, sensuous and haptic geographies, health and disability studies, and scholarship on performance and movement. The authors desire to open lines of connection and communication between and beyond the current bounds of this scholarship. In doing so, the authors attempt to clarify the goals of visceral geography, particularly in terms of political action and social change. Three goals stand out: first, visceral geographies advance understandings of the agency of physical matter, both within and between bodies. Second, visceral geographies move beyond static notions of the individual body and toward more contextualized and interactive versions of the self and other. And third, visceral geographies encourage a skepticism of boundaries by insisting on the imagining and practicing of our (political) lives in, through, and beyond dualistic tensions.

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This third and final ‘Geographies of food’ review is based on an online blog conversation provoked by the first and second reviews in the series (Cook et al., 2006; 2008a). Authors of the work featured in these reviews — plus others whose work was not but should have been featured — were invited to respond to them, to talk about their own and other people’s work, and to enter into conversations about — and in the process review — other/new work within and beyond what could be called ‘food geographies’. These conversations were coded, edited, arranged, discussed and rearranged to produce a fragmentary, multi-authored text aiming to convey the rich and multi-stranded content, breadth and character of ongoing food studies research within and beyond geography.

Introductioǹ`Slow Food has spread in the US through a certain gastronomic society, which is basically white. It has only spread in one category, white and wealthy, and has done so through volunteers. We have never made a selection of volunteers ... it was just whomever asked to be part of the movement, and so the message reached only those who were there and ready to hear it. This [process] revealed the organization, and [being] organized this way organically generates problems. It doesn't guarantee diversity.'' Slow Food leader (personal interview)As the above quote indicates, many alternative food activists öpeople dedicated to securing alternatives to conventional means of food production/distributionöpurport to want to increase membership diversity in alternative food movement organizations. At least this seems to be the case for the Slow Food movement (SF), whose leaders have suggested that inadequate racial and economic diversity may be an impediment to strengthening the US faction of the global movement. As movement leaders in the US begin to ask the tough and laudable question of how to increase membership diversity, they find themselves attempting to recruit across difference. Recent research has examined how structural/economic and discursive/rhetorical processes work to maintain alternative food movements like SF in the US as largely liberal, white (European-American), upper-middle-class groups (