Visceral Difference: Variations in Feeling (Slow) Food

Abstract

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 (

Eating for the post‐Anthropocene: Alternative proteins and the biopolitics of edibility

“…It introduces unfamiliar actors, materials and practices into the intimate relationship between eater and eaten, asking the eater to accept and ultimately embody them – both ideologically and materially – through ingestion (Mol, ). It also treats eaters as a homogenous, rational group, failing to account for different bodies with different bodily experiences and relationships with food (Hayes‐Conroy & Hayes‐Conroy, ).…”

“…For others, however, often males, these features contribute to the pleasurable experience of meat‐eating and are linked to the cultural value of animal products as sources of strength and power (Adams, ). The importance of viscerality in our engagement with and conceptualisation of food–body relations (Hayes‐Conroy & Hayes‐Conroy, ; Longhurst et al., ) is largely absent from existing food biopolitics literatures, and as I will show is a central mechanism through which the biopolitics of edibility has emerged in the case of APs.…”

Clearing Up the Table: Food Pedagogies and Environmental Education — Contributions, Challenges and Future Agendas

“…In particular, the sensory aspects of gardening and the material properties of plants and soil are imagined to produce new knowledge and affective attachments. Future work in this area could draw on visceral scholarship that challenges us to reflect on the classed and racialised aspects of sensory learning, which are under-explored in the issue (Hayes-Conroy, 2009; Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy, 2010). This work does not essentialise or individualise smell, taste, sight, hearing and touch, but sees them as historical socio-culturally located practices, performative of race, class and gender.…”

“…This work does not essentialise or individualise smell, taste, sight, hearing and touch, but sees them as historical socio-culturally located practices, performative of race, class and gender. In particular, Hayes-Conroy's (2009) work on teaching and learning in school gardening shows how ‘taste education’ is classed and racialised and produces differential access to viscerality. Senses and viscera should not be romanticised as presocial in sensory education and food activism, but understood as unequally distributed by class, gender and race.…”

Huhu grubs, bull semen shots and koki: Visceral geographies of regional food festivals in Aotearoa

“…Geographers Jessica and Allison Hayes‐Conroy have conducted a number of research projects on ‘the visceral’ (). The visceral encapsulates ‘physical capacities, relational processes, and fuzzy boundaries of the human body’ ().…”