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Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food
Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on human–animal relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step toward bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.
Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human–animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships.
These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane—and messy— interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal.
Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, María Elena García, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe
Each chapter introduces a scholar for whom the tangled, contradictory character of human–animal relations raises difficult questions about what they eat. Representing a departure from canonical animal rights literature, most authors featured in the collection do not make their food politics or identities explicit in their published work. While some interviewees practice vegetarianism or veganism, and almost all decry the role of industrialized animal agriculture in the environmental crisis, the contributors tend to reject a priori ethical codes and politics grounded in purity, surety, or simplicity. Remarkably free of proscriptions, but attentive to the Eurocentric tendencies of posthumanist animal studies, Messy Eating reveals how dietary habits are unpredictable and dynamic, shaped but not determined by life histories, educational trajectories, disciplinary homes, activist experiences, and intimate relationships.
These accessible and engaging conversations offer rare and often surprising insights into pressing social issues through a focus on the mundane—and messy— interactions that constitute the professional, the political, and the personal.
Contributors: Neel Ahuja, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Matthew Calarco, Lauren Corman, Naisargi Dave, Maneesha Deckha, María Elena García, Sharon Holland, Kelly Struthers Montford, H. Peter Steeves, Kim TallBear, Sunaura Taylor, Harlan Weaver, Kari Weil, Cary Wolfe
371 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 4, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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December 21, 2019(note 2 self) highlights were billy-ray belcourt's coda (!!), neel ahuja's interview, and kim tallbear's interview
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April 13, 2024Lots of food for thought ehehehehe...
August 22, 2023
This book is a great start for reading on the animal consumption as a food. This is because it makes you aware of the current studies going on about the field and the scholars from very different fields who has studied animals and make connections between the animal studies and their own fields, the connections I've never thought of before. I wrote down the names of most of the books mentioned in the interviews to read in the future. I didn't know where to start before I read this book.
May 30, 2022
The chapter I got the most out of — the most enlightening chapter for me — was “The Tyranny of Consistency” by Naisargi Dave. I was unfamiliar with Dave’s work until this point and I quote from it below.
Donna Haraway's name is mentioned in almost every chapter from the interviewees. She and veganism are the common, entwined thread. As far as I can tell, Haraway has always danced around — been noncommittal to — the veganism issue in a way I can’t quite understand (though, I guess I’m trying by reading this book). To me, a vegan, there’s something unsatisfactory in her past answers, when I so eagerly agree with her in every other way. In this particular area, it’s as if she lets others do some of the thinking for her so she can later pick and choose what to work with. This was also the vibe I got from the book Making Kin Not Population. She has others make some of her points for her to create a collaborative, well-rounded argument that is no longer hers. The only difference here is she is not a contributor in Messy Eating.
Read the rest of my review here: https://blackandwhitepandaduh.wordpre...
Donna Haraway's name is mentioned in almost every chapter from the interviewees. She and veganism are the common, entwined thread. As far as I can tell, Haraway has always danced around — been noncommittal to — the veganism issue in a way I can’t quite understand (though, I guess I’m trying by reading this book). To me, a vegan, there’s something unsatisfactory in her past answers, when I so eagerly agree with her in every other way. In this particular area, it’s as if she lets others do some of the thinking for her so she can later pick and choose what to work with. This was also the vibe I got from the book Making Kin Not Population. She has others make some of her points for her to create a collaborative, well-rounded argument that is no longer hers. The only difference here is she is not a contributor in Messy Eating.
Read the rest of my review here: https://blackandwhitepandaduh.wordpre...
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews