What is food? I’m struck that the r

What is food? I’m struck that the rapid growth of food-related research and teaching is oddly inattentive to this core question. As an interloping geographer I say that to an audience of anthropologists with real hesitancy, knowing that food has been central to the discipline since its inception and that many in the field have used food and food practices to think about how various social boundaries are made, or alternatively breeched. Still, it seems to me that the question of what exactly bounds food itself as an object has largely been ignored in contemporary food studies. And yet, it is this question that lies at the heart of many of the ethical, aesthetic, cultural, and political debates about the future of food. Genetically modified corn, soil (now used in high-end restaurants), in vitro meat, pink slime, vitamin-fortified water, hemp seed oil, monosodium glutamate, processed nutritional supplements, zero-calorie foods, and even packaged snack foods are all substances that in different ways test the boundaries of what constitutes food. Moreover, many communities of practice – for example molecular gastronomy, the “real food” movement, food science – in some sense exist to police or redefine these boundaries. I would posit further that the contestation among these different communities generally turns on the privileging of or disdain for various biological, cultural or technological elements of food. For instance, slow foodies may privilege cultural heritage and accept only artisan technologies, while food scientists may privilege what is digestible and nominally nutritious and downplay the cultural “yuck factor” of particular food inventions such as cultured meat.