As part of the workshop, a public reading will be held on Friday, May 22, 2026. For more details, see here.

 

The five-day workshop is the kick-off event for Tectonic Plates, a three-year project that explores how, through cooking and eating, we encounter the earth. For us, this is a question that is necessarily also about time and temporalities—personal, familial, cultural, geological, climatic, evolutionary, and otherwise. The workshop will involve writing workshops, encounters with historical cookbooks, collective cooking and eating, and visits to local eateries and sites of food- and knowledge-production. Fourteen people will be participating, from across food studies, history of science, STS, and anthropology. After five days of thinking and eating together, we will do a public reading of the work we have developed.

The broader project, Tectonic Plates, starts from the idea that decisions about what, where, how, and with whom to eat are, among other things, decisions about how to live on our planet, in relation to the present moment and to all the alternative temporalities that wind through it. The act of eating is imbued with knowledge claims about the earth, which are also claims about belonging: claims about what has been eaten, what will be eaten, what should be eaten, and who should eat it, and about who has the right to answer those questions. On the plate, eating bodies come into relations with metabolic histories that are simultaneously epistemological, political, ecological, and geological. Even as we make claims about it, food makes claims on us.

Workshop Participants:
Lydia Barnett 
Etienne Benson
María Elena García
Hanna Garth
Cristina Grasseni
Stefan Pohl Valero
Alexis Rider
Lukas Rieppel
Christy Spackman
Lachlan Summers
Rebecca Woods