The five-day workshop is the kick-off event for The 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, The 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:
Etienne Benson
Lachlan Summers
Rebecca Woods
Stefan Pohl Valero
María Elena García
Christy Spackman
Cristina Grasseni
Projit Mukharji
Lukas Rieppel
Alexis Rider
Lydia Barnett 
Hanna Garth