Tectonic Plates is 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 project will involve writing workshops, encounters with historical cookbooks, collective cooking and eating, and visits to local eateries and sites of food- and knowledge-production. It involves scholars from a variety of disciplines, including the history of science, environmental history, food studies, STS, and anthropology.
The project 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 histories that are simultaneously epistemological, political, ecological, and geological. Even as we make claims about it, food makes claims on us.