April 10: Food and the Ethical Self

This essay will seem familiar to those of you who have taken Anth 311 with me already. It functions here as a linking piece between that course and this one.

It was published in a volume called the Handbook of Material Culture, which was a collection of essays exploring the relationship between humans and the material world from a new angle, one in which humans are not the only entities that have agency. If we think of agency as not necessarily tied to human will or intention, but instead as something that has the power "to make happen," what might that look like with regard to food? 

Farquhar starts out by reviewing all the different ways that anthropologists have looked at food over the history of the discipline and then she explores what she sees as missing: food as a form of embodied experience that also gives form to social life. 

What power does food have to make something happen (what she calls the "agency" of food)? How does Farquhar express this? And can you connect it to an example from your own experience?

Are there lessons here that we can draw from this reading to help us in our projects to nurture life in a post-pandemic world?