Embodied Food Politics

While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism.
This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.

Contents: Thinking about food relationally; Some backstory; Making sense with CSAs; Thinking with Heritage Seed Banks; The sensibilities of chicken coops; Cultivating communities; Steps to an ecology of social change; References; Index.

About the Author: Michael S. Carolan, Associate Professor of Sociology, Colorado State University, USA

Reviews: 'Carolan brilliantly demonstrates that bodies tuned to Global Food can, through shared practice in new spaces such as urban chickens, seed exchanges, and community supported agriculture, create tacit knowledge for innovation in food systems that more closely link production with consumption. He supports his reflexive deep descriptive case studies by a wide-ranging and well-chosen literature that he both critiques and takes to the next level.'
Cornelia Butler Flora, Iowa State University, USA

'Michael Carolan provides a timely analysis of the changes that creep into our experiences with alterations of food production and distribution. Combining interviews and reminiscences with perspectives from sociology, history, and philosophy, this book explores what is being lost as food production loses its singular locations, as well as what can be regained with a greater appreciation of “embodied knowledge”.'
Carolyn Korsmeyer, SUNY, Buffalo, USA

'Michael Carolan’s Embodied Food Politics explains a lot. It goes deeper than the current impassioned food politics and reaches the core of where the passion actually emanates from, or should. Whether it’s heritage seeds or heritage breeds, he makes the point that behind these are individuals and communities who remember and have cared – people who would feel incomplete without the throbbing connections to the past and to one’s fellows that these seeds and breeds allow and signify. It’s all in the dwelling, and this book urges us to begin.'
Virginia D. Nazarea, University of Georgia, USA.