Foraging for planetary health: exploring multispecies metabolism in postindustrial landscape

The event will begin on Thursday, October 3, with a public lecture by Will LaFleur at the Institute of Sociology, titled “Rethinking Beer: Histories and Futures of Tastes, Practices, and Reproduction for a Post-Growth World.” Registration is not required for this lecture. The following 3-day workshop focuses on using the methods and concepts of social sciences and arts to explore foraging as a mode of coexistence in multispecies relations.

Foraging involves activities that not only complement but also subvert existing distribution chains and encourage the search for non-industrial food production. “Edible commons” are sometimes proposed as a measure against crises threatening conventional industrial food distribution chains (Sardeshpande et al. 2021). Furthermore, Chang and Bai (2020) contrast foraging to “capitalistic food culture” since the industrial production and buying of food off the shelf obscures the chain of activities needed to create a product. Consumers often ignore the conditions under which products are made due to the disconnection between production and consumption, as scholars of feminist commons observed (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 2001; Federici, 2012). Foraging, in contrast, makes the food production processes visible and tangible. Annemarie Mol (2021) noted that during the act of eating, the world moves through the body. While building upon her approach, the workshop will pursue the following questions: What is metabolised when we eat food that we have gathered, prepared, and reflected on together? What new entanglements between people and non-human forms of life emerge when food is obtained through foraging? How does eating change if the labour and joy—and, perhaps even pain—of foraging is part of the food preparation?