Food's Cultural Geographies: Texture, Creativity, and Publics

This chapter is about emerging cultural geographies of food. It is the result of a collaborative blog-to-paper process that led to an experimental, fragmented, dialogic text. Food is often researched precisely because it can help to vividly animate tensions between the small and intimate realms of embodiment, domesticity, and "ordinary affect" and the more sweeping terrain of global political economy, sustainability, and the vitality of "nature". Food's cultural geographies, like cultural geography more broadly, can be "best characterized by powerful senses of texture, creativity and public engagement". The explosion of academic interest in food geographies is a mirror to the explosion of public interest in, and public discourse about, all kinds of food matters.