Cover image for Towards a multispecies gastronomy: stories of more-than-human entanglements on small farms in Victoria, Australia/ Kelly Joelle Donati
Towards a multispecies gastronomy: stories of more-than-human entanglements on small farms in Victoria, Australia/ Kelly Joelle Donati
Title:
Towards a multispecies gastronomy: stories of more-than-human entanglements on small farms in Victoria, Australia/ Kelly Joelle Donati
Author:
Donati, Kelly Joelle
Personal Author:
Publication Information:
Melbourne : University of Melbourne, 2016.
Physical Description:
361 p. ; 30cm.
General Note:
This dissertation makes the case for a multispecies gastronomy, on the grounds that substantial ontological, epistemological and political shifts are needed if we are to overcome the profound economic, ecological and social crises in the twenty-first century, and so realise a flourishing co-existence for the animals, plants, fungi and microbes with whom we live and eat, as well as for ourselves. As a millennia-old discourse and field of inquiry that aims to articulate a schema for eating and living well, gastronomy offers fertile ground from which to re-imagine and re-enact the foundational social and metabolic relations in agriculture. This project seeks firstly to challenge gastronomy?s humanist orientations towards consumption and connoisseurship, and secondly to cultivate a conceptual openness to nonhuman gastronomic subjectivity. I call this new field ?multispecies gastronomy?, which proposes nonhumans as co-practitioners in gastronomic world-making and makes space for nonhuman pleasure (conceptualised as a form of flourishing) through a series of ethnographic case studies of small-scale farms in regional Victoria, Australia. In the course of my dissertation, I explain and develop the two conceptual and methodological pillars of multispecies gastronomy: more-than-human conviviality and gastrosophic sympoiesis, which attend to gastronomy?s social and metabolic natures. I argue that reworking stories of agriculture and gastronomy?that is, to be attentive to more gastronomic modes of co-flourishing and to acknowledge the more-than-capitalist economies at work within them?is necessary for finding more respectful and pleasurable conditions for living and eating (with) others in the world.
Format:
Books
Publication Date:
2016
Publication Information:
Melbourne : University of Melbourne, 2016.