Guest editors’ introduction: on the creative destruction of food as science

ABSTRACT

This introduction and special issue takes as its inspiration Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ 2012 articulation of Critical Eating Studies. We examine how value is produced through the circulation and transformation of the parts that constitute eating and edible bodies. Guided by the presumed dead, done, and discarded, we find material and structural meaning by focusing not on finished goods but on by-products – both intended and unintended. The Edible Feminisms special issue foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies as wastes and metabolic discontents. We explore how devaluation, or systemic discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms. In asking: what does feminism have to do with edibility? with waste and metabolic science? we illustrate the stakes of how, why and who of devalued parts and bodies. In the eleven essays of this special issue, we examine how cultural logics of devaluation (classism, racism, sexism) are related to the technical practices of revaluation (e.g. quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). We attune our readers to the messy insides of things, to food science through the Marxian concept of creative destruction.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical Eating Studies
• gender studies
• feminist science & technology studies
• discard studies
• waste
• metabolism

“You must waste cheese to keep making cheese here.”

~ Italian-Canadian artist Cosimo Cavallaro,

on the wall of expired Cotija cheese he began erecting

along the Mexico-US border in March 2019

(quoted in Paxson, 2019 this issue)

What does edibility have to do with feminism? With waste, or with metabolic health?

In the late 2010s, women around the world produce a significant portion – some speculate more than half – of the world’s food. Yet, women (particularly women of color) also face sharp hunger trends and gender-based barriers to resources like the land, tools and financing necessary for production (FAO; Doss 2011; Braich 2018). The lack of precise statistics, and the barriers to data collection on exactly how much women’s labor contributions affect global food supplies, is revealing of the gendered, classed and racialized ways in which the labor of some is systematically undervalued (Doss et al. 2018). As we write, thousands of assault and harassment cases filed by migrant and undocumented farmworker women await legal action – at the height of the #MeToo movement and despite the crucial role of undocumented laborers in sustaining U.S. agriculture. Since October 2018, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has run a #TimesUpWendy’s campaign calling out the fast food giant for failing to join the Fair Food Program that works for harvests without violence for farmworkers.

Despite the long-standing feminization of food and care work, in the United States women formally head < 20% of restaurant kitchens, with the number dropping to nearly 7% among elite restaurant groups (Harris and Giuffre 2015; Garsd 2015; Sutton 2014; Hartke 2018). At the highest levels of the culinary world, more and more women and people of color are achieving renown. In 2018, for instance, over half of the James Beard Award categories reflected women nominees for the very first time, and for the first time, two black women were nominated as Best Chef finalists (Rosner 2018; Wilson 2018; Canavan 2019). Nonetheless, as of 2018, 80% of James Beard Award nominees were white, and 72% were male (Kludt 2017; Wilson 2017, 2018). In contrast, approximately 12% of the American population is estimated to be food insecure, and single parent homes, particularly those headed by women of color, experience the highest rates of food insecurity (Coleman-Jensen et al. 2018). These figures are conservative and do not reflect sharply increasing rates of homelessness, especially among LGBTQ youth. Only two key studies, released by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, have expressly considered how discrimination based on sexuality or gender identity directly impacts food security (Gates 2014; Brown, Romero, and Gates 2016; Chapin Hall 2017; Oreskes and Smith 2019; The Williams Institute 2016).

Data like these have driven us to return to the indigestibility of racism, classism and patriarchy. The Edible Feminisms special issue takes eating and edibility as more than metaphor. This special issue recognizes these processes of transformation as central to how – through expert, technical, and regulatory practices – capital markets contort biological and social words, conforming them to its logic, and placing monetary value on human and non-human metabolic capacities. Food studies has established that the edible can act as a vehicle for both justice and injustice, and much thoughtful scholarship has provided the field purchase on tough questions about the persistence of hunger, of racism in culinary tourism, and of the privilege of haute cuisine (Tompkins 2012; Hatch 2016; Belasco 2006; Counihan and Kaplan 1998; Williams-Forson 2006; Guthman 2011; Finn 2017; Mannur 2010; Roy 2010; Ray 2016; Ku, Manalansan, and Mannur 2013). As food and environmental justice scholars and activists such as Karen Washington, who coined the term food apartheid, have argued before us, the inequities embedded in food and ingestion are not symbolic, but material, structural, and produced by design (Carney 2015, 9; Hoover 2016, 11; Washington qtd. in Brones 2018). Through attention to the eating and the digesting and the defecating and the rotting, Edible Feminisms foregrounds scientific methods through which neoliberal market relations write-off matter and bodies. We explore how devaluation, or systemic waste and discard, is built into technical modes of capitalist value production and echoes in social structure and cultural forms.

~

Edible Feminisms unfolded as a three-part project during our time as postdoctoral fellows at UCLA’s Center of the Study of Women and Institute for Society and Genetics (2016–2018). The first part was a public panel held on February 1, 2019 on UCLA campus, in which a group of cross-coastal, international activists and scholars addressed 150 students, faculty, activists, and community members on the topics of food, waste, and social justice.

Funded by the Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership, Edible Feminisms took up Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ call for “Critical Eating Studies” – for food scholars to “look beyond food itself” and reflect on how received ideas about ingestion and digestion reveal the political beliefs and structures that organize us as individuals and communities (2012).

1. (Left to right) Rachel Vaughn, Sarah E. Tracy, Heather Paxson, Tiny (aka Lisa Gray-Garcia), Tanya Fields, Rick Nahmias, Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and CSW Director Rachel Lee. Photo credit: Alexandra Apolloni. Image courtesy of CSW, UCLA.

Our public talk featured activists imagining alternate models for centering community in the practice of nourishment. Panelists included Tanya Fields, founder of the BLK ProjeK, a community organizer, public speaker, and popular social media personality fostering leadership and health among black women in the Bronx; Tiny (a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia), co-founder of POOR Magazine/Prensa POBRE Poor News Network and The Homefulness Project, a landless peoples’ self-determined land liberation movement and a prolific writer and editor; Rick Nahmias, founder of Food Forward, redistributing “waste” produce across LA; and literary critic and scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins of Pomona College, whose incisive and irreverent criticism complemented the ethnographic insights of our moderator, MIT anthropologist Heather Paxson, whose work has been influential in bridging scholarship on food and science.

2. Journal volume contributors during the Feb. 2 writing workshop. Photo credit: Alexandra Apolloni. Image courtesy of CSW, UCLA.

3. Journal volume contributors during the Feb. 2 writing workshop. Photo credit: Alexandra Apolloni. Image courtesy of CSW, UCLA.

The second part of Edible Feminisms was a full-day writing workshop on February 2 for contributors to this special issue of Food, Culture, and Society. On February 2, 2018, over a dozen scholars at all career stages workshopped their papers alongside presentations by local experts in waste management, metabolic disease, and psychedelic therapies for depression and anxiety at end-of-life. We wanted this workshop to actualize its own theoretical underpinnings: to provide an opportunity for the mutual support and enthusiasm of fellow scholars to take root. We wanted to do our bit to foster intellectual community amongst a generation of emerging scholars besieged by a relentless digital mediascape and a job market contracting violently under the seemingly inevitable corporatization of the university. Collaborative intellectual creation is the bedrock of our profession, and for us, shifting focus from food to eating meant our attunements – both conceptual and logistical – had to be interdisciplinary, multisensory, feminist and decolonial.

Part three of Edible Feminisms – this collection of essays – explores how value, both capital and cultural, is generated through the circulation and transformation of bodies and the parts that make them up. Its authors move from the micro to macro levels; from the intersectional politics of representation in film to metabolic disease; from food safety border control and industrial fermentation practices to DIY placenta dehydration and consumption. These papers show that, in order for waste parts – whether corn husks, refined sugars, cast-off molasses, encapsulated placenta, or mass produced amino acids – to become new commodity parts, they must first be divorced from context and from community. We hope that in what follows, we make this idea relevant to an audience diversely invested in the how and who of eating: scholars of food, agriculture, and cuisine; food writers; and culinary practitioners themselves.

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We return to our opening question: what does feminism have to do with edibility? With waste and with metabolic science? What can people interested in eating better understand by staying with food industry practices of deconstruction and reassembly, through focusing not on finished goods but on by-products – wastes and discards – both intended and unintended, material and symbolic?

In the 2010s, food waste has been an enormous topic of discussion. National and international bodies have commissioned studies into the magnitude and effects of edible food going to waste (Edwards and Mercer 2007; Salhofer et al. 2008; WRAP 2009; for other recent studies on the life of food waste, see Evans 2011, 2012; Parfitt et al. 2010; Barnard 2016; Vaughn 2018). Alerts of as much as one-third of the food produced for human consumption going to waste have become commonplace (Edwards and Mercer 2007; WRAP 2009), and analyses abound of the specific tactics being employed to grapple with edible matter gone to waste (Eikenberry and Smith 2005; Heynen 2010; Giles 2014; Barnard 2016; Vaughn 2018); others calling for clarification as to the exact make up of this systematically produced waste (MacBride 2011; Liboiron 2013); and those describing the reduction of consumer food waste as equally vital to the future of global food security as increasing food production itself (Stuart 2009). Celebrity chefs like Dan Barber, David Chang, and Massimo Bottura repurposed food waste to great fanfare, protesting global food insecurity or embracing local microbes to ferment food scraps into deliciously novel condiments and sauces (e.g. Vaughn 2018). Food waste has been DIYed, gentrified, and scaled up, converting the ugly, the gross, the slightly less-than-fresh, and the scrap into newly delicious, desirable, and profitable commodities. The last decade has also seen non-food items like insects and lab-grown, animal-free meat celebrated as sustainable protein. Ugly veg was a hot trend – so was bone broth and offal (Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2010, 2016; Prisco 2015). The murky depths of our own bodies have likewise been reassessed: the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, our previously denigrated digestive “plumbing,” was recast as the enteroendocrine system (EEC) and popularized as the “gut brain.” Researchers have come to see the limbic system – part of our neural architecture – extending through the gut: not only the site of cutting edge metabolic research, but also the “next frontier of gastronomy” (Cornish, Mouritsen, and Critchley 2019; Hartley, Liem, and Keast 2019; Tracy 2018). Those who follow food have become newly enamored by guts, creepy crawlies, and rot.

What would happen if we theorized the trend?

Food scholars have long labored to demonstrate how individuals, institutions, and governments have produced foodscapes on a macro-level, for good and for ill: our neighborhoods, municipal zoning, growing regions, state lines, national borders, and global circuits of trade (Hockenberry 2014; Guthman 2011; Berenstein 2018; Spackman and Lahne 2018; Cronon 1991; Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Holmes and Bourgois 2013; Horton 2016). Informed by science and technology studies and discard studies insights (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018; Radin 2017; Shapiro 2015; Hayden 2013; Helmreich 2009; Barad 2007; Waldby and Mitchell 2006), our special issue offers historically-grounded accounts of how the life sciences (e.g. agronomy, sensory science, gut microbiome science) turn plant and animal tissues and bodies into technologies – complete with applications, errors, and waste products. We hope to help demystify and problematize some areas of specialized scientific research whose applications bear directly on American foodways.

Attending to the material alongside the symbolic is important to intersectional feminist practice. Why? If the goal is to clarify how and with what effects people and practices are othered, marginalized, and devalued, social justice efforts can only be enhanced by speaking the language of science and technology – as they are refracted by the free market. This is because social categories of difference rest upon colonial theories of natural – which is to say, biological, or scientific – difference (TallBear 2013; Montoya 2011; Nelson 2016; Landecker 2013; Wilson 2015; Murphy 2012; Pollock 2012; Reardon 2005). One cannot speak truth to power without learning power’s languages. To build on Sara Giordano’s urging, feminist critique needs to carefully reflect “the realities of current scientific practice” (2014, 756), just as scientists need to conscientiously build racism and sexism out of study design. We want to model intersectional feminist modes for smelling, tasting, digesting, and relating in an inequitable social system. The key to this literacy is how, through food science and technology, the profits, wastes, and unintended consequences – often experienced as metabolic harms – of the food system get unevenly distributed across peoples and spaces (Murphy 2013; Guthman 2015; Vaughn 2017). Careful attention to these mechanisms is necessary to avoid reproducing them with only slightly-more equitable, slightly-more sustainable models. We acknowledge the efforts of degrowth researchers and activists, who reject the truism that prosperity is synonymous with high-rate economic growth. They call instead for a reinvention of the economy itself – “turning an elephant into a snail” – in the name of human health, social justice, and planetary survival (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2014; Cosme, Santos, and O’Neill 2017).

How is waste inequitably produced and distributed? In the modern food system, and echoed in gastronomic and nutrition discourse, inequity is facilitated by practices of breakdown: of ecologies, symbioses, and organisms into parts and functional units, into insides and outsides. Scholars have put other words to this phenomenon, describing it as nutritionism (Scrinis 2008; Biltekoff 2013) and quantitative reductionism, such as equating all food to calories (Mudry 2009; Biltekoff et al. 2014; Cullather 2007).

Our essays explore how cultural logics of devaluation (classicism, racism, sexism) are related to technical practices of revaluation (quantitative reductionism, nutritionism). This insight forms part of our (Tracy’s and Vaughn’s) larger intellectual projects, which follow how both sets of phenomena (the cultural and the technoscientific) are colonized by the capitalist imperative to individuate, to compete, and to brand. Together, these papers help to demonstrate how macro infrastructure – of settler colonialism and environmental racism, of body- and sex-shame that disproportionately inflects femininity – is consonant with engineering on the micro-level. In other words, the authors attune us to the insides of things, to the messiness of the fact that “inside” and “outside” are not foregone conclusions. Their research topics are in transit, in constant material and symbolic transformation. From colonial hygiene schemes to the technological capture of women’s pelvic aromatics, our authors’ historical actors translate vaginas, placentas, defecating natives, and fermenting microbe excretions – the juicy, funky, and skanky – into sterile units for rational and profitable deployment. They are case studies in the weaponization of the visceral (Holland, Ochoa, and Tompkins 2014, 2015).

Put another way, the following discussions can be read through the Marxian critique of creative destruction: a term that describes a feature of capitalism with a history of use in economics and political economy on both the political left and right. In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx wrote about annihilation or destruction (vernichtung in German), or the phenomenon by which he saw capitalism dismantle previous economic orders (e.g. enclosure of the commons) and assemble itself in their wake. He wrote that capitalism operated by necessarily devaluing existing resources (anything deemed by a society to be of value) to make possible the creation of new wealth, for example though war, dereliction, or economic crisis. Creative destruction casts capitalism’s characteristic boom and bust cycle not as an aberration (or an unfortunate exception) of the free market, but as its norm. It names how making waste – or casting off, reducing the value of some things – plays a key role in making other things profitable (Marx [1857] 1993, [1863] 1969).

As examples of capitalism’s creative destruction, we explore the breakdown of edible tissues and eating bodies into functional, quantitative units to be remixed and optimized in commercial product formulations. Our authors outline technical methods and ecological stakes in a series of “case studies in edibility” ranging from the invisible and the volatile to the disgusting and the delicious. We are interested in what gets destroyed and how, because we see understanding how as an important step in picking up the broken-down pieces, in practicing more sustainable – which is to say more just – alternatives.

Capitalism is adept at coopting narratives of female, queer, and racial empowerment. Indeed, gentrifying the margins is an important feature of consumer capitalism, taking up aesthetics and experiences that have been devalued by everyday sexism, racism, and heteronormativity and turning them into cultural capital – into the creative grist known as cool (Hooks 1992; Belasco 2006; Frank 1997; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Ngai 2010). Feminists have long tried to re-center community and ecological interdependence (Merchant 2006). Our desire here is to highlight the alienating effects of breaking things down and redistributing them along lines of socioeconomic power – to emphasize the intersectional feminist potential of insisting on reconnection, on mutualism, and on community. Perhaps that is best done through less calculated technoscientific vision, and through more careful listening, tasting, and smelling.

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In our opening essay, Hannah Landecker offers a critical tool she calls “the chemical gaze.” (Landecker 2019) Through this analytic, she explains the industrial norm of feeding waste forward, or usefully repurposing accidental products of commercial agri-food manufacture: for example, beet pulp, cottonseed meal, and arsenic trioxide. Turn of the twentieth century research focused on feed efficiency and growth promotion, she argues, drawing lines around compounds and biological outcomes of commercial interest and occluding other bounds and bonds of interconnection. Landecker illustrates the urgency of appreciating something other than the fully-formed commodity, despite the charisma and narrative clarity it offers us as writers and readers of food. She concludes that the chemical gaze also had an unintended effect: the large-scale introduction of toxicants into the food system, compounds which had – and continue to have – health effects other than their intended purpose of livestock growth promotion. In similar vein, Sarah Tracy discusses the repurposing of agri-industrial waste to ferment the popular flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) (Tracy 2019). Industrial fermentation proved a technique for amplifying the savory good taste of processed foods on a global scale, presenting public health consequences that are still not well understood.

The essays that follow provide confluent perspectives on technical practices for managing other, funky excesses of bodies selectively valued within schemes of modern hygiene, biotechnology, and biosecurity. It is no accident that our word of choice – funk – is historically associated with the black community in the United States (Bolden 2013). Funk has been fetishized as “cool” only because its associated kinds were first marginalized, disparaged, and pathologized; fringe culture – with its gritty gravitas – confers status when it can be coopted selectively, or gentrified. The authenticity or “street cred” of only some marginal artifacts operates as a performance of class. Joel Dickau discusses the iconic soul food staple of chitlins to illustrate the shifting valuation of texture in American sensory science and popular food culture (Dickau 2019). He argues that racialized “bad to chew” textures were identified and devalued within industrial taste schemas around mid-century, only to be selectively romanticized by culinary tourists in the early twenty-first century.

Christy Spackman discusses a funk less desired. Her study of measuring smell with gas chromatography-olfactometry (GC-O) shows how the commodification of food flavor (flavorants) extends beyond high aesthetics and into erotic smellscapes (Spackman 2019). Her mid-century researchers established experimentally that what goes into a mouth comes out in a vagina. They used cutting-edge technologies of capture to break down, and thus make knowable and amendable, the intimate environs of women at a historical moment when commercial douche offerings expanded alongside those of deodorant, mouthwash, cologne, and perfume. Constituting an olfactory “era”, she argues that the “deodorization of public and private space” in late industrial societies was a sensory expression of status contrasted with the smelly margins. Spackman’s case study is an example of a problematic “technical fix” (Weinberg 1966) for a professed social problem. Successful immigrants mask the aroma of their home cooking (Manalansan 2006), and tasteful vaginas aspire to smell neutral.

Heather Paxson and Daniel Gerling provide anthropological and historical takes on other instances of selective incorporation (Paxson 2019; Gerling 2019). Paxson argues that confusing wholes for parts (good or bad, safe or dangerous) – or what she calls synecdochal thinking – is at work in the contemporary policing of United States national borders against biological threats to American agriculture. Citing Renato Rosaldo’s concept of “imperialist nostalgia”, she shows how a selective filtering of imported edibles at the border reflects a national appetite for romanticized “authentic” or “traditional” foodways. Border policies throw out entire foodstuffs and memories of home in the effort to keep out only one problematic micrological agent, for example, or to quash a potential or imagined threat to American agricultural profitability. Such policies reveal far less enthusiasm for incorporating whole, “traditional” human migrants into the American body politic.

Gerling argues that the management of excrement, perhaps the original waste product, has rehearsed and reinforced classist, sexist, and racializing projects (see also Hobart and Maroney, this issue). He demonstrates how effluent was historically indexed to social influence; hierarchy was reinforced by deodorizing the center and then postering the city about how (only) the barrios stink, if we may be permitted the metaphor. “[C]ities were not sewered evenly or fairly. Rather, the wealthier and whiter parts of most cities received sewers first … Indoor toilets simultaneously and consequently became both status symbols, which sociologist David Inglis calls the ‘bourgeois fecal habitus,’ and the fantasy of the excrementless body became somewhat of a reality” (Inglis 2001, 200, cited in Gerling 2019, this issue). Class lines were reinforced by making sure shit did get dumped at the margins – a self-fulfilling prophecy of relative ill-health built into racialized environments (Guthman 2011; also, Hatch, Sternlieb, and Gordon 2019, this issue).

The twenty-first century DIY-ification of fecal implants sourced from the global south (Hobart and Maroney 2019, this issue) and the gentrification of placenta-eating both (Vaughn 2019, this issue) provide two related examples of the technical and symbolic work of turning previously designated wastes – gross things of no value – into new means of (1) generating economic capital and/or (2) gaining cultural capital. Hobart and Maroney offer interlinked examples of nutritional primitivism, or “the pursuit of supposedly simpler, more natural and more authentic ways of eating as part of a quest for health” (Knight 2012, 289, cited in Hobart and Maroney 2019, this issue). Relating evolutionary biology theories of nutritional development to colonial optics, they explore the exoticization of the Hawaiian staple root crop taro and the embrace of fecal transplants sourced from the Global South to problematize the selective revaluation of “primitive” health supplements – whether taken orally or anally. They conclude that nutritional primitivism draws on dubious scientific grounds for positing a “best” human diet and is, at its worst, “frankly racist in its representation of contemporary indigenous peoples”.

Analyzing the limits of the edible, Rachel Vaughn explores the recent vogue of post-partum placenta ingestion. She outlines the tensions between the sparse biomedical data available on placentophagy and the persistence of popular revaluation of placenta encapsulation in spite of exposure risks. Examining the ways in which an obstetric “waste” became re-imagined as a kind of functional food, Vaughn suggests the gaps in data concerning such a critical source of early human nutrition “speaks” as profoundly as the classed, gendered, and racialized ways in which the placenta re-enters streams of consumer ingestion.

Michelle Yates posits Richard Fleischer’s 1973 dystopian thriller Soylent Green as a prescient critique of capitalism’s crisis state in its representation of the end of the era of cheap food. The specter Soylent Green raises is a world in which capitalism has failed to work – that is, to benefit – even educated white men. Yates traces the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system as an infrastructural choice that reflected the priority of elected officials and planners on the government payroll to facilitate white flight from urban centers. One ripple effect was a two-tiered system of amenities (employment, food, culture, recreation, etc.) between white suburbs and brown urban centers) brought into visceral relief by the metabolic parallel of Hatch, Sternlieb, and Gordon’s analysis of the uneven distribution of artificially-cheap, surplus sugar into black bodies (2019, this issue). In Soylent Green’s hellscape, simultaneous ecological collapse and human population explosion has driven even relatively privileged white bodies to be consumed – because the era’s manufactured food staple, soylent, “is [made of dead] people!”

Together, Yates and Hatch, Steinlieb, and Gordon show the false promise of sustainability within capitalism, as “the lives of the dead (symbolically as in dead labor) are consumed to sustain the living, even as the living are increasingly only able to eke out the bare minimum of subsistence” (Yates 2019, this issue). In the early twenty-first century, Yates argues, the production of food is ever more demanding, with the production of one calorie requiring the input of at least fifteen calories of energy. The commodities most heavily subsidized and circulating at the lowest consumer sale prices are also often heavily comprised of refined sugars and marketed disproportionately to low-income communities of color. One result of this, Hatch, Steinlieb, and Gordon argue, are “sugar ecologies” that effect an endemic of metabolic disease within black communities in the United States.

Our final essay, Rachel Lee’s homage to the subversive art of Anicka Yi offers the reclaimed scent molecules of women’s bodies as catharsis for racism, sexism, and sensory alienation (Lee 2019). Mirroring the technocratic capture of vaginal volatiles discussed by Spackman, Lee shows us how Yi invites visitors to her multisensory installations to imbibe funk and musk. Is this a sufficient mode of redress for the molecular and psychic violence of capitalist alienation, of systemic racism, sexism, and heteronormativity? Surely not. It is just one, one that provides a woman of color a means of non-alienated self-expression, communication, and livelihood in an inequitable world. And, wow, is it ever cool.

4. Grabbing at Newer Vegetables, 2015 Plexiglas, agar, female bacteria, fungus 84.5 × 24.5 inches (214.63 × 62.23 cm) Image courtesy of the artist, 47 Canal, New York, and The Kitchen, New York. Photo: Jason Mandella

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the UCLA Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership for the generous grant that made Edible Feminisms possible. We extend profound thanks to Dr. Rachel Lee and her incomparable staff at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (especially Kristina, Alexandra, and Melissa) for their support in bringing the panel, workshop, and special issue to life. Thanks are also due to the following UCLA co-sponsors of the panel and workshop: Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership; Center for the Study of Women; Humanities Division; Luskin School of Public Affairs; Food Studies Graduate Certificate Program; Institute for Research on Labor and Employment; Institute of American Cultures; Iris Cantor–UCLA Women’s Health Center; Asian American Studies Center; African American Studies; History; Asian American Studies; Gender Studies; Institute for Society and Genetics; Social Sciences Division; Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah E. Tracy

Sarah E. Tracy holds a PhD in the History of Science and Technology from the University of Toronto and lectures in the Food Studies program at the New School. Her research brings science and technology studies and gender, sexuality, and critical race approaches to the study of American food culture and has appeared in Radical History Review, Global Food History, and The Senses and Society. An interdisciplinary account of how flavor informs the boundaries of human identity, health, and behavior, her first book, Delicious: A History of Monosodium Glutamate and Umami, The Fifth Taste Sensation, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.

Rachel Vaughn

Rachel Vaughn is Lecturer in the UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics, and Oral Historian in Residence at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Vaughn holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research engages the intersections of Food and Discard Studies, Feminist Science & Technology Studies. She is the author of “Choosing Wisely”: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” (Frontiers) and of the forthcoming book Talking Food, Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food Precarity from the Margins of a Dumpster (University of Nebraska Press).