“First You Feast with Your Eyes:” An Aesthetic Approach to Food and Risk

ABSTRACT

Ideas surrounding risk, especially as it relates to health behaviors, contribute substantially to our understandings of health and wellbeing. However, more than being a way to forecast future behavior, risk is also a social construction rooted in narrative understanding and experiential behaviors. In this essay I seek to extend current scholarship on risk through an emphasis on aesthetic  sensibilities. Relying on discourse from an ethnographic study of a nonprofit organized to address food insecurity, I examine participant communication surrounding their food behaviors (i.e. preparation, purchasing, and consumption) to illustrate the ways that participants approached risk aesthetically. I conclude with a discussion of theoretical implications, arguing that the act of accessing risk is itself an aesthetic endeavor.