1. Food, Eating, and the Good Life
Judith Farquhar

2. Meal Project for Third Paper
Hands-on Part: Preparing (and sharing) a meal.
Engagement Part: The ethical aspirations and practical constraints in your decision making.
Envisioning the food economy you desire and the steps you can take to attain it.

3. The Eater in the Matrix:
Is unknowing
Does not ask questions
Whose stomach is occupied by the agro-food industry (stomach share)
Whose malnutrition and chronic disease provides new economic frontiers for the medical industrial complex.
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss
At Town Hall this Friday

4. A Food Citizen Is One Who…
Asks where their food comes from.
How it is produced.
What is in the food they eat.
What are the social/environmental/nutritional implications of their food choices.

5. 6 Principles of Food Sovereignty
Affirms Food as a Right.
Values Food Providers.
Localizes Food Systems.
Puts Control Locally.
Builds Knowledge and Skills.
Works With Nature.

6. Ethical Eaters
Ethics asks the question: What is the good and how do we seek it?
When we pick up a fork, to whom are we obligated since we never, in a fundamental sense, eat entirely alone.
“Eating is an agricultural act.” (Wendell Berry, farmer poet)
Eating is a political act, but it is not just that: food has other forms of agency (wellness, pleasure, connection). (Judith Farquhar)

7. The Agency of Food
Agency: the capacity to act on, to cause to make happen.
Agency usually ascribed to human actors: those ascribed with a consciousness and a will.
But the reality may be more complex.
The agency of non-human actors.
The complex interactions between human and non-human actors (for example between Carpenter and her animals).
Agency instead of a marker of “human freedom” can be broadened to a concept of effectivity (i.e., a something that can “make happen,” but not necessarily in a pre-determined way).
Agency is not just an attribute of human beings but also of other kinds of materiality (subjects/objects).

8. What kind of agency can be ascribed to food?
The production and reproduction of social life.
A form of improvisational craftwork involving intimate collaborations among embodied humans and material objects (and nonhuman actors).
Such collaborations include recipes and cooking skills, tasting food, savoring the company of others.
Connect us with different histories and memories.
Most of which goes “without saying”
A built-in and embodied common sense
What happens in the “getting, desiring, eating, giving, enjoying, narrating, remembering, and cooking food” (p. 155).

9. Spam Salad Filling 1 can Spam 1 can tuna 1 can mushroom soup
Mix together. No seasoning. This keeps and will make about 3 doz. Sandwiches.
This couldn’t be more terse.
Draws our attention to the recipe as a stripped down set of directions to a very material practice.
Actually depends on so much tacit knowledge.
Farquhar found this example laughable until she began to imagine a whole social world that provides the context for this recipe as a material practice.
A world where a lot of people need to be fed on a little.

10. An Embodied Anthropology of Food
The role that bodily experience plays in shaping our thoughts and perceptions.
A focus on the embodied experience of food: how it tastes, how it feels to eat it, how it triggers memory, the meanings we attach to it, its value for the production of a particular kind of cultural self and/or social world.
How do embodied forms of experience such as desire, pleasure, and pain play in this approach to the anthropology of food?

11. Health Care during the Mao Era
Health care part of the Maoist social contract, through the danwei clinic in the cities and through the barefoot doctor in the countryside.
Public health campaigns during the Mao era also contained major epidemic disease.
Basic medical care at low cost as part of the socialist redistributive economy

12. Privatization of Health Care
For profit medicine has become increasingly mistrusted.
The “white-eyed wolf” (baiyan lang)

13. The New Health Consumer
Revelations by the Light of the Moon
Terror of becoming ill.
Responsible for his/her own health.
Self-disciplining subjects.
Health seeking behaviors, modes of consumption, and anxious consumers of knowledge.
Seeking expert knowledge in the public sphere at minimum cost.
Contradictory health advice as a hydra-headed monster.

14. The Cultivation of Life (养生 yangsheng)
An aging population, a demographic effect of the one-child family policy.
The “four-two-one” problem looms as a crisis of care for the elderly.
Fear of the chronic ills of aging as a burden on the young.
The “diseases of civilization” (wenming bing)
Lifestyle advice for prevention and management.

15. Rediscovery or Reinvention of a National Treasury: The Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon
An art of everyday, small routines
Perfect human life and achieve longevity.
Living in moderation
Harboring one’s life force
Observing the balance of the systems of the body.
A dynamic balancing that observes the changing of the seasons.

16. Yin/Yang Cosmology
Dry/wet
Hot/cold
Male/female
Light/dark

17. The Secret to Happiness
Be content with ordinary joys, stay happy and contented, be open-minded and generous, modest and mild; put the best construction on people’s intentions, be young at heart, stay confident, assiduously use your mind, keep meeting challenges.
A scaling of aspirations to the good life to the material constraints of a market economy.
Not just self-discipline but enjoyment: an aesthetic crafting of everyday life.
Xiaokang: a prosperity that is broadly distributed, so that all are comfortable
Rather than wealthy opulence for a few

18. Mrs. Hu Loves fried foods (working class comfort foods).
Her husband prefers “clear and plain” (qingdan).
Here we see how the practices of preparing and sharing food materialize a line of tension or division within the family.
Class marker reflecting the class politics of the last 50 years (seeking to erase the difference and then re-asserting it).
The husband’s cultural habitus is at variance with his wife’s.
Not just in terms of class distinction, but in a value for the neoliberal project of self-development through expert knowledges about nutrition.
Mrs. Hu might be giving herself a break from “self-sacrifice.” Perhaps an example of Berlant’s notion of lateral agency.
The notion of “comfort food” suggests a link between body and mind. Filling the belly and emotional happiness.

19. “The Flavors of Friendship”
Widow Zhang Li and her best friend Zhou Xiaomei.
How to pursue the good life when you have very little? How does privation turn into pleasure? (The water at the spring.)
An ethics of living, of self-care, and care for each other.
How does food materialize a moment of social connection that may in fact be experienced very differently by all the different parties involved?
How does it speak to us?
Pumpkin dumplings
A simple dish
Pumpkin is a famine food
Spring Silkworms
We will make it thicker this time.
Historical memory
In a generation that has been left behind by history.
Janet Siskind in her hammock in the Peruvian Amazon among the Sharanahua Indians
How was she experiencing that moment?
The point of potato chips is their crispness. They are called crisps in the UK
A longing for home and her ties to family.
The memory of a more alienated relationship to food rather than the intense personal investment.
They couldn’t possibly mean so intensely to her Sharanahua friends.
Is this why she hoarded the experience to herself? Recognizing the possible costs if she were found out?

20. Farquhar’s discussion of dumplings, page?
Layered history
Pumpkin a food of poverty
Spring Silkworms
Spring hunger: pumpkin gruel
Cai duo rou shao
Now a health oriented cuisine
But also a nostalgia thing
Cultural Revolution restaurants
Recordings of insects in the background

21. Zhang Li and Zhou Xiaomei
Like many aging low-income city dwellers in China, they are well aware that, lacking health insurance, the good life that they have built could be shattered with the first serious illness to attack them. But this vulnerability is precisely why they devote their time to life cultivation at the level of the body and material everyday life… [which just might] stave of the physical disaster of serious illness indefinitely.
Judith Farquhar, “Food, Eating, and the Good Life.” From the Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (Sage 2006).

22. Ethics of Eating
What is the good and how do we seek it through the getting, preparing, and eating of food in terms of the care of self and others? How do we experience our own limitations in this pursuit and how are we supposed to feel when we fall short? What kind of agency can we assume in such instances?

23. Layers of history and memory
Ancient traditions of self-cultivation.
Maoist disciplines of ascetism and simplicity.
Neoliberal imperatives to care for the self.

24. From Re-Balancing the Body to Re-Balancing Society?
Food scandals
NIMB politics (not in my body)
Food politics has the potential to build new forms of urban/rural alliances for a more sustainable world.
What if … the answer to the problems of environmental degradation, climate change, economic development, social justice, food security, energy decline … all had the same answer?
The building of vibrant local and regional food economies.

25. Beijing Organic Farmer’s Market

26. Anthropology Club Study Abroad Info Session
Today, March 1
211 Thomson
6:30-8 pm

27. “America eats the young”