Abstract
This volume reminds us that race is always present in our engagements with food. Slocum and Saldanha have collected some of the leading academic voices of the effort to highlight race and racism in the study of food. Their contributors speak of examples from across the world, from the US to South Africa, from Brazil to New Zealand, and beyond. The volume’s three sections – fields, bodies, markets – demonstrate the editors’ desire to think about relationships between race and food comprehensively, along all aspects of food systems, from cultivation to consumption to commodification. The volume’s contributors also speak across scales, from the intimacy of visceral sensation to the enormity of Empire. Thus, in achieving this collection Slocum and Saldanha do much more than gather voices on an important subject; they provide a resource to widely expand scholarly engagement with race and food within a broad variety of fields of inquiry and epistemological frameworks.
In the volume, Slocum’s chapter ‘Race in the Study of Food’ (Chapter 2) serves as an effective entryway to thinking about the subsequent chapters and particularly the relationships between them. It also gives us a background for understanding both (diverse and long-standing) social constructivist approaches to race and relatively newer engagements with the materiality of race. The chapter, together with Julie Guthman’s foreword and Elspeth Probyn’s ‘Afterword: Biocultural Entanglements,’ provide a tangible and compelling depiction of geographic scholarship on race and food.
That which is not included in the volume does not speak to a fault of the editors or contributors but rather to the rapid expansion of conversations on race and food within and beyond the academy. In particular, this volume’s deliberations about race and food complement the discourse on decolonization and food systems that is emerging within diverse activist circles. In these discussions, instead of quoting Foucault, Bourdieu and Bataille, scholar-activists are quoting Quijano, Grosfoguel and Fanon, and as well as movement organizations like Idle No More, the ONIC (Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia) and the Zapatista caracol governments of Southern Mexico. I hope that this book can serve as a starting point not only for including more voices in academic conversations about food and race, but also for noticing the multiple points of intersection that exist between scholarly and activist work on this topic.