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. ix I N T R O D U C T I O N Food Politics in the Twilight of Sovereignty I n r e c e n t y e a r s , f o od h a s emerged as one of the more pervasive issues in political struggle, popular entertainment, and humanist scholarship. Politically, the media warns of a global food crisis owing to rapidly rising prices and drought-induced shortages, even as the developed world faces a mounting public health threat stemming from widespread overeating and continues to redirect so much grain toward biofuel production. On television, contenders for Iron Chef or Top Chef delight audiences with their spectacular meals and culinary skill, while the contestants on The Biggest Loser remind the audiences of the perils of indulgence. Academically, the growing interest in “food studies” wrangles anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and nutritionists together to reveal the hidden machinations of an exploitative, inequitable, and unsustainable global food system while also celebrating the opportunities for human expression and joy through cultural rites and regional identity. In each case, with a precious and tempting resource implicated in discourses of personal identity, global inequality, and cultural authenticity, food appears as paradoxically both fascinating and frightening. Eating Anxiety, as a work of political theory, situates each of these factors, and each of these issues, in a historical condition anxious about the meaning of and possibilities for human freedom. The aim of this study is, therefore , threefold: first, to explain how food functions culturally, politically, and metaphorically to help structure popular and philosophical understandings of the world and the place of humans within it; second, to introduce the concept of “digestive subjectivity” and show how it offers valuable resources for rethinking cherished political ideals surrounding knowledge, identity, and power; and third, to unpack some of the debates in contemporary food politics, showing how digestive subjectivity offers x . I N T R O D U C T I O N critical resources for navigating contemporary political crises over globalization , neoliberalism, and democracy. While the vegetarianism and food co-ops of an earlier era may have been dismissed as alternative lifestyles or fashion statements, today the case hardly needs to be made that food is a political issue. Arguments about everything from industrial pesticides to agricultural subsidies to dietary regulation circulate freely in Whole Foods and Wal-Mart, schools and churches, Congress and the UN. This could be because our current global food system—consuming so much water and oil and producing so much sewage and carbon dioxide—is unavoidably implicated in ongoing and impending economic and ecological crises. But it is surely also because, as Elspeth Probyn notes, considerations of food inevitably blur boundaries between discrete lines of thought and areas of study, as studying the production, distribution, and consumption of food necessarily forces attention to the science of diet; the ethics of animal husbandry; the economics of land distribution; and the sociology of class, culture, and taste.1 Indeed, medical investigations into nutrition readily lead to questions about marketing; the work of agricultural engineers has bearing on demography and migration patterns; and anthropological work on cuisine cannot be disentangled from questions of global trade, animal welfare, and industrial subsidies. Food, in other words, is rarely only food. The popularity of food politics might owe to another issue. When we eat, our bodies fuse with—and become momentarily indistinguishable from—the world that surrounds us. Objects that were once part of the external world are literally incorporated into the self, and the space that separates the self from the world is collapsed. Michael Pollan, perhaps the era’s most visible food writer and the current face of food politics, draws on this realization when he states at the opening of his best seller, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that “the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.”2 This intimacy—this moment of allowing the natural world to invade the bounded space of our bodies , to enter into our mouths and then biochemically become part of the self—amounts to an experience of the limits of the self. This moment of considering and confounding the border between me and not me offers a singular opportunity for examining understandings of identity, authenticity, and responsibility that form the backbone of contemporary political ideologies. As a result, I contend, trends in food politics often have their stakes not in the production and distribution of food, nor even [3.149.230.44] Project MUSE (2024...

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