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.