Food's Cultural Geographies: Texture, Creativity, and Publics

Ian Cook
Peter Jackson
Allison Hayes‐Conroy
Sebastian Abrahamsson
Rebecca Sandover
Mimi Sheller
Heike Henderson
Lucius Hallett
Shoko Imai
Damian Maye
Ann Hill
Front cover of Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography

This chapter is about emerging cultural geographies of food. It is the result of a collaborative blog‐to‐paper process that led to an experimental, fragmented, dialogic text. Food is often researched precisely because it can help to vividly animate tensions between the small and intimate realms of embodiment, domesticity, and “ordinary affect” and the more sweeping terrain of global political economy, sustainability, and the vitality of “nature”. Food's cultural geographies, like cultural geography more broadly, can be “best characterised by powerful senses of texture, creativity and public engagement”. The explosion of academic interest in food geographies is a mirror to the explosion of public interest in, and public discourse about, all kinds of food matters.

Suggested citation

Cook, I., Jackson, P., Hayes-Conroy, A., Abrahamsson, S., Sandover, R., Sheller, M., Henderson, H., Hallett, L., Imai, S.,  Maye, D., and Hill, A. 2013. ‘Food’s cultural geographies: texture, creativity and publics.’ In N. Johnson, R. Schein and J. Winders (Eds.), A New Companion to Cultural Geography. Oxford: Blackwell. pp 343-354.