Human-Food Interaction

Dear Colleagues,

While food has always played a crucial role in lives of all living bodies, our contemporary concerns about food expands rapidly with nascent technological, environmental, and social disruptions [1]. For example, digital and network technologies have been making fundamental changes to how we live and die. The ways in which food is produced, prepared, and consumed are transforming, from broader systemic changes such as distribution and waste logistics to new and experimental exploration of designing material encounters with food, as seen in the rise of gastrophysics [2] as a transdisciplinary field of research and practice. Technologies are also transforming diverse and complex socio-cultural aspects of food. For example, values and practices of commensality and food security, ethics around lab-grown meat and quantified nutrition, and new creative and playful experiences around food. With food as a fundamental desideratum for humans and more-than-humans, how might we engage with and navigate the complex disciplinary, political, and cultural landscapes through research?

This special issue invites contributions from across disciplines, with a strong focus on inter-/transdisciplinary research methods and innovative exploration of food not only as matters of fact, but of concern [3].

[1] Choi, J. H.-j., Foth, M., Hearn, G. N. (Eds.). (2014). Eat Cook Grow : Mixing Human-Computer Interactions with Human-Food Interactions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[2] Spence, C., Blumenthal, H. Gastrophysics : the new science of eating.

[3] Bruno Latour. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 2004, 30, 225-248, doi:10.1086/421123.

Dr. Rohit Ashok Khot
Dr. Jaz Hee-jeong Choi
Guest Editors

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