From Bat Soup to Bean Sprouts: Coronavirus Food Fears in Historical Perspective

This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic

On a trip to Shandong, China, at the end of January 2020, a few days after the lockdown of Wuhan, I watched a video of a stewed bat on Douyin – the Chinese video-sharing app. The bat sat in a bowl of soup, its boiled skin drawn back across its face to reveal its teeth, almost as if maliciously grinning. …

Lectures

February 17, 2020

Eating in Class: Notes on Nourishment and Decolonial Pedagogy

By Carina Truyts

This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions

It’s a common adage, following Lévi-Strauss, that “food is good to think with.” A class assignment that includes food-centred ethnographic presentations expands the scope of such thinking into embodied and institutional memory. Below I describe such a class feast prepared by second-year social anthropology students at Sol Plaatje University in 2019 (one of two post-Apartheid South African Universities). The idea …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: Food studies

From Bat Soup to Bean Sprouts: Coronavirus Food Fears in Historical Perspective

Eating in Class: Notes on Nourishment and Decolonial Pedagogy