Food: A Sensuous Matter of the Everyday : A sensorial exploration of material and bounded natures of mundane food practices

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines everyday food practices such as sensed by seven households in the city ofStockholm, Sweden. By sensuously exploring the acts of acquiring, preparing, cooking, eating,and wasting food, I analyze how food is a matter of olfactory, gustatory, auditory, tactile, andvisual significance, as much as matter per se. More specifically, I address relational andbounded aspects of food, looking at how ambient surroundings, presences of material andimmaterial factors, sensuously influence everyday experiences of food. Intrigued by the at onceinter-, extra-, and re-corporeal matters of food, I analytically position myself alongside Latour,Ingold, Douglas, and Bennett. In entertaining their theoretical lines of thoughts, using them asanalytical springboards, this thesis explores socio-material dimensions of food practices, as wellas corporeal dynamics of human-material encounters. Methodologically carried out by meansof sensuous ethnography, following Pink’s notion of participatory practice, I have during tenweeks of fieldwork—in people’s homes and in their frequented grocery stores—engaged mysenses to experientially sense the world of food, such as lived by them. In our conjoint sensorialexploration, taken-for-granted mundane understandings of what food constitutes and whatconstitutes it, have emerged as domestically diverse, bounded to sensuous perceptionsderivative of the past, carried out in the presents, and cor(po)related to the future. By surveyingsituated meanings of what is smelled when savored, tasted when flavored, seen when looked,and felt when touched, simultaneously as accounting for nonhuman matters salient to coursesof actions, the thesis remarks context-sensorial-imbued figurations of everyday food.