How Do We Want To Eat, If It Happens. An Emergency Provision Dinner

As part of We Can’t Be There and The Politics of Food – Season 2, Michael Guggenheim (Sociology, Goldsmiths) and Judith Kroell (Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna) will lead a one-day workshop culminating in a public Emergency Provision Dinner: How Do We Want To Eat, If It Happens. The dinner will be prepared with the help of guest participants and residents (including The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Daniel Salomon, Dani Burrows and Yasmina Reggad) and will be based on a selection of disaster scenarios submitted by the Delfina Foundation followers.

Our Emergency Provision Dinner will engage with the ways in which our food can become a critical means and medium of survival for future disastrous events. During much of the 20th century, emergency provisions became a resource for states to inform citizens about what kinds of food to stock when threatened by disasters such as nuclear strikes or severe weather emergencies. The logic behind state advice was primarily calorie counting and ensuring households stocked enough basic foods.

We now live in a contradictory time defined by both insecurity and food abundance, intensively industrialised food production and decreasing food quality, new questions arise. What qualities would we seek from food in times of emergencies? What emotions should it produce, how should it taste and what situations should it respond to?

Biographies

Michael Guggenheim is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths. He directs the research project “Organising Disasters. Civil Protection and the Population.” He has also worked as a cook in a nursery and ran a catering firm.

Judith Kroell is a sociologist and as a member of the research group “Xperiment / Shared Inc.” She has participated in various projects at the interfaces of science, society and art. She is lecturer at the Dept. of Social Studies of Science, University of Vienna and she is co-founder and coordinator of the Association “Researchers without Borders”.

Together with Bernd Kraeftner, they directed the research project “In the event of… Participatory and Anticipatory Politics of Emergency Provision” (2010-2012)

We Can’t Be There is series of public events featuring artists in dialogue with academics, writers, and cultural commentators on approaches and methods used to explore temporality, disasters and the politics of futurity. The series is conceived by curator Yasmina Reggad in collaboration with Dr Rebecca Coleman and Dr Michael Guggenheim, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths, University of London. The series also includes various screenings and in conversations at the ICA, a Methods Clinic at Goldsmiths, University of London and a one-day workshop and seminar at Tate Modern.

This event is part of The Politics of Food: Season 2 and is proposed by curator Yasmina Reggad.

Event Supporters

European Research Fund ‘Organising Disaster. Civil Protection and the Population’ Starting Grant and the Methods Lab, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths

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