Shared by Lisa-Marie Gagliardi<\/p>\n\n\n\n
.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a magnifying glass over the lens of the iPad camera, Laura and I captured photos of decomposing apples. I posted these photos on the classrooms walls inviting responses from children, parents, and educators. The apples seemed to be unrecognizable as many people could not identify that the photo was of an apple. In addition to the photos, I collected remnants of my breakfasts \u2013apple cores, strawberry leaves, banana peels, and left them on one of the classrooms shelves. Together with the children, we noticed the food leftovers transform and decay. Before long, fruit flies joined in as well. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Staying close with decomposing food\ninvites opportunities to think with decay and death in unfamiliar ways. We\nsought ways to think with decay and death with a particular pedagogical\ncommitment to disrupt the human-centered utilitarian logics that fuel ongoing\nenvironmental destruction and contribute to climate crisis and food insecurity.\nUnsettling Euro-Western logics of separation and human exceptionalism brought\nup an awareness of how \u201ccontemporary\nwestern identity has rejected the otherworldly significance and basis for\ncontinuity, but has given it no other definitive meaning, provided no other\nsatisfactory context of continuity or embeddedness for human life\u201d (Plumwood,\n1993, p. 101). Confronting\nEuro-Western conceptualizations of death that sustain separation and human\nboundedness, we turn to ways of knowing that promote ecological responses to\ncontinuity in more-than-human worlds. Plumwood (2008) refers to Indigenous\nontologies that foster an imaginary of life and death as circulatory,\nreciprocal and mutually nurturing, \u201cas a gift from a community of ancestors, [in which] we can see death as\nrecycling, a flowing on into an ecological and ancestral community of origins\u201d\n(p. 325). <\/p>\n\n\n\n The decaying food was a lively\nmultispecies event that offered an opportunity to think with the grammar of\nanimacy<\/em> (Kimmerer, 2013), which\ncomplicates food relations by thinking with the liveliness of food. To rethink\nfood with the grammar of animacy draws attention to \u201cthe animacy of the world,\nthe life that pulses through all things\u2026 this is the language that lets us\nspeak of what wells up all around us\u201d (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 55). With the grammar\nof animacy, food pedagogies refigure food as alive and active. Perhaps most\nperplexing is how the grammar of animacy refigures food as a subject in food\nrelations, which complexifies the relational logics that position food as an\nextractable resource and tool. How might thinking with food through the grammar\nof animacy unsettle, activate and rethink how to ethically be-, learn- and\nbecome-with food?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Unsettling the sedimented status of food as dead and inanimate makes food unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Drawing on black feminisms, Chen\u2019s (2012) work on the productive and generative affordances of animate materials supports a rethinking of relational common food worlds. While human-centered logics position animacy as \u201cshaped by what or who counts as human, and what or who does not\u201d (Chen, 2012, p. 30), reimagining food as animate initiates a trajectory in which it is possible to attend to nonhuman animacy and enact an ethics of care. Disrupting the ways that humans hold food that at a comfortable distance \u2013 inanimate, insensate, dead \u2013 enlivens an obligation to care for nonhuman others and attend to the ways in which food animates socio-material life in significant ways. In this sense, \u201canimacy itself<\/em> can be queer, for animacy can work to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral with which it is associated\u201d (Chen, 2012, p. 98).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Food animacies create an ontological shift in food relations that matter. Imagining food animacies as a pedagogical provocation interrogates consumerist logics, which perpetuate anthropocentrism and colonialism, and cultivate a hope for more liveable futures in the midst of ecological decay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n .<\/p>\n\n\n\n References<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chen, M. E. (2012). Animacies biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. <\/em>London, UK: Duke University Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants.<\/em> Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plumwood, V. (2008). Tasteless: Towards a food-based approach to death. Environmental Values 17<\/em>, pp. 323-330. doi: 10.3197\/096327108X343103<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the Mastery of Nature.<\/em> New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Shared by Lisa-Marie Gagliardi . With a magnifying glass over the lens of the iPad camera, Laura and I captured photos of decomposing apples. I posted these photos on the classrooms walls inviting responses from children, parents, and educators. The apples seemed to be unrecognizable …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,8],"tags":[9,10,11],"class_list":["post-267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ethics-of-care","category-life-death-of-food","tag-death","tag-decay","tag-grammar-of-animacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":372,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267\/revisions\/372"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/food.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}