Social Stomach: Performative Food Prototypes

“Social Stomach” is a series of social, textual and “performative” or diogetic prototypes [1] that rethink the relation between food and technology and experiment with future metabolic exchanges that are biological, technological and political at the same time. Eating in this project represents the ultimate form of “cosmopolitics” [2], an ideal ground for design experiments with temporary assemblages of heterogeneous actors and forces that define society immersed in emerging technologies and changing scientific paradigms. From global supply chains to bodily metabolic exchanges eating involves political, technological, biological but also social acts that cut across various scales and form complex systems of relations and interdependencies. American fast food soliloquies, communal and family organized meals, the street-food culture of Singaporean “hawker” stalls, European restaurant enclaves for small elites and community pubs represent the complex relation between technological, political and economic systems involved in eating. These eating practices and systems are changing nowadays with the rise of social media, new scientific knowledge related to food and health but also global issues surrounding food security and justice. By studying niche communities organized around novel food and eating practices but also hacked, DIY tools for cooking, we can understand and rethink further what is at stake in today’s food politics and how to define our social stomach. .