​

Finally, let it be said here that I am officially AOK with this
​grab-quote being carved on my gravestone:

Amazing artistic depiction of what the interior of an O'Neill cylinder space colony might look like from NASA's "Space Colony Artwork From the 1970s", courtesy NASA Ames Research Center.  Kudos also to Michael D. Gordin's essay "The Unseasonable Grooviness of Immanuel Velikovsky" for introducing me to this image within my current bedtime read: Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Ed.s David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Last year at the tremendously successful GAFS Future of Food Studies conference in St. Louis, I threw out a provocation. Inspiration struck in the form of fantastic papers by Sarah Peterson and (current journal Editor in Chief) Catie Peters , as well a recent article by former GAFS president and Assistant Professor at Rutgers Carla Cevasco, entitled "This is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France." I declared that I wanted an entire panel organized around cannibalism for the next year's conference.
​Well, that time has come. The Future of Food Studies conference will be October 4-6, 2018 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We have launched our CFP inviting panel and paper proposals, due July 6, 2018.  

I was and remain serious about my call for cannibalism. Almost anyone who has eaten food is aware that food is pleasurable, and that it fosters spaces of sociability and connection. Food is delicious. Food is fun. 
Sometimes. 

I want to personally invite submissions of papers and presentations exploring the histories of food that are less comfortable and comforting.

Because food is not always good. Food has not only served as a catalyst for horizontal connections among members of shared communities, but also as a conduit for expressions of raced, classed, gendered, economic, political, and ecological power.

​While accusations of cannibalism have been used as a slur against populations construed as Other to the European imperial gaze, colonial plantations cannibalized the bodies of agricultural laborers in the production of sugar, citrus, and other commodities destined for European consumption. Thinking about cannibalism draws  our attention to the importance of critical race theory, questions of agency, the politics of the archive,  and attention to structures of power. Cannibalism is not constituted solely through the act of consumption, but in a constellation of ideas about human dignity, bodily sovereignty, and rights. Thinking broadly about how communities, ecologies, and bodies have been devoured by human food systems pushes us to address  infrastructures of labor, production, and distribution beyond the kitchen or dining room. ​

I want to suggest that it isn't just Soylent Green that is people, but many of our major food systems that kill, maim, injure, enslave, and erase less privileged populations. This has been happening in times and places exotic to white middle class Americans like "Darkest Africa" in the age of empire but also in places as familiar as Florida in the twenty-first century -- or even the local Whole Foods.

Put another way, I want not just papers about cannibalism, but cannibalistic papers; papers that devour and digest the field of food studies itself. When we look upon the organization of GAFS and the field of food studies more broadly, what type of stories are we telling and which stories are left out? Which scholars and perspectives are we elevating? Which scholars of food are finding more comfortable homes for their scholarship elsewhere, and why? What structures of power are we ourselves complicit in through our scholarly practices as well as our intellectual work?

These questions should be constant food for thought, and will require much mastication. ​Dig in, load up your plates, and send your ideas our way.