IMBISS: A Working Group

IMBISS: a working group is a series of study groups and workshops that think food as that which is simultaneously life sustenance, a cultural ecosystem and a political product. Its curriculum looks at the intersections between eating practices, culinary histories, food production and trade, and global politics.

Each of the series’ sessions will focus on a different food item or practice and open up its political history. They will be looking at how these intersect with colonial histories, global capitalist trade routes, processes of racialisation, economic uneven development, histories of revolutionary organising, between others. The sessions will take the form of either study groups, cooking workshops or supper clubs that center themselves around the learning of these histories.

The aim of this project is to raise public awareness of our deep entanglement in a system of exploitation by observing how everyday objects around us are caught in a web of colonial and imperial relations, oppressive cultural constructs, exploitative capitalist networks of trade and production, as well as environmental exploitation. The study group series also aims at highlighting the relationship between the current climate situation and a long history of capitalist and colonial exploitation. Through the project’s discussions we want to make the participants rethink their relationship with our environment and the way we eat and grow food.

PLANNED SESSIONS:

• Irish butter & the British Empire: food policies in colonised Ireland

• 豆花 (tofu pudding) & the “soyboy”: the sexist and racist discourses around soy

• Molasses & rum: slavery, the plantation & the “Atlantic triangle”

• Rubber colonialism & the Michelin Guide

• Soviet Champagne & the construction of luxury

• Salt & value

• The Inquisition’s Cookbook: food, identity & persecution

• Anti-foraging laws: on capital accumulation

This project is being developed with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.