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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

The touch of salt: On time and embodiment in food practices related to excessive salt consumption

Résumé

Food consumption is an inescapable maintenance practice. Entangled with socio-demographic, socio-cultural, environmental and techno-scientific transitions (Poulain, 2021), food practices enact care (or not) and embody imagination for possible futures. This manifests in the orders of sensing (Voß and Guggenheim, 2019) and valuing (Heut’s and Mol, 2013), as well as in techno-scientific desires and public policies related to food security, palatability, and public health (El Bilali, 2020; Gorski & Roberto, 2015). This paper presents work-in-progress within a research project exploring excessive consumption of salt/sodium in France. I propose an alternative approach to the WHO (2013) strategy for global salt intake reduction by 2025, attending to salt intake as an embodiment of care, embedded in different timescapes. My findings are grounded in ethnographic observations in 13 households, two public workshops at the House of Youth and Culture in an underprivileged neighbourhood, and a collective experiment with a feminist association ‘Talk to Them’, all in Toulouse and surroundings. I situate salt practices in specific time-space configurations (snacking while working, cooking dinner at home, etc.) and attend to the embodied ways of knowing, such as tasting and touching. The latter being an explorative and slow mode of knowing, requiring time and continuous oscillation between touching and being touched (Myers & Dumit, 2011). I propose that caring for salt is a work-intensive embodied practice, which articulates the contradiction of maintenance time (tinkering, cooking, eating) and production time (working, inventing, reformulating). Within this practice, the two meanings of salt emerge: ‘for the pleasure of eating’ and ‘as a danger for health’. These are associated with two salt temporalities: ‘fast salt’ (invisible, hidden in transformed products, emerging from ‘not having time’) and ‘slow salt’ (available for seeing and touching, absorbing time). I conclude by reflecting how touch offers emancipatory potential in food practices research.

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Dates et versions

hal-04223910 , version 1 (02-10-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04223910 , version 1

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Alexandra Endaltseva. The touch of salt: On time and embodiment in food practices related to excessive salt consumption. EASST (European Association for the Study of Science and Technology) annual conference - The politics of technoscientific futures., Jul 2022, Madrid, Spain. ⟨hal-04223910⟩
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