Weibel Lectures: Luiza Prado - Empty Calories
Weibel
Institut für digitale Kulturen
From avocado toast to baked feta pasta, our relations to food
are increasingly influenced and defined by online platforms such as Instagram or TikTok. Hashtags such as #TikTokFood and
#Foodtok have been responsible for amassing billions of views, causing surges of interest in particular ingredients, long
queues to restaurants and the othering of cuisines. As we increasingly consume food through content on screens, the realities
of food production and its environmental impact have been hidden under digital layers of gold-leaf everything, long, melty
strands of cheese, and dramatic reality tv storylines.
Amongst
soaring energy and food costs, labour shortages, cost-of-living crisis and ongoing supply chain issues, we eat with our eyes
and ears. We always have in a sense; depictions of food can be found in the interior of Egyptian tombs; in Roman mosaics in
Pompeii; in the Greek comedies of Aristophanes; in the paintings of Giotto, Jan Van Eyck, Caravaggio, Velásquez, Rembrandt,
or Renoir; in the photography of Daguerre, Man Ray, Sharon Core, or Paulette Tavormina.
Food as entertainment is a geopolitical
issue, masked and filtered through phone lenses yet impossible to disentangle from the thick material articulations of class
and access; geographical location and climate; gender, race and labour. The current hunger for images of beautifully plated
avocado toasts offered by cafés and restaurants in the West is directly connected to the droughts and deforestation currently
affecting entire regions in Chile or Mexico, major producers and exporters of the fruit. Social media foodscapes feed the
emergence of a food politic based on desire and exclusivity, distracting and detaching food from the realities of its production
and climate impact. Hunger tells us a lot about ourselves, and empty political calories still taste better than nothing.
"Empty Calories" follows the history of the legendary (and ostensibly extinct) spice silphium to explore the biopolitics
and necropolitics of online foodscapes, and their disconnection to the interrelations of class, gender, and geography. Examining
how ritual and meaning become diluted when food is subsumed to the exclusive role of entertainment, the talk weaves between
the negotiations of our social location, the political economy of food networks, and the status of food as content to ask:
How does the establishment of the kitchen as a site for performance contribute to distracting us from concrete fears of extinction
and annihilation in the context of climate disaster?Zoom:https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/68389025763 
