The Butcher, the Baker, the Policy Maker: Food Regulation and the Making of Camp Nationalism

• In Event: Ghosts of Modern Futures Past – II

Abstract

On August 26, 2013, Dario Cecchini took to a stage in Copenhagen to butcher a pig in front of an audience of historians, journalists, authors, political activists, filmmakers, and chefs. The setting for this performance was MAD, an annual food symposium tied to Slow Food, the Sustainable Food Alliance of the United Kingdom, and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. As he separated offal from the carcass of his beast, the butcher from Chianti recited passages from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. “Io venni men così com’ io morisse. E caddi come corpo morto cade,” declaimed Cecchini; "I fainted as if I had met my death, and then fell as a dead body falls".

In this paper, I look at the ways in which organisations such as Slow Food, with their particular influence on food and agriculture regulations in Italy and increasingly across Western Europe, evoke a spectre of national identity by calling upon both romanticised pasts that might not ever have been and an undefined future deemed certain to arrive. More specifically, I combine haunting and sociotechnical imaginaries with Susan Sontag’s "Notes on Camp", José Muñoz’s ‘Disidentification’, and the performance of Cecchini, introduced above, to ask how camp gestures and techniques have been drawn into conversations on how we (ought) eat, and what such eating says about who we are, or, more worrying, who we might be made to be.

Author

• Sahar Tavakoli, Cornell University STS