ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Metabolic closures: what happens when foodways end?

• In Event: Metabolic Frontiers: Transforming Matter and Energy in the 20th Century

English Abstract

This paper asks: what happens when foodways end? I call attention to the temporal converse of the metabolic frontier - what I term metabolic closures, food systems which have ended due to ecological, cultural, or political change. While attention is increasingly paid to the loss of foods from cultural traditions, that attention has not yet been extended to how that loss reverberates through systems of food production. In this paper I will focus on the example of Azorean whaling. After the 1982 International Whaling Commission moratorium on commercial whaling, fisheries scientists and managers - under the belief the moratorium would be temporary - attempted to keep companies, nations and consumers interested in whaling. While the IWC itself was consumed by internal conflict over the moratorium, many former whaling communities, including the Azores, began to move on and find other uses for whales, namely tourism. This created the interesting situation in which revered fisheries and whaling scientist John Gulland, FRS, visited the Azores to convince local leaders to refocus on whaling and shift away from ecotourism. The contrasting responses between former whalers and former whaling scientists and managers challenges received notions about the relative vulnerability of food producers and resource management scientists in the aftermath of major food system shifts.

Author

• Aaron Van Neste, Oberlin College