Synonyms
Introduction
The great performance artist Linda Montano once proclaimed, “Food is in the middle of everything” (2001, p. 181). In the opening montage to the Japanese edition of the pioneering cooking competition show Iron Chef, a judge exclaims, “I feel as if Iron Chef is speaking to me through the food!” These dual connotations of media – as middleness and as means of communication – aptly synthesize the complex and multifaceted ways in which food functions to mediate human experience.
At its broadest, food serves to broker the sensory, social, and creative layers of human experience. Such mediations occur at various points of the food cycle – from production to preparation to consumption – shaping individual and collective identity.
At its root, the term media points to an intermediate state in time or space. Indeed, media is derived from the Latin root medius, which in the sixteenth century was roughly equivalent to “the...
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Davidson, J. (2018). Food as Media. In: Kaplan, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6167-4_596-1
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