1 - Sympoeisis and Early Modern Cooking : Troubling the Boundaries of Human/Nonhuman

Summary

Abstract

As a site of food and medicine preparation, the early modern kitchen served as an interface between human and nonhuman, the house and its environs. This chapter considers how cooking illustrates what Donna Haraway calls ‘sympoeisis’ or ‘collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries.’ I argue that work in and out of (and across) the early modern kitchen provides a useful way to rethink what it means to be human and nonhuman, how cooking is an endeavour that particularly blurs the lines between them. Cooking, that is, is an inherently ‘tentacular’ practice (drawing again on Haraway), one that highlights webbed relations between co-agentic things (human and nonhuman alike).

Keywords: transcorporeality, sympoesis, recipes, nonhuman, gathering, contingency

As a site of food and medicine preparation, the early modern kitchen served as an interface between the human and nonhuman worlds. But cooking—and its pre-preparation and consumption as well as its restorative qualities—reflects and depends on relationships that defy simple boundaries between self and Other, human and nonhuman. As I will argue, cooking illustrates what Stacy Alaimo terms the ‘trans-corporeal’, an enmeshment of multiple entities that is always in flux; or what Donna Haraway calls ‘sympoeisis’, which she defines as ‘collectively producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries’. This is not to say that early modern cooking was a romantic enterprise of intimacy with the nonhuman, though. After all, preparing food necessitated bludgeoning, decapitating, and exsanguinating animals, and wading through muck and braving the elements to gather plants.

In this chapter, I draw on Alaimo's and Haraway's notions to consider how work in—as well as outside and across the boundaries of—the early modern kitchen is inherently sympoeitic, transcorporeal, a site of enmeshment and ‘collectively producing systems’ that forces us to rethink what it means to be human and nonhuman; and, in turn, how this blurring of human-nonhuman also challenges how we understand such a seemingly straightforward notion as ‘cooking’.