Making recipes: Essaying with mess and embodied knowledges

Abstract

How might a writing form that includes both creative and academic work explorewhat sociologist John Law might call the ‘messiness’ of embodied knowledges (Law 2004)? Meeting the challenges of learning to live differently in a world that appears to be becoming increasingly uninhabitable for humans (and many other species) requires different methods of research that allow us to think anew about ‘the messes of reality’ and embodied knowledges (Law 2004: 2). My research threads together the practice of making things with food scraps that would usually otherwise be wasted and the practice of essaying. Drawing on philosopher Lisa Heldke’s notion of ‘cooking as inquiry’ and recipes as tools this paper uses an autoethnographic approach (Ellis et al 2011; Spry 2001) to explore how the form of the essay might expand recipes for things to make from food scraps to include theoretical and philosophical inquiries that have both informed and been informed by the practice of making things with the scraps. In this way, my research and this paper are both about experimentation in everyday cooking-like practices, and experimenting in writing, theorising and research, where the writing is not merely a metaphor, but also enacts the modes of inquiry discovered, explored and played with in the physical practices.