MEAT AND ITS OTHERS

“Meat and its Others” is an exploration of the materiality and onto-epistemological construction of food, and a recipe development class.

We begin by discussing food activities’ role in the production of subjectivities and social positions, and define the recipe as a discursive form that specifies aspects of who the cook is alongside what’s cooked.

We direct particular attention to the meanings and materialities of meat. What’s the deep entanglement of hamburgers with white-supremacist-patriarchal-capitalism about? Meat is indissociable from the historical distinction of human and animal, itself inextricable from the differentiation of races and genders.

Influential texts like Carol Adams’ Sexual Politics of Meat recapitulate philosophical presumptions consistent with liberal humanism and white feminism. Meanwhile, cookbooks like “Afro-Vegan, Decolonize Your Diet!” by Luz Calvo and Catriona Rueda Esquibel and articulations of “Black veganism” by the Ko sisters suggest practical implementations of insights from Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Amanny Ahmad, Dylan Rodriguez, Vincent Woodard, and Zaikiyya Jackson. We also look at films including Okja and PETA commercials.

Beyond static identities like “vegan,” the course invites thinking of our necessary encounter with food as a practice vitally alignable with broader anti-racist, anti-capitalist, decolonial commitments.

As culminating projects, students compose “critical recipes” and bring their results to a culminating virtual dinner party.
Wednesdays, 3-5 PM PST; 6-8 PM EST
​Online on Zoom
120 minute sessions, 5 weeks
July 30th-August 27th, 2025
$125 - $375 Tuition
Select scholarships and solidarity rate discounts available upon request.

INSTRUCTORS

Nicholas Nauman
​This class emerges from my multifarious food work over two decades. After an early education with Food Not Bombs and culinary mutual aid, I worked in NYC restaurants, eventually running the Brooklyn experimental restaurant/ performance space EAT. There, I practiced food service as creative and political intervention, which became a springboard for both art and employment. I have since labored as a private chef and done frequent food-related events in art, music, activist, and pedagogical contexts. ​
Image Credit : pig chef spaghetti by Durkeema