Introducing a Special Issue on Food Stuffs: Materialities, Meanings, and Embodied Encounters

This essay introduces a special issue on food stuffs—meaning both food's material components and the objects through which food is transacted and mediated. Through interdisciplinary dialogue and a range of case studies situated across time and space, it explores the theoretical possibilities and limitations that renewed attention to the materiality of food and embodied encounters can bring to the critical study of food and eating. In so doing, it works to illuminate the myriad ways that materiality and meaning intersect in the context of food.