What Is Eating? Studying Bodies, Fluids & Environments

What Is Eating?

Studying a topic starts out by not knowing what it is. This is why the title of this website is a question. The Eating Bodies Fluid Network brings together researchers from diverse disciplines to investigate how eating shapes — and is shaped by — bodies, fluids, environments, and social worlds.

Our work spans sensory science, ethnography, anthropology, and environmental humanities, with a shared interest in metabolism, water, care, health, and multispecies relations.

The Eating Bodies Fluid Network approaches eating not as a settled biological act but as an open question. Researchers from anthropology, sensory science, and environmental studies collaborate to examine how ingestion connects human bodies with broader metabolic systems, water cycles, and multispecies relationships. The network treats the body as a fluid, permeable entity shaped by what it takes in and what passes through it, challenging tidy distinctions between inside and outside, self and environment.

A central strand of inquiry concerns water as both substance and relation. Bodies are mostly water, and eating always involves aqueous processes of dissolution, transport, and transformation. The network investigates how water flows through bodies, agricultural systems, and watersheds, linking intimate acts of drinking and digesting to larger questions of scarcity, contamination, and care across human and more-than-human communities.

Sensory science offers another lens through which the network examines eating. Rather than treating taste as mere preference, researchers study how sensory experience is shaped by culture, memory, and material environments. Laboratory experiments and ethnographic fieldwork together reveal how flavor perception emerges at the intersection of biological apparatus and social practice, opening new ways to understand why eating matters beyond nutrition alone.

Ethnographic fieldwork anchors the network’s approach to metabolism and food practices. Researchers spend time in kitchens, clinics, farms, and restaurants, observing how people navigate dietary norms, health advice, and the material demands of daily sustenance. This attention to lived experience foregrounds the temporal rhythms of eating—seasonal cycles, life stages, and the slow accumulation of bodily effects that diets produce over time.

The network also engages critically with weight, metabolism, and medical interventions such as bariatric surgery. By examining how obesity is framed as a disease and how treatment technologies reshape bodies and subjectivities, researchers question dominant narratives about individual responsibility. Instead, they situate body weight within wider ecologies of food availability, socioeconomic pressure, and cultural norms that govern what and how people eat.

Multispecies perspectives are woven throughout the network’s activities. Eating is never a solo human affair; it involves plants, animals, microbes, and the countless commensal organisms that inhabit guts and food systems. Workshops and publications explore how eating creates relationships across species boundaries, raising questions about reciprocity, exploitation, and the shared metabolic landscapes that connect all living beings.

The network extends its inquiry into food waste and wasting as both material and conceptual problems. What gets discarded from kitchens and bodies reveals cultural assumptions about value, purity, and excess. Researchers trace how food waste moves through municipal infrastructures, compost piles, and ecosystems, while also considering how certain eaters and eating practices get marked as wasteful or disordered within prevailing social frameworks.

Through publications, workshops, and collaborative events, the network fosters dialogue across disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Researchers working on Latin American extractivist conflicts, European food laboratories, and Dutch water management share insights that unsettle taken-for-granted categories. The aim is not to settle the question of what eating is, but to keep it open, generative, and responsive to a changing world.