From Urbanomic (see the website for more details, and to pre-order it):
We are pleased to announce that Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism is now available for advance ordering, and will be published July 1st. Please visit our website at www.urbanomic.com to purchase. A PDF preview of the editorial introduction to the volume will be available on the Urbanomic website soon.
Contributors to the volume include: AO&, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Gabriel Catren, John Cochran, Sean Day, Rick Dolphijn, FIELDCLUB, Michael A. Morris and John Gerrard, Carole Goodden, Iain Hamilton Grant, Manabrata Guha, Dorothée Legrand, Vanina Leschziner and Andrew Dakin, Dan and Nandita Mellamphy, Jeremy Millar, Eugene Thacker, Richard Wrangham, Fernando Zalamea.
There has never been a time when cookery was so high on the agenda of Western popular culture. And yet endlessly-multiplying TV shows, obsessive interest in the provenance of ingredients, and ‘radical’ experiments in gastronomy, tell us little about the nature of the culinary.
Is it possible to develop the philosophical pertinence of the culinary without using philosophy as a support for this endlessly-expanding culture of gastronomy? How might cookery in the restricted sense connect to an extended philosophical sense of the culinary, in which synthesis, combination and experimentation take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation?
Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism brings together work that explores, from many different perspectives, the multifaceted question of cookery and eating. In this volume, a range of contributors – philosophers, chefs, scientists, anthropologists, artists – explore the links between philosophy, chemistry, experimental practice and the culinary arts; chart the consequences of the contemporary return of cookery to scientific precision, in the rarefied world of haute cuisine as in the world of mass- manufactured confections; and explore the material, symbolic, and existential dimensions of food and its preparation. Along the way we discover that the question of a culinary materialism is bound up with some profound and enduring issues in the history of philosophy, and can also suggest new approaches to contemporary philosophical problems.
Collapse VII: Culinary MaterialismJuly 2011Eds. R. Negarestani, R. Mackay560pp TBCLimited Edition 1000 Numbered CopiesISBN 978-0-9553087-9-6£9.99
