Collapse Volume VII: Culinary Materialism

Collapse Volume VII: Culinary Materialism
(Reissued Edition)

Reza Negarestani & Robin Mackay (Eds.)

Published by Urbanomic
December 2012
Paperback 108x175mm, 631pp.
ISBN 978-0-9567750-9-2

Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a culinary materialism wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation?

Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking, excavating the cultural, industrial, physiological, chemical and even cosmic grounds of cookery, and proposing new models of culinary thought for the future.

Contents

ROBIN MACKAY & REZA NEGARESTANI - Editorial Introduction
IAIN HAMILTON GRANT - The Chemical Paradigm (Interview)
JOHN GERRARD & MICHAEL A. MORRIS - Corn Bomb: An Extended History of Nitrogen
FIELDCLUB - Whey To Go: On the Hominid Appropriation of the Pig-Function
RICK DOLPHIJN - The New Alimentary Continuum
MANABRATA GUHA - Vague Weaponizations, or The Chemistry of Para-Tactical Engagements
CAROL GOODDEN - FOOD and the City (Interview)
AO& - Where's the Edge of the Pot? (Interview)
JOHN COCHRAN - Object-Oriented Cookery
RICHARD WRANGHAM - Reason in the Roasting of Eggs
VANINA LESCHZINER AND ANDREW DAKIN - Theorizing Cuisine from Medieval to Modern Times: Cognitive Structures, the Biology of Taste, and Culinary Conventions
SEAN DAY - The Human Sensoria and a Synaesthetic Approach to Cooking
JEREMY MILLAR - Black Cake (A Recipe for Emily Dickinson, for Emily Dickinson)
DAN AND NANDITA MELLAMPHY - Ec[h]ologies of the Désêtre
EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO - The Metaphysics of Predation
EUGENE THACKER - Spiritual Meat: Resurrection and Religious Horror in Bataille
DOROTHÉE LEGRAND - Ex-Nihilo: Forming a Body Out of Nothing
FERNANDO ZALAMEA - Analytical Jelly and Transmodern Tatin
GABRIEL CATREN - On Philosophical Alchimery, Or Why All Chimeric Compositions are Philosophical Stones

APPENDIX OF RECIPES - Compiled by the editors