2-hour guided investigation into food, the body and democracy + drink

Short provocations · extracts · collective experiment · drink

We tend to think of democracy as something that happens in parliaments, elections and protests. But political power also operates much closer to the body.

What's available to eat, what's affordable, what's advertised to us, what children learn to want.. None of that is neutral, and much of it is not decided by the people eating.

This evening starts there, and then goes one step further: if the systems shaping what we eat also shape our attention, our mood, our capacity to concentrate and think, what does that mean for our capacity to participate in collective life at all?

Drawing on biology, food systems and ideas from Ultra-Processed People, Ultra-Processed Women and How Emotions Are Made, we'll explore the relationship between food environments, the brain and the body, and the conditions underlying human agency.

The evening will combine short provocations, brief extracts, collective discussion and a practical exercise inviting participants to look differently at the food environment around them, and to identify where they have, and can reclaim, agency.

The aim isn't to tell you what to eat. It is to leave you with a different understanding of your own agency, and of the systems that shape it.

If our bodies are part of the infrastructure of democracy, then taking back some power over our bodies can also be a way of taking back political power.

Hosted by Linda Salamé, founder of Body Security.

Food engineer, political scientist and storyteller. Former policy officer at the European Commission.