Cooking Back: A Conversation on Food, Power, and Detention

This conversation examines food in the Australian offshore detention system, and traces the multiple registers through which food operated within the refugee camp on Manus Island: as a biopolitical instrument of dependency and control, as a structuring force of daily time, and as a medium through which administrative power rendered itself invisible behind the language of care and procedure. Moving beyond an account of deprivation, the conversation explores how detainees navigated and subverted these regimes through acts of culinary imagination, improvization, and solidarity – from smuggled spices and secretly brewed alcohol to collectively invented rituals like Manus coffee. The piece then turns to more explicit forms of bodily refusal, examining the individual and collective hunger strikes that punctuated life on Manus, including the twenty-one-day siege of 2017, as embodied assertions of dignity and political agency. The conversation closes with a reflection on the afterlife of detention – on what a body carries, and what it takes time to unlearn, long after the gates have opened.