Shaping seaweed as a food in southwest England (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

This resource is an application for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. My research explores how demand – and relatedly, taste – for seaweed-as-food is changing in southwest England. Approaching the study of changing food habits as mutually constitutive shifts in production and consumption, and cultural and economic forces, my research asks how the material reality of anthropogenic environmental change, and what could be described as a ‘logic of sustainability’, interrelate with these dynamics to shape seaweed, materially and symbolically, as a particular kind of ‘food’. I approach the study of mutually implicated shifts in seaweed supply and demand through the ‘lens’ of cultural intermediaries, and the business strategies and everyday practices of ‘tastemakers’. I contribute to anthropological scholarship that theorises changes in food habits by focusing on ‘middle chain’ actors – arguably, an understudied perspective – and the interstitial practices that link ‘production’ and ‘consumption’. Following a ‘relational turn’ in the anthropology of food, I also consider how ‘demand’ for food is emerging through situated interactions, through collaborative fieldwork in Falmouth, Cornwall. My project advances key debates in food studies, but also brings these into conversation with more-than-human approaches, maritime anthropology, and the blue humanities, by enquiring into the specificity, and special nature, of seaweed as a plant from the sea.