Brownbag:You Are Never Alone with The Chicken Dinner! Relational Geographies of Food in Southeast Europe

In her seminal contribution on more-than-human perspectives in food studies Sarah Elton postulates that “[…] you are never alone with the chicken dinner, even if you are dining alone” (Elton 2019: 8). But what or whom are we dining with then? Taking this question as a starting point, I look at the relational geographies of food in Southeast Europe focusing on chicken in its commodified form (e.g. chicken breasts, chicken wings or chicken nuggets). Thereby, my contribution is guided by three main intentions: (1) I want to understand how chickens are framed relationally as commodities and how chicken commodities come into being. (2) By looking at commodity circulation, my goal is to unveil how markets are constructed and assembled by human and more-than-human actants and thereby de-naturalize and challenge understandings of markets as self-organized and autonomous entities. And (3) I sketch out a way to construct a multi-sited terrain for the studies of markets. By doing so I want to expand a relational understanding of commodities and their circulation and acknowledge the multiple places, humans and more-than-humans that are dining with us.

Danko Simić is a predoctoral University Assistant at the Department of Geography and Regional Science (University of Graz). He is board member of the Austrian Association of Academic Geography.