Tasting Labs Weeks 8 and 9: Musings on Rebellion.

While this post may be brief, I wanted to take a moment to consider food and taste as rebellion.

Our current society has many rules about what can be eaten and when, and why. Foods and beverages that can alter consciousness are for the most part ‘controlled’. There are age restrictions, circumstance restrictions, etc.

So what about those who drink and eat when they are not supposed to? This could include things so simple as eating cereal for dinner, a minor social oddity, to drinking alcohol while underage, or eating when ritual calls for a fast.

In some ways, the act of rebellious eating is perhaps an act of privilege, because it’s hard to eat something you’re not supposed to when you don’t have access to it at all.

There are many ways that eating as an act of rebellion can be dangerous, such as breaking diets meant to improve health, or drinking or taking drugs while driving. Looking at just a brief moment of what I can think of as a negative act of rebellious eating, there may be more dangerous, negative ways to eat rebelliously than empowering and overall positive ways.

But it is an interesting bit to think about, don’t you think?

I can imagine some ways that eating rebelliously can be positive. Appreciating food from other cultures, if it’s forbidden or stigmatized in your own culture, could be a positive act of rebellion around food. Changing the ceremony around eating, or the company in which eating is done can be a positive act of rebellion, personally or on a larger scale.

Enjoy some end of quarter puzzling on what interesting dynamics there can be when the circumstances where eating becomes rebellion.

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