STEALING RECIPES?
OWNERSHIP CLAIMS AND THE CULINARY COMMONS

April 21, 2023 | 2pm – 4pm EDT | GISB 1118 & Zoom

The recipe — as an artifact, a set of claims and a coalescence of labors — exists in a tension between private property and informally governed knowledge commons. In the ever-expanding field of contemporary food media, recipes have become a flashpoint of gendered, racialized and classed claims to cultural representation, which can be at once trite, essentializing, ossifying and nationalist, but also subversive, capacious and world-expanding. In this day-long symposium on recipe theft, we will investigate how recipe creators, distributors and consumers make and contest claims to recipe ownership, how self-governance and intellectual property law address recipe production, how recipe development attempts to codify diffuse cultural knowledges, and how profit is extracted from the control over recipe circulation. 

Drawing on perspectives from across anthropology, history, political economy, media studies, and food studies, this hybrid symposium invites participants to try their hands at navigating the politics of recipe production, combining an interdisciplinary panel with an interactive recipe development workshop. In thinking with recipes we invite participants to interrogate the messy entanglements between knowledge and property, embodiment and mediation, production and culture.

Panelists:

Alicia Kennedy
Writer, Recipe Developer, and Author of No Meat Required

Anny Gaul
Cultural Historian and Assistant Professor, University of Maryland

Sucharita Kanjilal
Incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Bard College

Ariana Gunderson
PhD Student, IU Department of Anthropology

Plus: A Recipe Development Workshop 

with Alicia Kennedy
10 am – Noon, April 21^st
405 N Park Ave, Bloomington IN
In Person ONLY
Registration Required: please sign up at this link.