Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. Maintaining the focus on eating initiated there, this book now explores not only how imaginings, mobilizations and relationships of care actively shape eating, but also the part played by eating in the production and breaching of performances of care. By paying attention to this multi-directionality of entanglements between food and care, Careful Eating examines what is made and unmade by the individual act of eating itself, and also the ways in which eating is viewed, critiqued and governed by Others. In tandem, but from a differing disciplinary standpoint, critical realist approaches to care have also sought to take account of lived bodily materialities and their wider contexts without resorting to biological reductionism. The ingesting bodies have increasingly become key sites both of 'surveillance medicine'.