On September 4^th, I gave a keynote at the Irish Humanities Alliance annual conference on the theme “Feeding the Soul”, University College Dublin. My talk, titled “Foodscapes as affective assemblages, or why (food) stories matter”, highlighted the ways food and foodways can challenge, stimulate, and generate ideas about our relationships with others, ourselves, and the environment. The examples I used are stories from two movies which unfold in contexts of precarity and humble manifestations of life. In one of them, a documentary titled “Uyway” (loosely translated as The Seed) the protagonists are indigenous from Peru and potatoes. In the other movie, Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners and I”, the protagonists are French precarious people and potatoes. Humble people, humble food. Putting humans and potatoes on the same level of protagonism was a choice reflecting two of the motivations of the talk, which were to examine connections between embodiment and agency through encounters with food, and to acknowledge the significance of materiality and the non-human world in the construction of ecological narratives. Thanks again to the Irish Humanities Alliance team for organizing this beautiful event!

Raúl Matta (Institut Lyfe Research and Innovation Center)