CONTRIBUTORS Iain Hamilton Grant John Gerrard Michael A. Morris FIELDCLUB Rick Dolphijn Manabrata Guha Carol Goodden Gordon Matta-Clark AO& John Cochran Richard Wrangham Vanina Leschziner Andrew Dakin Sean A. Day Jeremy Millar Dan Mellamphy Nandita Biswas Mellamphy Eugene Thacker Eduardo Viveiros de Castro Dorothée Legrand Gabriel Catren Fernando Zalamea Cookery has never been so high on the agenda of Western popular culture. And yet the endlessly-multiplying TV shows, the obsessive interest in the provenance of ingredients, and the celebration of ‘radical’ experiments in gastronomy, tell us little about the nature of the culinary. Is it possible to maintain that cookery has a philosophical pertinence without merely appending philosophy to our burgeoning gastroculture? How might the everyday sense of the culinary be expanded into a philosophy of ‘culinary materialism’ wherein synthesis, experimentation, and operations of mixing and blending take precedence over analysis, subtraction and axiomatisation? Drawing on resources ranging from anthropology to chemistry, from hermetic alchemy to contemporary mathematics, Collapse VII: Culinary Materialism undertakes a trans-modal experiment in culinary thinking. A wide range of contributors including philosophers, chefs, artists, historians, and synaesthetes examine the cultural, industrial, physiological, alchemical and even cosmic dimensions of cookery, and propose new models of culinary thought for the future.
