International intellectual property (IP) law for pharmaceuticals has fundamentally shifted in the twenty-first century from a property-centric to a human rights view. Scholars tend to explain this transformation in the context of both the power struggle between developing and developed countries, and the influence of a social movement that criticized IP rights as hindering access to essential medicines. Yet, these explanations leave out the central role of two international organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and particularly their permanent staffs, whose boundary disputes have shaped international IP law at the intersection of trade and global health. Bringing into conversation historical and legal literatures on global health and IP, this article traces how a human rights perspective on IP emerged as a strategy to reconcile the WHO staff’s sociomedical views of health with an increasingly dominant set of global IP rules. It shows how the WHO staff used the language of economics—an analytical frame favored by the WTO—to advance a then unorthodox economic understanding of IP as a type of governmental regulation. This allowed the WHO to argue that states should enjoy regulatory autonomy to curtail IP rights in order to meet broader state objectives, such as human rights protection. Paradoxically, despite their divergent views on the nature of IP, both WTO and WHO engagement with it heralded the emergence of a new technocratic view of global health that focuses on patentable medicines and technologies, and that has ultimately turned away from the WHO’s sociomedical roots.
{"title":"The Intellectual Property Turn in Global Health","authors":"Laura G. Pedraza-Fariña","doi":"10.1086/713703","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/713703","url":null,"abstract":"International intellectual property (IP) law for pharmaceuticals has fundamentally shifted in the twenty-first century from a property-centric to a human rights view. Scholars tend to explain this transformation in the context of both the power struggle between developing and developed countries, and the influence of a social movement that criticized IP rights as hindering access to essential medicines. Yet, these explanations leave out the central role of two international organizations, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and particularly their permanent staffs, whose boundary disputes have shaped international IP law at the intersection of trade and global health. Bringing into conversation historical and legal literatures on global health and IP, this article traces how a human rights perspective on IP emerged as a strategy to reconcile the WHO staff’s sociomedical views of health with an increasingly dominant set of global IP rules. It shows how the WHO staff used the language of economics—an analytical frame favored by the WTO—to advance a then unorthodox economic understanding of IP as a type of governmental regulation. This allowed the WHO to argue that states should enjoy regulatory autonomy to curtail IP rights in order to meet broader state objectives, such as human rights protection. Paradoxically, despite their divergent views on the nature of IP, both WTO and WHO engagement with it heralded the emergence of a new technocratic view of global health that focuses on patentable medicines and technologies, and that has ultimately turned away from the WHO’s sociomedical roots.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"36 1","pages":"241 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/713703","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44806446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was designated as having the same rights as a human person. The decision drew upon Maori belief in the animate status of nonhuman beings and depended on the legal power of a Western state. This article examines those two factors in relation to the history of drinking water as an essential part of human diet, focusing on early modern England/Britain. In the early modern period, water was stripped of a life-giving force with which earlier European authorities (not unlike the Maori) had endowed it, even as water was becoming a generic component of a recommended diet—recommended, not least, by state authorities. Medical interpreters who published their works in English distanced themselves from definitions of matter that had considered water as itself vital, and instead defined the material components of a healthy diet, including water, in terms that avoided any hint of vitalism. Encounter with the dietetic advice of other cultures did not revive belief in water’s vitalist properties; rather, that advice was assimilated to new expectations that beverages, especially water, should maintain a cool body and temperament. These transformations took place in an imperial context. It was the Royal Navy that declared the minimum units of drinking water necessary for humans (meaning its sailors), which was a historically novel development. To uncover these trends is to explore how change occurs, and therefore how it might occur in the future, as state power may more frequently need to align with beliefs in animate nature that today are mostly non-Western beliefs, in order to protect natural features and resources, not least for human health.
{"title":"Why Drink Water?","authors":"J. Chaplin","doi":"10.1086/708805","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708805","url":null,"abstract":"In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was designated as having the same rights as a human person. The decision drew upon Maori belief in the animate status of nonhuman beings and depended on the legal power of a Western state. This article examines those two factors in relation to the history of drinking water as an essential part of human diet, focusing on early modern England/Britain. In the early modern period, water was stripped of a life-giving force with which earlier European authorities (not unlike the Maori) had endowed it, even as water was becoming a generic component of a recommended diet—recommended, not least, by state authorities. Medical interpreters who published their works in English distanced themselves from definitions of matter that had considered water as itself vital, and instead defined the material components of a healthy diet, including water, in terms that avoided any hint of vitalism. Encounter with the dietetic advice of other cultures did not revive belief in water’s vitalist properties; rather, that advice was assimilated to new expectations that beverages, especially water, should maintain a cool body and temperament. These transformations took place in an imperial context. It was the Royal Navy that declared the minimum units of drinking water necessary for humans (meaning its sailors), which was a historically novel development. To uncover these trends is to explore how change occurs, and therefore how it might occur in the future, as state power may more frequently need to align with beliefs in animate nature that today are mostly non-Western beliefs, in order to protect natural features and resources, not least for human health.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"99 - 122"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708805","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48199614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the mid-nineteenth century, animal flesh was subject to a range of treatments in an effort to preserve meat grown on the fringes of the British Empire (in Australia and New Zealand, South and North America) for consumption in urban centers in Britain. Focusing on the publications of the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture, and allied sources such as the Lancet, this article demonstrates that the more a preservative technique transformed animal flesh, the more likely consumers—often presumed to hail from the poor and working classes—were to resist it. This resulted in frustration among elite “men of science and industry,” who held that tinned, canned, dried, or chemically treated meats were a “great boon” to precisely these classes. By refusing to consume industrial charqui, which was salted and dried, or by purchasing imported tinned Australian beef or mutton only unwillingly, the lower classes frustrated the ambitions of would-be tastemakers in the Society of Arts, who interpreted consumer resistance in their articles and published reports as the lower orders’ refusal to act in their own best interest. Importantly, it was the very changeability of meat—its figurative malleability as well as its material inconstancy—that enabled industrial transformations, consumer resistance, and its cultural symbolisms, making it a particularly rich object of study for historians of science.
{"title":"The Shape of Meat","authors":"Rebecca J Woods","doi":"10.1086/709185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709185","url":null,"abstract":"In the mid-nineteenth century, animal flesh was subject to a range of treatments in an effort to preserve meat grown on the fringes of the British Empire (in Australia and New Zealand, South and North America) for consumption in urban centers in Britain. Focusing on the publications of the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture, and allied sources such as the Lancet, this article demonstrates that the more a preservative technique transformed animal flesh, the more likely consumers—often presumed to hail from the poor and working classes—were to resist it. This resulted in frustration among elite “men of science and industry,” who held that tinned, canned, dried, or chemically treated meats were a “great boon” to precisely these classes. By refusing to consume industrial charqui, which was salted and dried, or by purchasing imported tinned Australian beef or mutton only unwillingly, the lower classes frustrated the ambitions of would-be tastemakers in the Society of Arts, who interpreted consumer resistance in their articles and published reports as the lower orders’ refusal to act in their own best interest. Importantly, it was the very changeability of meat—its figurative malleability as well as its material inconstancy—that enabled industrial transformations, consumer resistance, and its cultural symbolisms, making it a particularly rich object of study for historians of science.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"123 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709185","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44331618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Some recent authors have argued that “Indian Systems of Knowledge,” such as Ayurvedic medicine, cannot be historicized. They argue that Ayurvedic medicine must be understood as a “system” and with reference to its “metaphysical foundations.” Food has often played an important part in these antihistoricist arguments about traditional South Asian medicines. In this article, I first describe and historicize these antihistoricisms by delineating both their colonial origins and their recent nationalist appropriations. I also argue that history of science needs to distinguish between different types of antihistoricisms emerging from different academic and political contexts. I then move on to show how food history actually can be deployed to subvert these antihistoricist claims. I pursue three interrelated inquiries to support my case. First, I demonstrate that the category of “food” is inappropriate for the textual heritage of Ayurveda, and that we need to be more sensitive to specific technical categories, such as anupana, pathya, and dravya, within which foodstuffs were accommodated. Second, I demonstrate that new foods, especially exotic New World foods, were absorbed into each of these technical categories recognized in Ayurveda. Finally, I show that these new foods did not simply leave the categories themselves untouched. The embodied experiences of the scholar-physicians’ palates substantially transformed the allegedly disembodied, ahistorical categories they wrote about. I argue, then, that far from being an ahistorical fossil as the proponents of antihistorical arguments would have us believe, Ayurvedic medicine was a rich, heterogeneous, and historically dynamic tradition, and food history is singularly well placed to testify to that dynamism.
{"title":"Historicizing “Indian Systems of Knowledge”","authors":"P. Mukharji","doi":"10.1086/709541","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709541","url":null,"abstract":"Some recent authors have argued that “Indian Systems of Knowledge,” such as Ayurvedic medicine, cannot be historicized. They argue that Ayurvedic medicine must be understood as a “system” and with reference to its “metaphysical foundations.” Food has often played an important part in these antihistoricist arguments about traditional South Asian medicines. In this article, I first describe and historicize these antihistoricisms by delineating both their colonial origins and their recent nationalist appropriations. I also argue that history of science needs to distinguish between different types of antihistoricisms emerging from different academic and political contexts. I then move on to show how food history actually can be deployed to subvert these antihistoricist claims. I pursue three interrelated inquiries to support my case. First, I demonstrate that the category of “food” is inappropriate for the textual heritage of Ayurveda, and that we need to be more sensitive to specific technical categories, such as anupana, pathya, and dravya, within which foodstuffs were accommodated. Second, I demonstrate that new foods, especially exotic New World foods, were absorbed into each of these technical categories recognized in Ayurveda. Finally, I show that these new foods did not simply leave the categories themselves untouched. The embodied experiences of the scholar-physicians’ palates substantially transformed the allegedly disembodied, ahistorical categories they wrote about. I argue, then, that far from being an ahistorical fossil as the proponents of antihistorical arguments would have us believe, Ayurvedic medicine was a rich, heterogeneous, and historically dynamic tradition, and food history is singularly well placed to testify to that dynamism.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"228 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709541","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41586417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Germans were instrumental in shaping “nutritional modernity,” an era stretching from the 1840s to the present, in which nutrition became a vibrant field of scientific study as well as a preeminent tool of social control. Nutrition emerged as a scientific discipline in German laboratories and statistical studies in the nineteenth century. Responding to recurrent bouts of food insecurity associated with key moments of national crisis, moreover, German scientists turned hunger into a major social problem whose best solution lay in their hands. The article begins by considering major nineteenth-century contributions to nutrition science, from Carl Voit’s intake-output method to Max Rubner’s caloric vision of the human body. Second, the article investigates the development of nutrition as a scientific discipline against the backdrop of recurrent cycles of nutritional insecurity. Fear over the political threat posed by a hungry proletariat at the fin-de-siècle turned nutrition into a labor problem and stimulated the emergence of Volksernährung, an applied branch of nutrition science that was nationalized when the country faced severe food shortages during the First World War. Finally, the article turns to scientists’ social action in important fields such as nutritional prescription and popularization, from their frequent appearance as endorsers of reformist cookbooks in the nineteenth century to their role in developing didactic visual materials and mass scientific spectacles for the state in the twentieth. German nutritional modernity in its scientific aspects emerged from the confluence of these three trends: the scientization of nutrition in the nineteenth century, the medicalization and nationalization of hunger at the fin-de-siècle, and a vibrant tradition of scientific popularization that began in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. The German case provides a particularly useful venue for exploring how the social and scientific aspects of nutrition became entangled with the project of national governance.
{"title":"Nutritional Modernity","authors":"C. Treitel","doi":"10.1086/708971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708971","url":null,"abstract":"Germans were instrumental in shaping “nutritional modernity,” an era stretching from the 1840s to the present, in which nutrition became a vibrant field of scientific study as well as a preeminent tool of social control. Nutrition emerged as a scientific discipline in German laboratories and statistical studies in the nineteenth century. Responding to recurrent bouts of food insecurity associated with key moments of national crisis, moreover, German scientists turned hunger into a major social problem whose best solution lay in their hands. The article begins by considering major nineteenth-century contributions to nutrition science, from Carl Voit’s intake-output method to Max Rubner’s caloric vision of the human body. Second, the article investigates the development of nutrition as a scientific discipline against the backdrop of recurrent cycles of nutritional insecurity. Fear over the political threat posed by a hungry proletariat at the fin-de-siècle turned nutrition into a labor problem and stimulated the emergence of Volksernährung, an applied branch of nutrition science that was nationalized when the country faced severe food shortages during the First World War. Finally, the article turns to scientists’ social action in important fields such as nutritional prescription and popularization, from their frequent appearance as endorsers of reformist cookbooks in the nineteenth century to their role in developing didactic visual materials and mass scientific spectacles for the state in the twentieth. German nutritional modernity in its scientific aspects emerged from the confluence of these three trends: the scientization of nutrition in the nineteenth century, the medicalization and nationalization of hunger at the fin-de-siècle, and a vibrant tradition of scientific popularization that began in the nineteenth century and continued well into the twentieth. The German case provides a particularly useful venue for exploring how the social and scientific aspects of nutrition became entangled with the project of national governance.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"183 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708971","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43242677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From the end of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, Colombian chicha (a fermented beverage made from maize) was at one and the same time alcohol and food, a product produced and consumed on a large scale in an urban setting, and an object of intense scientific scrutiny, with multiple meanings and transformations. In this article, I argue that industrial chicha production, local scientific practices, and food policies and regulations crossed paths in Colombia, influencing each other. I explore the situated and diverse practices of knowledge production about the relationship between chicha, bodies, and society, as well as their actual implications in, and mutual effects with, matters of food governance. In laboratories and hospitals, but also in the places of production and consumption of chicha, Colombian scientists produced toxicological, physiological, nutritional, and statistical knowledge about this beverage, shaping diverse racialized perceptions of local poor populations and their capacities to achieve national progress. In turn, the material transformations in the production of chicha (related to modern urban configurations), the industrial producers of this beverage, as well as the emerging practices of governance over chicha and the bodies of its consumers, influenced the making and use of knowledge claims about this same food product. With this case study, I call attention to some insights that history of science and medicine can offer to the fields of biopolitics and food history, and their interconnections. In methodological terms, I propose a biographical approach that follows some of the multiple historical lives of chicha, both as an object of science and as a commodity.
{"title":"The Scientific Lives of Chicha","authors":"S. Pohl-Valero","doi":"10.1086/709127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709127","url":null,"abstract":"From the end of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, Colombian chicha (a fermented beverage made from maize) was at one and the same time alcohol and food, a product produced and consumed on a large scale in an urban setting, and an object of intense scientific scrutiny, with multiple meanings and transformations. In this article, I argue that industrial chicha production, local scientific practices, and food policies and regulations crossed paths in Colombia, influencing each other. I explore the situated and diverse practices of knowledge production about the relationship between chicha, bodies, and society, as well as their actual implications in, and mutual effects with, matters of food governance. In laboratories and hospitals, but also in the places of production and consumption of chicha, Colombian scientists produced toxicological, physiological, nutritional, and statistical knowledge about this beverage, shaping diverse racialized perceptions of local poor populations and their capacities to achieve national progress. In turn, the material transformations in the production of chicha (related to modern urban configurations), the industrial producers of this beverage, as well as the emerging practices of governance over chicha and the bodies of its consumers, influenced the making and use of knowledge claims about this same food product. With this case study, I call attention to some insights that history of science and medicine can offer to the fields of biopolitics and food history, and their interconnections. In methodological terms, I propose a biographical approach that follows some of the multiple historical lives of chicha, both as an object of science and as a commodity.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"204 - 227"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709127","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42156467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity of limited resources to feed growing numbers, and they sought ways to manage this relationship by “improvements” that combined technological and political innovations in both metropolitan and colonial settings. This article examines how these efforts engaged with population, focusing on several projects relating to food connected with Samuel Hartlib (1660–62) and the Hartlib Circle: Gabriel Plattes’s manifold agricultural improvements for domestic use, Hugh L’Amy and Pierre Le Pruvost’s promotion of colonial trade and fisheries, Cressy Dymock’s corn-setting and “perpetual motion” machines for use in England and Barbados, and John Beale’s promotion of fruit trees and cider. While the Hartlibians developed no theory or doctrine of population and made scant use of demographic quantification, their projects framed the problem of feeding populations central to the management of human multiplication, both as a global, historical concern and as a key problem of colonial empire. They thus shed light not only on the emergence after 1660 of new discourses of demographic quantification, and the background to sustained demographic growth after 1750, but on the origins of population as an object of scientific-cum-political intervention through the medium of food.
{"title":"Food, Population, and Empire in the Hartlib Circle, 1639–1660","authors":"Ted McCormick","doi":"10.1086/709104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/709104","url":null,"abstract":"The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity of limited resources to feed growing numbers, and they sought ways to manage this relationship by “improvements” that combined technological and political innovations in both metropolitan and colonial settings. This article examines how these efforts engaged with population, focusing on several projects relating to food connected with Samuel Hartlib (1660–62) and the Hartlib Circle: Gabriel Plattes’s manifold agricultural improvements for domestic use, Hugh L’Amy and Pierre Le Pruvost’s promotion of colonial trade and fisheries, Cressy Dymock’s corn-setting and “perpetual motion” machines for use in England and Barbados, and John Beale’s promotion of fruit trees and cider. While the Hartlibians developed no theory or doctrine of population and made scant use of demographic quantification, their projects framed the problem of feeding populations central to the management of human multiplication, both as a global, historical concern and as a key problem of colonial empire. They thus shed light not only on the emergence after 1660 of new discourses of demographic quantification, and the background to sustained demographic growth after 1750, but on the origins of population as an object of scientific-cum-political intervention through the medium of food.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"60 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/709104","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44537958","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This is a study of some connections between eating-together and knowing-together. Silicon Valley technoscientific innovation typically involves a coming-together of entrepreneurs (having an idea) and venture capitalists (having private capital to turn the idea into commercial reality). Attention is directed here to a well-publicized type of face-to-face meeting that may occur early in relationships between VCs and entrepreneurs. The specific case treated here is a large number of breakfast meetings occurring over the past twenty-five years or so at a modest restaurant called Buck’s in Woodside, California. Why is it this restaurant? What is it about Buck’s that draws these people? What happens at these meals? And why is it breakfast (as opposed to other sorts of meals)? This article goes on to discuss historical changes in the patterns of daily meals and accompanying changes in the modes of interaction that happen at mealtimes. Breakfast at Buck’s may be a small thing, but its consideration is a way of understanding some quotidian processes of late modern innovation, and it offers a possible model for further inquiries into eating and knowing.
{"title":"Breakfast at Buck’s","authors":"S. Shapin","doi":"10.1086/708943","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/708943","url":null,"abstract":"This is a study of some connections between eating-together and knowing-together. Silicon Valley technoscientific innovation typically involves a coming-together of entrepreneurs (having an idea) and venture capitalists (having private capital to turn the idea into commercial reality). Attention is directed here to a well-publicized type of face-to-face meeting that may occur early in relationships between VCs and entrepreneurs. The specific case treated here is a large number of breakfast meetings occurring over the past twenty-five years or so at a modest restaurant called Buck’s in Woodside, California. Why is it this restaurant? What is it about Buck’s that draws these people? What happens at these meals? And why is it breakfast (as opposed to other sorts of meals)? This article goes on to discuss historical changes in the patterns of daily meals and accompanying changes in the modes of interaction that happen at mealtimes. Breakfast at Buck’s may be a small thing, but its consideration is a way of understanding some quotidian processes of late modern innovation, and it offers a possible model for further inquiries into eating and knowing.","PeriodicalId":54659,"journal":{"name":"Osiris","volume":"35 1","pages":"324 - 347"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/708943","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60711288","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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