Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol

A book I return to for its careful orientation shift: treating eating not as a topic to explain from a distance, but as a practice that demands attentiveness to relations, bodies, materials, and the everyday.

Why I’m reading this

Eating in Theory is one of the books that feels closest to my own dissertation thinking. Even though our home disciplines are different, Mol’s work helped me articulate an orientation shift I was already trying to name. When I first encountered it, I had the experience of recognizing my own questions on the page, but in a form that made them easier to hold, move with, and speak about.

What I’m learning from it

What stays with me is the book’s commitment to staying close to the ordinary without reducing it. Eating is not treated as a simple routine, a personal preference, or a problem to fix. It becomes a site where relations gather: bodies, norms, infrastructures, care, politics, and the more‑than‑human conditions that make eating possible. The book models a way of thinking that does not rush toward conclusions. It lingers, it returns, it adjusts its gaze. That pacing matters for the kinds of questions I’m asking about food in early childhood settings.

I also learned a great deal from Mol’s writing style. There is a clarity to her prose that does not flatten complexity. The book helps the reader stay with complicated ideas without turning them into a performance. It shows how theoretical work can remain close to the textures of lived practice.

Form as method

This book also gave me permission. Its structure and formatting offered a kind of courage: the courage to play with writing, to let thinking move in tangents, and to trust that careful detours can be part of rigorous scholarship. Reading it strengthened my sense that form is not separate from content. The way we write shapes what we can notice, what we can hold, and what we can make possible for a reader.

Connections to my dissertation and to pedagogy

Because my dissertation attends to everyday food moments as pedagogical encounters, this text helped me sharpen how I talk about “fooding” as something that happens in relation, not something we simply manage or evaluate. It supports my interest in what becomes noticeable at the table, what gets organized by institutional habits and expectations, and what kinds of educational worlds are being made through ordinary decisions. It also reminded me that a shift in orientation is often a shift in practice: a different way of attending, a different way of asking, a different way of writing.

Questions I’m sitting with

When I return to this book, I keep circling a few questions:What does it change when we treat eating as a practice that is always relational and situated? What becomes newly visible, and what becomes harder to simplify? And how might this kind of careful, practice-near thinking reshape what early childhood educators understand as curriculum, care, and responsibility?

Invitation

If you’ve read Eating in Theory, I’d love to hear what you took from it. Did it shift your orientation in any way, or give you language for something you were already trying to say?