205
The Art of Food Rituals
rituals are spatial and temporal encounters that ‘include order, tradition, and prescribed actions but
also innovation and creativity, improvisation and randomness’ (Grimes, 2015: 3). Rituals enacted for
the sacred naturecultural purpose of world-making share an interweaving sequence of three transitions: the separation from ordinary everyday life; the liminal, threshold space of transformative
experiences and closure, which embraces the potential reincorporation of the wisdoms and teachings
which have occurred during the ritual encounter (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960).
The innovation of ritual practices as containers to restore deeply experiential ways of knowing
within a participatory consciousness is an active recovering of Rta, the Sanskrit roots from which both
‘art’ and ‘ritual’ originate. Rta is understood as ‘the synergy of materials, forms and processes … the
dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). These ritual practices offer the potential
for embodied, emergent and evolutionary forms that are responsiveness to self, other, matter and place.
As Victor Turner confrms, the liminal quality inherent in ritual offers the potential to ‘generate and
store a plurality of alternative models for living … in the direction of radical change’ (Turner, 1985:
33). Echoing Turner, Frederique Appfel-Marglin conveys the essential dynamic role of performing
intra-actions or rituals ceremony for ‘making a livable common world’ (Apffel-Marglin, 2011: 162).
Rituals afford us rigorous and extensive thinking-feeling practices by engaging our bodyminds in
the matter, substances and processes of life. As a contemporary ecological arts practice, Touchstones
Earth co-evolve and host rituals as refugia for embodied thinking within a sympoietic sensibility that
honours the sacred as ‘the changing, fowing, thinking/Of the world’ (Bateson quoted in Charlton,
2008: xiv). These choreographies in time and space are performative encounters that encourage
interaction between feeling and knowing, site and psyche, mind and body, nature and culture and
the cycles of past, present and future (Mathews 2003). Within a bounded form, the bodymind experiences being-with oneself, other people, matter and place as a conscious process of regenerative
world-making – the ‘material engagement in labours to sustain interdependent worlds’ (Puig de la
Bellacasa, 2017: 198; Ryan et al. 2016). As Clifford Geertz refects, rituals are spaces where we can
come to know how to act because we know how we feel (Geertz, quoted in Grimes 2015: 1). Thus,
it is in the making of ritual that we can cultivate and practice a sympoietic and political consciousness that respects our interdependent origins with each other and the Earth (Gablik 1992a). Joanna
Macy, in her despair and empowerment sessions, animates healing with ritual work. These rituals
become conduits for deepening into our inner emotional life, reaching out to each other and cultivating actions in respect of the other-than-human world of which we are a part (Macy, 1991). In his
work with ritual, Malidome Some refects that participation in a communitas is ‘a pre-requisite for
true ritual healing, for a sense of belonging that satisfes, and for a rewarding understanding of Spirit’
(Some, 1998: 294). As Matthew Fox considers in conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, ritual has its
value for a radical cosmology of interconnectedness and forms the basis of morality. Fox writes:
All healthy ritual is an invitation to doing things together, not being spectators watching someone else
do something, but inviting people to truly participate with their own bodies, their own images, their
own breath and their own visions.
Fox and Sheldrake (1996: 147)
KNOWING THROUGH FOOD RITUALS
Food decisions impact on all aspects of our lives, every day, every mouthful. Carolyn Steel writes,
‘food emerges as something with phenomenal power to transform not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, cities’ (Steel, 2008: 307). Refecting on the art
of Joseph Beuys and his culinary happenings, Lemke writes of ‘gastrosophy’, a philosophy which
reframes the ritual of food-making as an art and aesthetics of everyday life (Lemke, 2007: 53). In
the ancient Hindu philosophical scriptures of the Upanishads, the nature of knowledge is explored
through the substance and metaphor of food as part of life’s interconnected cycles of decay and
renewal. The translated extract from Sanskrit is a testimony to how food is a profound medium for
‘coming to know’:
The Art of Food Rituals
rituals are spatial and temporal encounters that ‘include order, tradition, and prescribed actions but
also innovation and creativity, improvisation and randomness’ (Grimes, 2015: 3). Rituals enacted for
the sacred naturecultural purpose of world-making share an interweaving sequence of three transitions: the separation from ordinary everyday life; the liminal, threshold space of transformative
experiences and closure, which embraces the potential reincorporation of the wisdoms and teachings
which have occurred during the ritual encounter (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960).
The innovation of ritual practices as containers to restore deeply experiential ways of knowing
within a participatory consciousness is an active recovering of Rta, the Sanskrit roots from which both
‘art’ and ‘ritual’ originate. Rta is understood as ‘the synergy of materials, forms and processes … the
dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). These ritual practices offer the potential
for embodied, emergent and evolutionary forms that are responsiveness to self, other, matter and place.
As Victor Turner confrms, the liminal quality inherent in ritual offers the potential to ‘generate and
store a plurality of alternative models for living … in the direction of radical change’ (Turner, 1985:
33). Echoing Turner, Frederique Appfel-Marglin conveys the essential dynamic role of performing
intra-actions or rituals ceremony for ‘making a livable common world’ (Apffel-Marglin, 2011: 162).
Rituals afford us rigorous and extensive thinking-feeling practices by engaging our bodyminds in
the matter, substances and processes of life. As a contemporary ecological arts practice, Touchstones
Earth co-evolve and host rituals as refugia for embodied thinking within a sympoietic sensibility that
honours the sacred as ‘the changing, fowing, thinking/Of the world’ (Bateson quoted in Charlton,
2008: xiv). These choreographies in time and space are performative encounters that encourage
interaction between feeling and knowing, site and psyche, mind and body, nature and culture and
the cycles of past, present and future (Mathews 2003). Within a bounded form, the bodymind experiences being-with oneself, other people, matter and place as a conscious process of regenerative
world-making – the ‘material engagement in labours to sustain interdependent worlds’ (Puig de la
Bellacasa, 2017: 198; Ryan et al. 2016). As Clifford Geertz refects, rituals are spaces where we can
come to know how to act because we know how we feel (Geertz, quoted in Grimes 2015: 1). Thus,
it is in the making of ritual that we can cultivate and practice a sympoietic and political consciousness that respects our interdependent origins with each other and the Earth (Gablik 1992a). Joanna
Macy, in her despair and empowerment sessions, animates healing with ritual work. These rituals
become conduits for deepening into our inner emotional life, reaching out to each other and cultivating actions in respect of the other-than-human world of which we are a part (Macy, 1991). In his
work with ritual, Malidome Some refects that participation in a communitas is ‘a pre-requisite for
true ritual healing, for a sense of belonging that satisfes, and for a rewarding understanding of Spirit’
(Some, 1998: 294). As Matthew Fox considers in conversation with Rupert Sheldrake, ritual has its
value for a radical cosmology of interconnectedness and forms the basis of morality. Fox writes:
All healthy ritual is an invitation to doing things together, not being spectators watching someone else
do something, but inviting people to truly participate with their own bodies, their own images, their
own breath and their own visions.
Fox and Sheldrake (1996: 147)
KNOWING THROUGH FOOD RITUALS
Food decisions impact on all aspects of our lives, every day, every mouthful. Carolyn Steel writes,
‘food emerges as something with phenomenal power to transform not just landscapes, but political structures, public spaces, social relationships, cities’ (Steel, 2008: 307). Refecting on the art
of Joseph Beuys and his culinary happenings, Lemke writes of ‘gastrosophy’, a philosophy which
reframes the ritual of food-making as an art and aesthetics of everyday life (Lemke, 2007: 53). In
the ancient Hindu philosophical scriptures of the Upanishads, the nature of knowledge is explored
through the substance and metaphor of food as part of life’s interconnected cycles of decay and
renewal. The translated extract from Sanskrit is a testimony to how food is a profound medium for
‘coming to know’: