Epicurean Endocrinology

I’ve been working on Epicurean Endocrinology, a collaborative cooking/science/art/design/curatorial project with the bio artist Byron Rich. Epicurean Endocrinology is a platform for exploring the effects of food on hormones, and hormones on food, through a variety of works including meals, bio-lab experiments, and food-culture productions such as recipes, cookbooks, and cooking shows.

Epicurean Endocrinology is by nature a project that cannot be contained by a single discipline. Mostly because one discipline could not contain all we are doing the wrong way. We are doing bad science, to be sure, but we are also doing unprofessional cooking, quack nutrition, perverse cultural criticism, and just generally being weird.

What we are doing, that genuine experts and professionals cannot, is investigating the intersections of nutrition, marketing, gastronomy, bio-engineering, and agri-science as they relate specifically to gender and sex. Sex, gender, and food are entangled both culturally and biologically, but they generally are not looked at together with anything resembling coherence. Research into this intersection tends to be of the generalist cultural-studies “laughing women with salads” thrust, or esoteric studies of the effects of particular phytoestrogenic compounds on the expression of certain hormone receptors in animal subject testicular tissue.

It occurred to us that it might be a good idea to talk to other people working deeply in the disparate fields we are glossing over and manipulating with the characteristic unconcerned (read: infuriating) glee of the hybrid-hyphenated-artist-type. It also turns out that many people, across disciplines, are interested in food, agriculture, environment, nutrition, gender, sex, and the intersections thereof. Which makes sense, because that is quite a lot of subject areas.

This “blog” is an archive of my lazy, for now email-based, interviews with various people I meet who have something to say about these topics, and some expertise, whether personal or professional, to share. Here’s to citizen science, unbounded by such strictures as method or professional status. Blog posts here will be reposted on cookingsex.biz