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- Panel 1-1 From Food to Pest: Making Golden Apple Snails (In)Edible in Japan /Yen-ling Tsai
Panel 1-1 From Food to Pest: Making Golden Apple Snails (In)Edible in Japan /Yen-ling Tsai
Yen-Ling Tsai
Associate Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan
If food, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is “something that people and animals eat to keep them alive”, what, then, makes something edible in the first place? This paper attempts to think through this question by tracing the story of golden apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata and Pomacea maculata) as “food-in-the- (un)making” in Japan. First imported to Taiwan from South America in the late 1970s as a food source, golden apple snails quickly became a major agricultural pest in tropical and subtropical Asia. In temperate Japan, however, the transformation of golden apple snails from “food” to “pest” was a much more ambiguous process. This, I argue, invites us to reflect on the question of what constitutes (in)edibility. Rather than presuming that the edibility/inedibility distinction is a given, I follow Alex Blanchette and Marianne Lien’s recent provocation (2023: 111-113) that we should be more attentive to the potentials of edibilities’ others: the inedible and the non-edible (i.e.things do not a priori register as either edible or inedible), and all of the many things that people refuse to consume. In so doing, (in)edibility becomes a thresholding project that involves multispecies and heterogeneous processes in which a substance’s status as food and an organism’s status as eater are mutually realized, or not.
Associate Professor, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU), Taiwan
If food, according to Cambridge Dictionary, is “something that people and animals eat to keep them alive”, what, then, makes something edible in the first place? This paper attempts to think through this question by tracing the story of golden apple snails (Pomacea canaliculata and Pomacea maculata) as “food-in-the- (un)making” in Japan. First imported to Taiwan from South America in the late 1970s as a food source, golden apple snails quickly became a major agricultural pest in tropical and subtropical Asia. In temperate Japan, however, the transformation of golden apple snails from “food” to “pest” was a much more ambiguous process. This, I argue, invites us to reflect on the question of what constitutes (in)edibility. Rather than presuming that the edibility/inedibility distinction is a given, I follow Alex Blanchette and Marianne Lien’s recent provocation (2023: 111-113) that we should be more attentive to the potentials of edibilities’ others: the inedible and the non-edible (i.e.things do not a priori register as either edible or inedible), and all of the many things that people refuse to consume. In so doing, (in)edibility becomes a thresholding project that involves multispecies and heterogeneous processes in which a substance’s status as food and an organism’s status as eater are mutually realized, or not.