In person icon Back to Your Roots: Radical politics and traditional food in the European far right

Abstract

This panel explores food discourses and practices to shed new light on far-right politics and their understandings of radicality. Food prescriptions reveal the far right as a life project, creating desirable identities as "fit strong men" or a shared community through visions of shared traditional food consumption, reiterating the ideal of the nation as racial family. Food discourses reveal radicality in at least two important ways: the close saturation of far-right ideals in the mundane and minute details of life, and the development of a radical theory of knowledge and society evoked in discourses of tradition and nutrition. The varied papers in this panel look at far-right food politics as going beyond populist discourses of traditional food, or “white food for white families.” Each offers complex ways of articulating the relationship between food and radical politics: as expressing contrasting ideals of the body as a site for tradition or eugenic fitness, for the creation of far-right expertise and its legitimation as beauty, a site for the production of strong jawed discipline, or a subtle yet profitable ideological enterprise.

Title	Details
Porridge Fascism: Dietary Discipline In The History Of The Far Right	View Paper Details
“Against politically correct nutrition”: Ancestral foods and far-right knowledge production	View Paper Details
Rally Around The Meatball: Why does the Far Right mobilize against Lab-Grown Meat?	View Paper Details
Not All Goulash and Bratwurst: Ideas of Traditional Food and Health in the Hungarian and German Extreme Right	View Paper Details