Eating Roo: of things that BEcomE food 33 Eating Roo: of things that BEcomE food Elspeth Probyn Abstract This essay pursues the processes and obstacles involved in making food out of an animal. Taking kangaroos and roo meat as the object of investigation, the essay follows roo through environmentalist arguments, promotional campaigns, animal activists and decades of Skippy. Following kangaroo entails tracking the interconnections and disconnections between assessments of environmental sustainability and the sentiment that the kangaroo is a ‘friend’; between the association of roo meat as pet food and the attempt to produce a cuisine around it. It also means following roo from Australia to Russia and the Czech Republic. Based on the assumption that food is intractably and simultaneously both cultural and ‘beyond-cultural’ (agricultural, metabolic, biological and so on) the essay argues for a complex description of its phenomenal forms. Keywords kangaroo, global-local, alienation, intimacy, metabolic, food scares, The other GFC, the global food crisis, has brought a renewed public and academic attention to questions of what we eat, where it comes from, how much it costs, and whether it is sustainable. Diseases of over-eating mingle with starvation and, although globally disconnected, are often caused by malnutrition: the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’ health still comes down to colonial staples of white flour, white sugar, and white power (to coin the title of Tim Rowse’s 1998 book). 1 Coinciding, in ways that are more than coincidental, with a growing awareness and at times panic about global warming and climate change, people are becoming attuned to how what we always deemed as edible (corn, soya) are being turned into non-edible things like bio-fuels. And as one of the most virulent forms of globalisation, there is a seemingly endless circulation of food scares about things we had thought were edible - chickens that carry flu, cows that turn mad, eggs that are bad. Studying food has never been so crucial, or so complex. Over the last several years, I have been working to bring together my previous research in feminist cultural studies - with a particular focus on subjectivities, practices and the materiality of culture - to bear on questions of food. What I am calling alimentary cultural studies of necessity studies the whole gamut of factors and feeling associated with the production and consumption of food. It must consider the places where food is produced, where it is eaten, how natural entities are transformed into commodities within a context of globalisation and local communities. In addition, questions of uneven distribution and inequalities are never far from the surface. As a project 2 it roams widely over doi:10.3898/nEWf.74.02.2011 1. Tim Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, http://dx.doi. org/10.1017/ CBO9780511518287 2. ‘Taste & Place: The Transglobal Production and Consumption of Food and Drink’, Funded by the Australian Research Council, 2009-2011.