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DOI 10.60531/INSIGHTOUT.2023.1.5| TAVAKOLI: BUTTA LA PASTICHE!_ INSIGHTOUT 1(2023) 32 but on how their food is bred, rai­sed, slaughtered, and sold. Introduction In his Physiology of Taste; or, Transcendental Gastro­nomy, 19th century lawyer and epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin gives a definition of the figure of the gastronome. In a series of prefatory aphorisms, he writes:“The destiny of nations depends upon the manner in which they are fed.” 1 Brillat-Savarin is de­scriptive rather than prescriptive here, observing some general truth about the time in which he lived and ate. Nonetheless, the aphorism begs the ques­tion: Can the future of a nation be strengthened, undermined, or in any way altered or redirected by manipulating the diet of its body politic? In 2013, butcher-poet Dario Cecchini travelled from his native Chianti Hills in central Tuscany, Italy, to Copenhagen, Denmark, where—in a circus tent set up on the harbour island of Refshaleøen—he reci­ted Dante and slaughtered a pig. It was a political performance: a call to bear witness to an existential threat looming over a racial minority whose mem­bers are scattered all over the globe—a race of local Butchers. In this tent and for this audience, the future of nations depends not only on how its members eat This is a paper about sociotech­nical systems constructed around local or geographically indicated foods and the imaginaries that are baked into them. I raise the question of how sociotechnical imaginaries that both give rise to, and emerge out of, such foods naturalise social categories of community, culture, or state in such a manner that once flexib­le(cultural) practices are ossi­fied in place and time. I combine Science and Technology Studies literature on sociotechnical imaginaries with the an­thropological concept of Gastronationalism to ask how the feeding of a nation becomes proxy for the nourishment of a body politic. Furthermore, I queer the timelines along which these sociotechnical ima­ginings unfold. Rather than invoking the future to bear upon the present, the sociotechnical narratives composed around food set their referent in the past, tacking between what has been and what is yet to be, with the present existing as an incidental point on their arc. What is strange here is not that the past plays a role in the imagining of the nation in the pre­sent. This has been well described by scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm as a com­ponent of national narratives or tradition-making. What is strange is that this queer unfolding of time, so clearly described in these texts from the fields of political science and history, has been completely overlooked in discussions of sociotechnical imagina­ries, even where those imaginaries participate in the making of an image of(sociotechnical) nations. The timeline of the sociotechnical imaginary appears to be one where the future hangs over the present, the 1 Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; or, Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. Fayette Robinson(Philadelphia, 1854), 25.