Isabella Machado Altoé

Isabella Altoé is a food studies researcher and activist from Brazil. She began by researching veganism and affective memories during her undergrad course. After getting her BA, she worked for a year as a cook in a restaurant and came to realize that food is a never-ending source of knowledge about the world. In 2018, Isabella started a MA in Social Sciences, where she studied immigrant chefs and did ethnographic research in an Argentinian restaurant in Brazil. With a deep interest in anthropology, Isabella is starting an interdisciplinary PhD in Cultural Studies to research food futures in the Anthropocene. She wants to investigate different forms of planting and eating during our environmental and socially challenging time both in Canada and in Brazil. Her academic interests include everything there is to know about food, such as agrifood systems, food activisms, culture and memory, affects, and human and non-human relations. The intention of her work is to complexify our way of thinking about food through a non-anthropocentric approach, without losing sight of the subject’s affective dimension.