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Spinoza Price 2012

During the ceremony, she announced her plans for the prize money.  In the first instance, Mol wants to invest her Spinoza Prize in expanding her research project Eating bodies in Western practice and theory, which takes a fresh look at:

 

  • what it is to eat;
  • what, in practice, are tasting, digesting, wasting, thriving, appreciating;

  • what ‘an eating body’ is and where it begins and ends;

  • how ‘eating’ enduringly changes the world.

Eating practices

Within her research group,  Mol conducts case studies of eating practices. This involves the bringing together of different types of 'knowing', such as physiology, economics and the knowledge of the experienced cook. Various types of 'appreciation' can also be discerned. ‘Good food' can mean: cheap, efficient, good, enough, convenient, and so on, depending on the situation. How do all these registers of ‘knowing’ and ‘appreciation’ relate to each other in terms of eating practices? What can we learn more generally? These questions are central to the Mol’s research.

 

Mol also wants to use the Spinoza Prize to set up a global network of researchers concerned with 'eating, knowing and appreciation’, to foster the dialogue between the Western tradition and the ways of thinking and doing  encountered in other traditions.

About the Spinoza Prize

The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awards the Spinoza Prize, worth 2.5 million euros, on an annual basis to a maximum of four Dutch researchers who rank among the absolute top of science both in the Netherlands and internationally. The scientists receive the prestigious prize for their outstanding and pioneering research. Besides Mol, microbiologist Mike Jetten (Radboud University Nijmegen), mathematician Ieke Moerdijk (Radboud University Nijmegen) and astronomer Xander Tielens (Leiden University) also received this year's prize.