Metabolic intimacy at the age of toxic relations: lessons I am learning from my vegan wife
I am sitting at a table outside the now busy Linköping University campus having my lunch. In my headphones Seal sings “crazy” and the sun is shining mildly. The salad I picked from the nearby store is delicious. I look around as I take parcels of food to my mouth. It is delicious. Earlier this day I was talking about academics and toxic environments that they work with or create. I believe this conversation made this lunch I am having not a regular one, instead an opportunity to linger into what makes us human living bodies. One lesson I learned in biology in primary school about bodies is that when there is lack or abundance they seek balance – homeostasis, but how to seek balance in a world that is hanging on a thread?
I remember one day two years ago my wife told me that she wanted to become Vegan. I thought to myself maybe this is one of those trends that people follow and once they understand the implications and hard work they really entail they give up. Two years later, she is now telling me about raising our future children as vegans. For those who don’t know what vegan is, it is a person who doesn’t eat any food stemming from animal for ethical and moral reasons and the rejection of animal commodification. Caring for what one eats is not a new practice nor it is solely Western, it has been turned into an elite and western lifestyle. So let’s get the "oh it is because they are from the West" excuse out of the way, when it comes to caring for what you become intimate with.
I am not a vegan myself. I have been able to find all reasons to safeguard my chicken and fish meat eating habits that I so much cherish. However, with time I started understanding what my wife was doing. She never stopped loving me for my choices but made me aware of what I was taking into my body. I am not trying to turn you into a vegan but invite you to be aware of what you eat. This is the spirit of this conversation with you, reader. Care for a metabolic trip?
Today we hear on the news about the proliferation of toxicity around the world. They occur in rivers, oceans, soils, atmosphere, lakes, etc., you would think, somewhere out there but at the end they all end in our bodies through what Law and Mol (2008:9) call “metabolic intimacy”. I believe eating is one of the most intimate practices of species. Humans and nonhumans are connected in complex ways through metabolism. With humans eating has been also equated to identity as in “we are what we eat”. This is how intimate eating is. It does not just shape identity, it makes you – bio-chemically and socially.
Oceans are expected soon to have more plastic than fish by 2050; rivers are rapidly shifting their regimes though industrial dumping; soils are overfed with fertilizers, nuclear waste, etc., companies and corporations systematically fail to account for food safety, all these things don’t just end in places or natures out there for which the political ecologists or activists will fight for. Feminist scholars have pointed out that the locus of the struggle has long shifted to the body itself. For example, in Amsterdam a young man made a statement against veganism in a vegan festival by eating raw meat. Hence eating become a revolutionary or complicity act for the current regime in which toxic relations are becoming the norm in an ever evolving “slow violence” linking different species across scales and locales.
This is not to exempt vegans from these toxic relations. This text is not an agreement to build peace at home, for food that vegans eat is not produced out of nowhere. It is also produced within these toxic relations in which land grabbing, fertilizers, GMOs, exploitation of poor communities, elitism and neo-coloniality are the norm, however, it was the courage of my wife and other vegans and vegetarians to question the status quo, that dared to question what they become intimate with, that began to question how eating becomes itself a process of disabling or crippling oneself. Nutrients, proteins, carbs, fats, fibres, and vitamins become the microcosms in which the struggle over meaning making happens.
Nourishment is also the locus of global asymmetries. Most African countries are still struggling with malnourishment. A lot of funding goes to helping people to have access to health care systems; African governments and international partners focus on export products like soybeans, jatropha, rubber trees, cereals and grains. These products use a lot of water, land, chemicals and work force. What we eat is at the centre of how often we will go or not to hospitals, so focusing on health care while necessary is like trying to stop the smoke and ignore the fire. There is another form of brain-drain in Africa that is taking place in Africa. One that is caused by nutrient deficiency. A brain that does not eat enough is a brain that is drained, and forever trapped in a constant survival mode minimalizing its functions to maintain homeostasis in already unstable conditions.
Nutrition is then a form of reclaiming power and agency, it is a way of reclaiming not just freedom and justice but also the body that needs to be free and treated fairly. I have recently been receiving news on social media from my home country Mozambique asking me to share news to my relatives and the ones I care about concerning certain foods that are dangerous for human consumption but are found it stores. In South Africa, listeriosis made it back to human bodies through polony sausage, anyone who has been in South Africa knows that processed food and meat goes side by side with national identity, and those kinds of entanglements are built on trust that meat farmers and processed food corporations take into account food safety measures, and that the states plays its role of ensuring that private forces adhere to regulations. We now know that is not always the case. In a video on social media a Mozambican kid is shown eating polony after the listeriosis outbreak was publicly announced claiming that he is not afraid of the disease in the face of laughing parents and global internet audience! A new form of food relations should be on the menu!
Certainly, like with my political ecologists colleagues I do believe that these global asymmetries benefit a few – donors, NGOs, corporations, political and economic powers that control much of what happens in the world. However, like I said earlier the revolution today lies on the plate, what you eat is not just food or nutrients, it is relations that link multiple species and power relations across scales. What you eat is the planet. Therefore, eating becomes a political action, in which it is not just the other that is at stake it is our own bodies. So, if eating right is not for the environment may it be for yourself. However, my wife’s choice made me aware that what I eat is beyond myself. My body will no longer be mine, after I die it will be food for other species, and those species will be food for other species that will end up feeding other humans, in ever intimate cannibalistic and interspecies metabolic relations. A non-hindu and Buddhist way of saying karma does exist.
We are what eat! We are the planet. This is crazy, I know but fighting for a difference is an act of craziness! As I finish my delicious salad, and look at the vast sea of bicycles at the campus, Seal’s voice echoes in the background of my ruminations:
“ […]A man decides after seventy years That what he goes there for, is to unlock the door While those around him criticize and sleep And through a fractal on a breaking wall I see you my friend, and touch your face again Miracles will happen as we trip
But we're never gonna survive, unless We get a little crazy No we're never gonna survive, unless We are a little crazy […]” (Seal 1991)
Linköping, September 05, 2018
Works cited
John Law and Annemarie Mol, Globalisation in Practice : On the Politics of Boiling Pigswill’, version of 9th April 2009, available at http://www.heterogeneities.net/publications/LawMol2006GlobalisationinPractice.pdf
