Readings :: Eating in Theory

Eating in Theory
By Annemarie Mol

I loved Annemarie Mol's first book, The Body Multiple, in which she asked the question "what is atherosclerosis" and concluded that it was not just found or discovered but enacted, and necessarily enacted differently by different actors in different specialties. That book was transformative for me, and I still refer to it a lot. Her second book, The Logic of Care, was not as transformative, but still solid. So I had high hopes when picking up this book.

How is it? Honestly, just okay for me. 

Whereas Mol's other two books focused on fairly bounded questions and settings, this one is more generally about eating (and metabolic engagement more generally) as a different way to think about agency. She notes and agrees with the posthumanist critique of human agency as exceptional, but she notes that "agency" and "subjectivity" are both grounded in humanism and then applied to nonhumans. But "robbing 'the human' of his [sic] exceptionalism by spreading out his [sic] particular traits over the rest of the world is not enough" (p.3). Her solution is:

What if we were to stop celebrating 'the human's' cognitive reflections about the world, and take our cues instead from human metabolic engagements with the world? Or, to put it differently: What if our theoretical repertoires were to take inspiration not from thinking but from eating? (p.3)

(The word "inspiration" is based on breathing in, so we have a bit of a mixed metaphor here, but let's go with it.)

Her approach is to tell stories about eating (and excreting) that do not lead to theoretical conclusions about eating, but rather about "being, doing, knowing, and relating" (p.5). In practice, she conducts fieldwork—well, really, it sounds like she visits different places and tells stories about them. These stories include visits to dietician-led groups to address kidney disease; a sewage plant; and a dinner with asparagus. The latter has a punch line that I am sure has already occurred to you.

One discussion, in which she attends a workshop for cooking with "old grains," yields the insight that eating is not bounded by the body. Eating also involves selecting and modifying grains over centuries to yield variations that are digestible, nutritious, and productive, as well as using cooking methods (she cites Wrangham here). She concludes: "Here is the lesson for theory. Doing is not necessarily centered in an embodied individual. It may well be distributed over a stretched-out, historically dispersed, socio-material collective" (p.93). This insight is not particularly new, but it is well put here.

The phrase "Here is the lesson for theory" occurs near the end of each chapter, and if you're reading it on a Kindle (I'm not), I imagine you could search for it to get the basic insights of the book. If not, you'll need to read through the illustrative anecdotes.

So what did I think? I think this book was less interesting to me than the first two, partially because it was not as well bounded, partially because the metabolic metaphor really does most of its work in the first chapter. The illustrations seemed a little drawn out for me and the insights seemed less unique and fresh than in The Body Multiple. Still, if you are interested in posthumanist critiques of agency and cognition, this book may give you what you're looking for.