Sitting through a one-day FOODSAFE Level I course while being part way through Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble produces an exquisite type of mental agony. It’s like gastronomic matter and antimatter coming together over coffee. They meet up for a little chat about food practices, and one’s cortex is the café table across which they, er, demonstrate their differences. Just before life as we know it ends, key words from the commercial food safety instructor (a professional health inspector) hover in the air like malevolent menu offerings: microbial pathogens, food contamination, hazards, critical control points, proper waste disposal. Meanwhile, the barrista (a Haraway avatar in a green visor, in this scenario), calls out contrasting orders from the counter, “companion species!” “children of compost!” “sympoiesis!” “chthulucene!” “comic faith in technofixes!” Boom.
Perhaps the key key word from FOODSAFE is against, while Haraway’s is with (and with’s kin, kin.) The Vancouver Island Health Authority Health Inspector and Professional Trainer urges us to create barriers and protective insulation between humans and dangerously undercooked food. The Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz calls for humanity to curl up with the crittersphere and embrace ecocatastrophe. I feel like my chair is a well-lubricated razor blade, on a delicate slant.
Before entering the community centre classroom for my food safety intro, I was predisposed to deride the sterilization of kitchen implements and the commission of broad-based bacteriocide. I am now a little wary of incubation periods and toxicity producing bacteria. From recent readings and domestic food practice, I have also come to love the cycle-loving services of decomposers and wild yeasts. I generally hold that the ‘feeding nine billion’ discourse is problematic, but also that stomach cramps are unpleasant.
Haraway and FOODSAFE are now jumbling my sensibilities further—neither is a singularly straightforward prescription; neither is what I want to practice regularly. The two paradigms are SO far away from each other, and yet both have relevance within a heterogenous and complicated foodscape. So I’m now sitting with the contradiction for a bit, in order to try to sense what space there is for the problem-oriented bleach brigade to co-exist with the complexity-centred Harawayfinders. They already do, in a way, but I suspect that the twain aren’t really going to have much of a productive conversation when they meet at that local, fairtrade coffee shop selling pumpkin spice lattes. Like I said, boom.
Here are a few figurative Post-its from the FOODSAFE course that made my Harawayic bum clench and toes curl, in both good and bad ways. Otherly clenching and curling quotes from Staying with the Trouble are interspersed, with the aim of eventually supporting movement towards a liminal space of gastronomic-paradigmatic diffraction. Maybe.
No one likes bitter tastes, after all! (In reference to the course workbook chart showing that, while both high-acid and high-alkaline foods are poor environments for bacterial reproduction, only low pH foods are generally considered palatable. Except in much of Eastern Europe, Asia, and multiple African countries. And to anyone who has travelled a bit, or is into micro-brews, novo chocolate, third-wave coffee, and tangy greens.)
from Chapter 6: Sowing Worlds: “’Do you realize,’ the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, ‘that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’ And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.” —Ursual K. LeGuin, ‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’” (Haraway 2016, p. 117) I am tempted to insert emojis here symbolizing manly members, outdoor athleticism, and science fiction fembots, but I think that would be too meta. Wait… oops. Oh well.
It’s really problematic that fast-food restaurants have decided to start serving breakfast all day. Now people with egg allergies can’t safely eat McDo in the afternoon, because of fears of cross-contamination. (Or: Now those folks might live longer and more healthful lives, while not supporting monocultural farming practices, poor labor conditions, and centralization of economic power.)
from Chapter 5: Awash in Urine: “In October 2011 my twelve-year-old canine friend and lifelong sports partner, Cayenne, aka Hot Pepper, started taking a notorious, industrially produced, nonsteroidal, synthetic estrogen called DES (diethylstilbesterol) to deal with urinary leakage…. Aging spayed bitches like Cayenne and post-menopausal women like me often could use a hormonal tightening of slack smooth muscles in the urethra to keep socially unaccceptable leaks plugged up.” (Haraway 2016, p. 105) One species’ medicine is another’s murder. One woman’s writing is another man’s boundary object. Ruth Ozeki wrote what I consider to be an archetypal actor-network theory novel. DES was in there, too.
Never buy fish from a supplier who isn’t inspected by the local health authority. There are a lot of illicit fishers out there. (Accompanying a video clip of a sleazy-looking guy coming to a bistro’s back door with a contraband salmon in a plastic bucket. Evil man! Must be a local guy trying to dodge paying taxes. Or someone trying to support his family.)
from Chapter 2: Tentacular Thinking: “I remember that tentacle comes from the Latin tentaculum, meaning “feeler,” and tentare, meaning “to feel” and “to try”…. The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones.” (Haraway 2016, pp. 31–32) I suddenly want Japanese noodles and Korean seafood [PHOTO LINK], and to visually-manually investigate the lid closures on urban composing bins, and to go get an MRI of my bodily self so I can draw on it with fine-tipped whiteboard markers.
For a while there, it looked like the big candy companies were going to go back to making all their nut and non-nut treats on the same production line. It’s good that they didn’t, so that nut-allergic kids can keep having treats, too. (Adolescent-onset diabetes for everyone! Hooray!)
from Chapter 3: Sympoiesis: “Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means ‘making with.’ Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing. In the words of the Inupiate computer ‘world game,’ earthlings are never alone.” [see: Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)] (Haraway 2016, p. 58) With apologies to Ian Lewis and Inner Circle, Whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do when the allergens come for you? Cause you know they were already there, on your skin, in your house, from other people’s packaging and reusable Bulk Barn containers, you plain-M&Ms-gobbling, jumbo–Jelly Belly–sniffing, non–self-making sugar freak, you!
When washing your hands at work, you should take approximately the time needed to sing the “Happy Birthday” song twice. (Following the example in the video, however, one would only hum the song, so as to avoid paying royalties to Warner/Chappell music. Except any time after 2015.)
from Chapter 1: Playing String Figures with Companion Species: “Terrapolis is a fictional integral equation, a speculative fabulation…. Terrapolis is n-dimensional niche space for multispecies becoming-with…. Terrapolis is a chimera of materials, languages, histories…. Finished once and for all with Kantian globalizing cosmopolitics and grumpy human-exceptionalist Heideggerian wolding, Terrapolis is a mongrel word composted with a mycorrhiza of Greek and Latin rootlets and their symbionts.” (Haraway 2016; p. 11) Nuff said.