Decommodify Digestion

for 'Earth Minus Environment', Kestle Barton

This essay was originally commissioned in Feb 2021 by Lauren Keeley for her project ‘Earth Minus Environment’ with Verity Birt, yet was never published online. The project title and inspiration are derived from Gustav Metzger’s artworks of the same name, and culminated in a summer exhibition at Kestle Barton in Cornwall. As explained on the website, “Earth Minus Environment, takes it title from an unrealised sculptural installation by the late artist Gustav Metzger, proposed for the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, 1992. Metzger’s intention for the work was to create a ‘dramatic symbol’ that would provide clear thinking on environmental issues, by making visible the destructive capabilities of the ‘human environment’.”

I was paid £500 to write it and made a video to accompany it, though I’m not so keen on it now and have included screencaps instead.

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Decommodifying Digestion

A decade ago I made a commitment to avoid using supermarkets as much as possible, and although it’s rarely convenient and often expensive I’ve pretty much upheld it bar the occassional lapse of effort or emergency. It was one of those promises we make for our own embetterment, like quitting smoking or exercising more frequently, and I always intended to stick with it, even though I hadn’t fully intellectualised it. I’m immensely proud of young me for being stubborn enough to try, and to current me for being aware enough to keep a promise.

Now I see that I was setting a boundary to protect myself against the psychological bombardment each trip brought on, and potentially ‘going with my gut’. I found that my experiences were haunted by the paradigm of choice; the paralysis experienced when faced with infinite options. I struggle to write about this as I have spent so long mentally blocking it out, having internal (and probably external) meltdowns in public spaces, and often avoiding making decisions at all. As a chronically indecisive person (in detail rather than philosophy), any item selection is difficult enough without the absurdity of arbitrary market value thrown in. 

When I am asked where I shop instead, it drives home the lack of imagination we employ when acquiring food - the most essential fuel for our survival as a species. So deeply ingrained in British culture it is that supermarkets are assumed to stock everything we need, and that all other vendors have poor selection in comparison. Watching people fearfully panic buy pasta and loo-roll in the early stages of the covid pandemic reminded me very clearly how dependent our nation is on institutional monopoly. Meanwhile, one year on many well-stocked, honest, independent and family-run businesses are struggling to survive. Unsustainable food chains are illustrated by the demand for fresh produce year-round, out of season, unblemished, bountiful and cheap, with an almost psychopathic determination to waste a third of everything we buy. There is something deeply disturbing about this picture, and it needs drastically reframing to address western consumers’ unwavering entitlement.

As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her essay The Serviceberry:

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource….How we think ripples out to how we behave. If we view these berries, or that coal or forest, as an object, as property, it can be exploited as a commodity in a market economy. We know the consequences of that. Why then have we permitted the dominance of economic systems that commoditize everything?

I must have listened to this essay ten times this year so far, and usually end up walking through the forest crying in the rain.  But enough about my favourite pastimes.

Interspecies violence is a bag of chopped salad. Limp, discoloured, squares of leaf stewing in their own liquids, pressed against some shredded carrot and polyethylene, suspended in sterile factory air. It screams of death. Organic decay, yes, moreover also the absence of life, a cold termination of existence. How disrespectful of us that we should expect working people to sow plant tend feed harvest wash pack transport refrigerate shelve living plants only for them to die strangulated in plastic in a supermarket. 

The bag of salad, a shrink-wrapped broccoli, some shelled hard boiled eggs rattling around in a box, and a jar of pickled beetroot: these are not the items from nature supermarkets purport to sell. On the chillers, silent with technology, and on ambient shelves they are unspectacular to the point of normalcy. Icons, avatars, cartoons, a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of the original. We assume that as consumers we are bystanders in the narrative but it takes two to tango: silence is compliance, we should all know that by now. It’s a fundamental hypocrisy to demand our food –nourishment for survival we literally exchange for money and put inside our bodies– to be as fresh as possible without supporting regenerative farming practices and advocating for utmost safety and fair renumeration for oppressed workers across the world.

For these plants to be so bastardised from their origins is heinous and points to the willful de-education and denaturalisation of our society over the past few decades. We allow the soils to be poisoned with chemical pesticides and labour oppression. We allow the poisoned crops into our homes. We allow the crops to poison us and then wonder why. Death is a bag of salad.

Our climate crisis is typified by humans maintaining separation from nature and ignorance of our entanglement in ecologies. In seeing ourselves at the top of the food chain, with our insatiable material needs driving us to environmental destruction, we uphold superiority over all other living beings; animals, insects, trees, bushes, plants, mycelium, yeast. Perhaps we would act differently if we acknowledged and appreciated the one lifeform that connects us all.

It covers every surface inside and out, keeping us and our more-than-human counterparts alive and thriving.

Bacteria.

There are millions and trillions of microscopic microbes –bodies that move beyond boundaries– in a teaspoon of soil or a pinch of our flesh. Our closest friends and allies are invisible to the naked eye, yet shaping and changing the environment we live in. They are experts at chasing potential nutrients, breaking down complex materials into usable parts, working collectively to preserve surplus, and digesting organic matter for fuel. They communicate their needs non-verbally, shifting resources from the centre outwards, constantly pushing new frontiers.

When we perish in the wake of the climate crisis caused by wealth inequality, corporate greed and infinite resource extraction, the original lifeform from which all subsequent existence followed will outlive humankind by Millennia. 

Preserving food is a way of extending the lifespan of leftovers, of loosening the grip of capitalism over our diets, and of reevaluating the abstract worth of fuel within a scarcity economy. Learning a basic pickle, jam or sauerkraut can open a gateway to a world of infinite flavour combinations, and contextualise a wider rejection of processed foods that have become ubiquitous in our homes. 

So, if the primary function of bacteria is to forage sugars which are then shared and ingested to ensure successful reproduction, we’re really not that different from them. It makes sense that indigenous knowledge and peasant communities noticed, studied, and replicated these processes. The requirements for successful imitation are pretty fundamental; create an environment that supports certain strands of microbial life and not others; keep at a consistent temperature and humidity; supply with oxygen, or remove totally.

Most fermentation happens entirely without humans, so why do we insist on claiming the results? We’re not needed, yet write ourselves in as the main character. Perception of control is seemingly a baseline human requirement, we practically define ourselves by role relativity and species superiority. How will we ever learn if we’re not watching? When wild yeasts attack the outside of a nectarine that’s over-ripe after sitting in a warm fruit bowl for a few days, they are simply shopping for food just like us. We tend to look on aghast, objectifying a thriving microbial community defying existential possibility and remove from sight immediately. However, looking closer is to consider and admire the digestive work they are tirelessly performing. The flush of furry blue, a superficial network of beautiful fungal and filamentous pathogens, are deemed ugly or alien because they don’t serve a human use. Extra-terrestrial and extra-dietary and extra-ordinary. 

Instead, should we try seeing the flourishing mutual aid network in a different way, we might want to get our notebooks out. Just as ruderal plant species sprout between cracks in concrete in disused carparks, pioneering yeasts float around and grab onto the most minute of structural rupture, rooting on a hairline skin split or jammy dent. Just as a bare stone accidentally catches moisture, the flesh exposure completes the life-supporting quadrecta of light, warmth, air and water. Just as a team of cooks prepping a seasonal glut with sharp knives, hungry microbes collaboratively break down complex carbohydrates and thrash proteins apart, increasing surface area to mass ratio, aiding the digestion process and making space for others to feast. This new habitable space invites less adaptable species to participate in the feed ritual, expanding the mutual aid network and outwardly distributing resources.  It’s also significant that the transformational process of rotting creates a highly acidic output that allows for long-term bacterial succession and effective preservation. Take notes. Let that sit for a moment.

Now we know this, a mouldy fruitbowl will never be the same in our eyes. The monetary transaction we blindly participated in now stages a performance of reciprocity.

It’s very difficult to describe exactly what I do with food. I interact with it intuitively; saving it from the bin, reacting to it jumping out at me from the undergrowth or stroking my arm as I walk past. In the same way I’ve come to see debris as a trove of precious resources, things that are edible are all potential nourishments. 

A friend said to me today that she thought the way I work with food was “an attitude”, which resonated deeply. I don’t keep recipes and rarely follow them. I often can’t remember how I did things or what they tasted like, and I think this points to a certain present-ness that is tricky to explain. Ingredients move past me in their journey towards perishing, and I think I’m lucky just to be there to catch some of them. 

When a recipe is written a concept is crystallised, frozen in time, it speaks of known knowns and human control over materials. For me, this is an impossible task for two reasons. Firstly, I tend to think of myself as chaotic disorganised in the kitchen, leaving a whirlwind of jars, cutlery and plates in my wake. Fat chance I’d have a hand clean enough or surface clear enough to take notes. Moreover, the processing I undertake is reactive and reflexive to the materials in my immediate realm. 

Resisting recipes is participating in a non-verbal collaboration with the materials at-hand. It’s exploring a moment, touching a memory, caressing a friend. Bringing observation skills into the kitchen means asking for guidance from the plants. 

Living in an old school destined for flattening in the near future has brought me closer to my own body because I am closer to other bodies that thrive in decay. I love the families of swifts that live in the rafters of the roof, that shit on the window sills and play games at dusk. I love the vivacious and herbaceous edges, billowing with edible volunteer plants and formerly kept shrubs that now split bricks with their roots. I love the dutiful pollinators, including not just our wonderful bees, but various hoverflies, dragonflies, moths and butterflies, that nest in rotted wood. I love the rodents that trolley food around the perimeter of the building, who clear up after us in the kitchen at night, who find shade in the wild grasses. I love the algae spreading on the pond, I love the rambling roses, I love the room full of wellies and filing cabinets. 

Now my care duties lie with the more-than-humans I share my home with: bacteria on my hands, yeasts in the kitchen air, worms in my composter, chard in my broken raised bed, mice and birds eating the chard in my broken raised bed. 

My body is a rock that has absorbed the trauma of human greed. 

My hands are cushioned by a film of atoms and bacteria on each surface I touch.

My heart is learning hard lessons from the complexity of organic chaos.

In preparing the land to grow food in, we undertake a local excavation. Tilling is not toil, it’s exfoliating the skin of Mother earth. Removing perennial taproots is akin to plucking her ingrown hairs, and raking is like giving her a massage. Preparing soil reminds us that food does not magically appear in plastic bags at our convenience.

Like humans and animals, plants and bacteria are equal living members of the kingdom and must be treated as so. Sentient and responsive, frivolous and resilient, we owe our survival thus far to them.