Machinic Hygienics (or Why You Are Not Necessarily What You Eat)

"Nature is just one giant restaurant."
Woody Allen

"If God hadn't meant us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat."
John Cleese

In the epigraphs above, these two famous comedians seem to establish a trans-Atlantic agreement concerning the role of animals in our diets, and thus by extension, the most fundamental substratum of our lives. From this perspective, nature (particularly the fleshy portion of nature), exists largely for the sake of human consumption. Despite the fact that 1960's folk singer Melanie Safka once sang, "I don't eat animals, and they don't eat me," most of the planet continues to delight in the savoury textures and flavours of eating our fellow fauna.

Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to argue that diet and digestion play a large part in both psychological constitution and cultural character: "Wherever a deep dissatisfaction with existence comes to prevail, it is the aftereffects of some great dietary mistake made by a people over a long time that are coming to light" (The Gay Science, aph.134). The picture, however, becomes more complex when we factor in the post-industrial revolution since his time: that being, the movement from largely agricultural modes of food production toward the urban death-factories that process our meat since the Second World War. Indeed, perhaps this co-incidence of dates is not merely a co-incidence.

Many sausages, pies, pasties, and other minced meat manifestations are now made with something called MRM, which stands for "Mechanically Recovered Meat." This inauspicious name - hidden by the acrid odour of an acronym - is in reality worse than anything we could find in the pages of a 1970s J.G. Ballard novel. For it consists of the meat residue which is left on the carcass after all the prime cuts have been removed. This is then pressure-blasted off the bones by machinery and forms a red-brown slurry which resembles low-grade mince. It is also cooked at exceptionally high temperatures in order to kill the bacteria in the accompanying excrement.

Hygiene becomes a key issue in the context of such economically-driven procedures. Nevertheless, Europe seems to be in a constant state of meat-panic: from foot-and-mouth disease, B.S.E., C.J.D. (more ominous acronyms!), and the various mysterious afflictions that regularly hit pork and poultry. Indeed, I was in Oxford during the great British cattle-carcass burnings of 2000, and the sky had turned into a late medieval furnace, straight from the pages of Blake, by the policies of the late capitalist era.

For those few souls who work in, or have visited an abattoir, it is clear that we have learned other lessons from the Holocaust than the rhetoric of never repeating such extreme political errors. In fact, we have merely taken the logic of the camps, and transferred them - once again - on to a category of life deemed "non-human." The lines between the two (never firmly established in the first place) become blurred even further. As a consequence, it is a mistake for animal sympathizers to say abattoirs are inhumane, for the banal crime is not so much treating animals as animals, but as humans - more specifically, as that precoded and precluded sub-section of humanity called "bare life."

Of course it is a conceit to apply this category, made famous by Giorgio Agamben's book Homo Sacer, to animals, since it is precisely its (non)human aspect which gives it its sacred power. However, it is an interesting exercise in the limits of empathy - or/and indeed humanity - to extend it to the domain of those creatures that are hung by their feet from steel claws, and maintained in a state of maximum distress until the final release into cold, clean, packaged death.

No doubt I believe technology to be the key factor in considering our relationship with our victuals. We certainly couldn't provide a better example of Heidegger's "standing reserve" than the refrigerator, which keeps perishables in a kind of limbo state of stasis between death and decomposition. (Indeed, I'll never forget discovering a plastic container in the back of my mother's fridge, emblazoned with the chilling words, "Vegetable Curry, 1987" on the lid. I discovered this artefact in the freezer - in conditions much like the creature in The Thing - in the year 1991.)

Just as important, however, is the role of culture - or more specifically, those constantly criss-crossing borders between cultures (usually defined as much by food as by language or shared histories). For instance, at the very origin of that technology now known as cinema, the Lumičre brothers screened mocking portrayals of the religious and culinary habits of Muslim Arabs in Le Musulman Rigolo (1902) and Ali Bouffe a l'Huile (902). From "rosbifs" to "frogs" to "krauts," the diet of the Other is an endless source of fascination, repulsion and identity-reinforcement.

More recent events provide further examples. Turkish and Greek football fans clashed in the streets and in the stadium in 2002, effectively ruining their chances to ever co-host the World Cup. One of the most interesting aspects of the hostilities was the throwing of yoghurt at each other's foreign ministers. Here we have a case whereby people felt compelled to literally throw their own "culture" in the face of the other . . . as if the age of the media sound-byte had summoned such succinct visual metaphors from its own economical imperatives. ("We have ten seconds of screen time, let's make our message clear.")

Of course there are always two sides to the attraction/repulsion coin; especially when it comes to food. Eating foreign delicacies does not, however, necessarily translate into a cosmopolitan, polycentric perspective of the world. Despite the insatiable taste for exotic flavours, and the often orientalist fantasies they smuggle into our stomachs, we are reminded by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam that "multicultural bellies, full of tacos, falafel, and chow mein, are sometimes accompanied by monocultural minds" (Unthinking Eurocentrism, 21). Thus, in contrast to the oft-quoted maxim, "You are what you eat," it is perhaps more accurate to insist that "You are what you do not eat." This is because cultural identity is usually defined negatively in relation to otherness (and one need only watch the banquet scene in Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for vivid proof of this process). As the disturbed Tarquin Winot affirms in John Lanchester's brilliant novel The Debt to Pleasure: "To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, submit to the world; to like something is to succumb . . . dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction and discrimination - a triumph of life."

When F. T. Marinetti launched the so-called "second wave of Futurism" through a series of extravagant banquets in major European cities, he consciously tried to evoke "an atmosphere simultaneously African and mechanical . . . a splendid rendering of the wish to interpret colonial motifs according to a modern and Futurist sensibility" (The Futurist Cookbook, 18). Not one to adapt his impulses to political correctness, Marinetti also boasted that "We love women. Often we have tortured ourselves with a thousand greedy kisses in our anxiety to eat one of them. Nudes seemed to us always tragically dressed. Their hearts, if clenched with the supreme pleasure of love, seemed to us the ideal fruit to bite to chew to suck" (28). In doing so, Marinetti outlined a formula (their preferred term for "recipe") in which to effectively present the aesthetic complexities of gastro-politics. In calling for a boycott of pasta by his fellow Italians, he caused a national uproar. And yet - in a foreshadowing of Jose Bové's attitude towards McDonalds - he also rallied against a certain "xenomania." Clearly the palate can cope with inconsistencies as much as the mind.

One of Futurism's signature dishes was something called, unappetizingly, "sculpted meat." They also orchestrated the evening's events so that "suddenly a live turkey is let loose in the room, and it flounders about in terror, to the surprise of the men and squeals of the women who can't understand the resurrection of the food they've just eaten" (ibid., 130). (One is reminded of the persuasive cow in Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which personally comes to the table and invites guests to choose which portion of his body they would prefer to eat. . . . a form of promotion I see here in the windows of Amsterdam on a regular basis.)

The ethical question of what to put in our mouths, and, even more importantly, what to swallow, is answered or elided by a multitude of strategies. Drawing on the inspiration of loaves, fishes, water and wine, a Florida doctor has published a self-help manual, What Would Jesus Eat?, and a companion volume, the What Would Jesus Eat Cook Book. Dr. Don Colbert said he wrote the book after realising that many of the most overweight Americans were also conscientious Christian fundamentalists. But however amusing we may find this linkage of pious behaviour and the battle against the bulge, its reasoning can lead to some very unpleasant places: as happened in Australia 1999, when a cult called the Breatherians were charged with murder-through-neglect, after leaving certain members to die of hunger. As the name of their group suggests, they believed that the devout could live on air and prayer alone.

No doubt there are many less drastic ways to meditate on the profound influence of food: as an economy, as a technology, as a medium, and as a fuel for everything we do. From those wonderful chefs who prepare our favourite meals, to those scoundrels who like marzipan, everyone has their own way of screening the raw from the cooked (Claude Lévi-Strauss), and the pure from the dangerous (Mary Douglas). Those imaginary-culinary borders we draw between ourselves and others are harder to maintain, however, than we might imagine. For instance, if you happen to believe that Europeans never practiced the barbarian practice of cannibalism, you may be surprised to learn that a powder called Mumia vera Aegyptica was sold in Swiss, German and French pharmacies as a laxative and cure for the common cold, as late as 1924. This powder was made from mummified human remains imported from Alexandria and handled in Venice, Lyon and Marseille. (And thanks to Michael Röösli, for bringing this fact to my attention.)

And so it is clear that the way we categorize different creatures into edible and inedible is largely a cultural affair, since we eat a tiny percentage of the things that our metabolism can cope with. In other words, we usually eat with our eyes and minds more than our mouths and stomach. Such inground habits are the target of an amusing advertisement I recently saw for a mobile phone company. Two aliens invade Earth and begin their reign of terror by eating a human and then following this course by devouring the poor person's phone. "What's it like?" asks the first alien. To which the other replies: "The smaller one tastes like chicken."

© Dominic Pettman
University of Amsterdam
March 2003