You Are What You Eat
Human beings consume living creatures in order to live. While the nutritional maxim “you are what you eat” may seem like a no-brainer, it reveals in micro what is uncanny about our planetary predicament: the living entities of planet earth are never really individual. If we were to pan out and speed up time 1000x, discrete entities disappear entirely and we would see instead continuous streams of metabolism; giant flows of energy traveling from our near star into the body of the earth. Any human remains radically determined by these flows, even while humankind manipulates and disrupts these energies to the point of no return (metabolic rift). Slowing time down again planetary metabolism becomes a cheeseburger, a tuna fish, an octopus, sunlight, seaweed, mycelium, ergot, a field of rye, a whiskey, a cow, a cheeto, a human, a septic field, lichen, lychee, limes, industrially grown chickens, fried chicken, chicken noodle soup, peach trees, granache, surgar cane, taco-bell, coca-cola, doritos, nitrogen, landfills, mercury, lead, microplastics, cancers. The progression of these entities going in and out of one another is a gross example of extimacy. Extimacy is a portmanteau of exterior and intimacy, a psychoanalytic cipher that might be summed up in the mystical koan “that art thou,” except that food is not mystical at all whatsoever, but rather brutally material and real. Food makes us uncanny: revealing the predicament of living on an alien planet that we also happen to be made of. As Michael Pollen has observed, Americans are mostly made of corn.
Cambell’s Soup Cans (1962) Andy Warhol
