Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol Jessica Hardin Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 208 pp. Towards the end of the book, Mol offers an example taken from her fieldwork at a food conference for healthcare professionals. In it, a researcher presents a paper that argues that humans, even those in affluent places like Europe, should eat more protein. When asked about the earthly repercussions of such a diet, the researcher responds that this is outside of his domain; that is, the effect of increased protein on the earth and the future of humanity is a political issue (131). As a quick, direct example, this interaction speaks to the heart of this book: how do we live on an earth as it is existentially threatened by human action? This broader frame animates Mol’s feminist critique of human exceptionalism. In the first chapter, Mol situates the reader within philosophical anthropology and empirical philosophy. This chapter would be an excellent addition to anthropological theory seminars because of the ways it denaturalizes the centrality of “the human” (and its particularly hierarchical terms) in Western philosophical and epistemological traditions. The intervention space she carves out is noting that beyond “rising above other creatures,” the human is also situated as rising above the body itself to achieve transcendence (2). Mol asks, what kind of human, in contrast, emerges when we center eating, feeding, nourishment, and sustenance in our theories? By theorizing eating, Mol attends to socio-material conditions by way of rethinking what she calls being (Chapter 2), knowing (Chapter 3), doing (Chapter 4), and relating (Chapter 5). In the final chapter, Mol lays out the political stakes for theorizing eating through “specific [End Page 193] stories about situated people, dependent on each other, on other creatures, and on a forgiving, but frightfully fragile earth” (126). Mol is clear to state that while this is a book of theory, she is not offering a Theory of eating or even the human—as in, she doesn’t offer an “over-arching explanatory scheme” (1). Her approach is to re-consider these through “eating inflected intellectual terms and tools” (6). Each chapter takes aim at canonical philosophical texts that anthropologists engage, most notably Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas. Each chapter builds from the core recognition that eating is transformative—socially and materially––and that by carefully attending to eating, the fiction of transcendence derived from overcoming the flesh is laid bare. The subtext here is that this hierarchical notion of the human is ultimately a dangerous one, a model that is existentially threatening. There are several cross-cutting themes that thread together Mol’s concerns with rethinking being, knowing, doing, and relating. Here I focus on her ethnographic analyses, the issue of temporality, and the model of care that she develops throughout the text. Based on fieldwork in the Netherlands in diverse places from elderly homes, rehabilitation centers, food conferences and nutritional laboratories, Mol hones in on mundane examples with theoretical explorations that truly match. Examples in the “Being” chapter range from her observations of a speech therapist talking through the process of swallowing with her patient to a dietician diagramming how the body processes sugar as she teaches people living with diabetes how to eat. In both of these examples, Mol’s purpose is draw attention to the absence of eating in philosophical anthropology and demonstrate its significance for what it means to be human. Mol demonstrates that bodies transform through the process of eating making them “externally entangled and internally differentiated” (40). From eating to being, Mol uses instances of situated eating to explore a model of being where “inside depends on the outside, while continuity depends on change” (49). Bridging examples from therapeutic contexts to her own table to a friend’s garden, Mol does what anthropology does best—building ways of thinking about and laboring in the world inspired from “the specificity and situatedness of each and every eater” (25). The second cross-cutting theme that is not articulated as such but runs throughout the book is the issue of temporality. In presenting eating as transformative, Mol encourages the reader to see the ways that...