Future Hospitalities Julietta Singh (bio) Despite the fact that aphorisms about the relation between food and subjectivity are commonly rehearsed to the point of being cliché, there remains much to be said about how eating practices always anticipate unpredictable futures. Western thought has long signaled the constitutive relation between being and alimentarity. Louis Brillat-Savarin, the early nineteenth-century French gastronome, famously declared: "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es" (Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are). Brillat-Savarin's formulation of food as that which reveals being as such is echoed by Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach's commonly uttered maxim: "Der Mensch ist was er isst" (Man is what he eats). Today, "you are what you eat" has become a mantra of contemporary food politics: it is promoted by environmental movements that advocate organic, sustainable, and local eating; it is proscribed as a dietary regime for better health and longevity; and it serves as a marketing slogan for various corporate food conglomerates. If we believe that what we eat is what we are (I eat organic and therefore am a responsible global citizen, or I eat a no-carb diet and am therefore fit and prime), we also tend to forget the absolutely critical futurity of eating. To take seriously the futurity of eating is to understand that to eat is a process of becoming, an act of emergence and transformation through which we are being constituted molecularly, materially, socially, ideologically. As Jane Bennett argues: "In the eating encounter, all bodies are shown to be but temporary congealments of a materiality that is a process of becoming, is hustle and flow punctuated by sedimentation and substance" (49). What we are now is not what we will be once we have eaten: The enjoyment of a meal, its gustatory pleasures and perils, its digestive processes, its afterlife as excretion, all entail a temporality that cannot [End Page 197] be fixed in grammars of the present. Perhaps instead of "I am what I eat," we might find more generative potential in a formulation of eating that recognizes that the subject is through eating becoming something as yet unknown to itself. The eating subject certainly has a temporally marked past (I have eaten), but it also angles toward a future trajectory that is aspirational and unpredictable. As an act, eating of course cannot be contained by the act of putting food into our mouths. It is implicated in a much wider field of social, political, and environmental problematics. To think eating requires perhaps foremost a critical redressing of how we imagine and enact hospitality: what we eat and with whom, whom we feed, whom we refuse to indulge with, and what we refuse to indulge in, are questions that are instrumental to our future becoming as individual subjects, as distinct or integrated cultures, and indeed as a species. The vegetarian, as I will illustrate, is a particularly prescient site through which to investigate hospitality and the futurity of eating.1 This is so not because the vegetarian is somehow a nonviolent eater or because s/he is imagined to be more concerned with individual, social, and/or planetary health, but because in the Western world vegetarianism marks an interruption of the dominant logic of consumption in a fundamentally carnivorous culture. Attending to the perils and possibilities of hosting the vegetarian and likewise of being a vegetarian host in and beyond the West reveals the fissures and miscalculations of our understanding of hospitality today. What I attend to in this essay are sketches of vegetarian hospitality that enable a renewed thinking of hospitality that is at once complex, contradictory, generous, violent, and promising. Through an eclectic set of narratives of hospitality—ranging from best-selling American journalism, to postcolonial fiction, to ethico-political autobiography—I aim to bring everyday acts of hospitality into critical relief and in so doing to think toward a radical reconception of hospitality based on entanglement, precarity, and collaborative transformation. OTHER HOSPITALITIES Arguments against vegetarianism are plenty, ranging from scientific proofs that humans are constitutively carnivorous, to the necessity of preserving traditions that revolve around meat consumption, to...
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Jun 22, 2020
Patricia Munoz-Escalona + 3
Open Access
