Recipe for a Spiral

Convivial Cosmogonies is a series that examines culinary labor practices and their material origins.

Hello, Goodbye. I have all but avoided speaking in the first person in this column but I wanted to break from that for a moment to acknowledge the scope of Convivial Cosmogonies and how it has evolved under MOLD’s stewardship. Always and forever balanced on the shoulders of labor and its cosmologies of theory, this column became a collection of sites or plots or petri dishes for me to attend to certain questions. Questions which I was genuinely surprised I could not find an outright answer to when I went looking. This is not to say anything I have produced here is novel or even original, but that I am grateful to have been offered a little plot here to test the particular balance of practice and theory required to (begin to) answer these questions. My own growth and ever-growing heap of concerns is evident in these texts and their associated recipes and artworks. Embedded and implicit in each piece are compounding concerns and questions which will find new homes and sites elsewhere in my work and practice. But for now, one more question to attend to.

Always,
Adriana

At the core of the gastronomic –the edible, and the convivial– is contradiction and transformation. Food is made of and from contradiction and the interdependency of opposites. In short: food is struggle. Under Capitalism or any worldview which seeks to crystallize the world into ahistorical and immovable objects, contradiction is something to be obscured or eradicated. A true appreciation of our agency in these systems becomes inconceivable as we bump up against what from the wrong angle seems to be an irreconcilable paradox. These contradictions exist and are not impasses but potential and even active sites for transformation. By understanding contradiction as generative and everything as in motion, we can be critical of a generally conservative (read: in both its political and non-political meaning) trend in food and food media where there is a tendency to look backward, a longing to return to some before-time to avoid confronting the inherently alienated experience of living, eating, and laboring today. Indeed, as a foundation to his argument in Capital, Marx writes, “…all labour is primarily and initially directed toward the appropriation and production of food.”¹ Rather than clumsily banging away at or refusing to grapple with these contradictions, we might instead reach outside of the tools and methods at hand in and under Capitalism. In this case: a dialectical approach and method. Contradictions, in dialectics, are proof of the potential for change, the potential for agency, the potential for disintegration and emergence. A process of cooking and digesting all in one.

Dialectics itself is a dense and messy philosophical and historical topic to wade through without a practical anchor, which in our case here is food. Food can allow us to more directly interface with dialectics or with the subject of a dialectical process/method. So rather than sink into attempting to recount a full and complete history of dialectics it is better to ask: whose dialectics? To be specific, we are speaking about dialectics from the perspective of dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism is the Marxist interpretation of dialectics, which in application becomes historical materialism.² The dialectical potential and tendencies within food have been foundational to the politics of dialectical materialism from the outset: “Marx’s analysis of the new regime of food production in mid-nineteenth century industrial Britain therefore takes us in a full dialectical circle. An examination of the conditions involved in the consumption of food nutrients leads to the question of the whole regime of industrial-capitalist food production, and from there to the issue of the soil and capitalism’s alienated social metabolism.”³

In its simplest form, dialectics sees all systems of every scale as bundles of relations rather than discrete things interacting with other discrete things. We influence others and the world around us as they influence us in turn (and so it goes.) This allows us to describe the world in all its complexities and relations without losing definition: “Dialectics as living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing)…”⁴ A given system when compared to another will share and reject certain aspects or defining features. What a dialectical method allows is for that difference or apparent discordance between the two to not invalidate the system as a whole. By seeking through-lines and flows it becomes clear that rigid differentiation is not the goal. History itself (human and otherwise) consists of sequences of crises in combination with possibility of something new that brings with it a memory and trace of all that came before. In this way, history takes on a kind of spiral form, or the snaking form of intestines rather than a long straight line of history.

Food as a system (a very large one) is perhaps the ideal dialectical subject in its writhing and wriggling relations visible just beneath the surface. Any kitchen, grocery store, or farm will expose this entangled mass upon closer inspection. The simple fact that on a global scale so many go hungry while so much food is produced is a contradiction to be held and looked at closely. Food as material is also dialectical in its imperative to transform and be transformed. To treat food as a static object or subject is to reject its fundamental role and behavior while disguising one’s (our!) relations to it. An obfuscation inherently at our expense. We are of food and food is of us.⁵ Food as a site also gives us a sense of how dialectics behave and have always behaved outside of the purview of philosophy or political theory. To say we are all connected and everything influences and is influenced by everything else is not itself a novel concept, though the prevailing world order would like us to see it that way if we can see it at all. After all, to consume is to be influenced and a Capitalist system would prefer we not realize that we ourselves are influential as a unique combination of consumers and producers of the world around us. Simply eating and laboring under Capitalism encapsulates this contradictory state of being, all at once the eater and the eaten.

Cuisine itself is dialectical. This is visible in the (active) construction of seemingly static cuisines which upon closer inspection are in perpetual change and in relation to class, ecology, and even the subjective tastes of the individual. Gastronativism is one aspirational illusion propagated by static cuisines. In reality, it reveals the inherent contradiction of cuisine which is that it is always changing while dragging with it all that came before—not unlike a perpetual stew or ferment made with a mother or starter.  We might even adapt a remark from Engels: “Thus the hand stomach is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.”⁶ Or per the distinctly un-revolutionary Brillat-Savarin, “The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.”⁷ Cuisine itself can serve as a site for class struggle and can reveal an often invisibilized contradiction or coexistence. In cuisine this might take the form of so-called “traditional” or “poor” cuisines and dishes being perpetually appropriated and reinvented in fine dining contexts, a dynamic which on its face might seem impossible or even hypocritical but in reality constitutes its essential and lively quality. Any criticism of that appropriation and adaptation should then focus on the motives and conditions that allowed that appropriation to take place. Why and how a restaurant comes to serve a so-called elevated take on someone’s grandma’s soup/dahl/brisket/pasta/etc or why processed foods find their way into cuisines far removed from their origins (e.g. spam or processed cheeses in current or former American military occupied countries) is the question that leads us somewhere actually generative. Cuisine is then better seen as a process and not a crystallized and permanent category. 

A fundamental contradiction of cuisine is the toggling between and sustained coexistence of the global and the local. While historically “low” class foods would have had a more local sensibility (local varieties of vegetables, local breeds of animals, traditional tools) and elite class foods relished an ostentatious import, that very contradiction is turned on its head over and over as the cuisine of the elites and ruling class turns its gaze to the local as a site of appropriation and extraction. The global cuisine of monocrops, fast food, and industrial snacks then becomes dominant in non-elite households and bellies. Inherent in this is a sustained and necessary capitalist contradiction of the wealthy few eating well at the expense of everyone else. 

A tomato is perhaps a useful example. Initially domesticated and developed from wild plants (evolution itself being a dialectical process), they were then captured in colonial excursions, brought to Europe where they were flatly rejected and shunted to the peasant classes. They became so assimilated into their respective cuisines, societies, and ecologies that they would become irreducibly embedded. Those tomatoes would then splinter off into infinite varieties as Capitalism found its footing, some types of tomatoes remaining situated and local, others being adapted and bred for monoculture and export, and then finally those original heritage varieties becoming fetishized and marketable in their own right. And so it goes, on and on but with every past and future tomato invoked in the sale or cooking of each tomato.

Within Neoliberalism and Capitalism more broadly, these contradictions or paradoxes are pointed at as hypocritical and therefore untenable. So by that logic, either the contradiction does not exist and has never existed or one “side” must be eliminated. This desperate attempt to see discrete and unchanging objects rather than flowing and dynamic processes only serves to obfuscate (our) agency in the process of understanding and navigating the world around and among us. A contradiction is not hypocrisy manifest but rather a question to be answered and a point of potential emergence. In more practical terms, paradox and contradiction is an opportunity, a seed or a cell shimmering with potential. We can then turn to a dialectics where through the acceptance of constant change, turnover, and process, “the future is posed as a choice in which the only thing that cannot be chosen is what we already have.”⁸ Dialectics in practice means a kind of preparedness for change and process because it is understood to be already happening at all times. Fruit rotting in a bowl is as much evidence of this as the dismantling of government institutions or climate collapse. In short: disintegration. But what side we take, how we emerge, and the shape of that emergence, is up to us, in acts and practices of perpetual maintenance and adaptation. Choices on choices. Forever and ever. In pursuit of an edible dialectics or a dialectics of conviviality.

Identify what is around you (apparently edible, ideally).

Ask: Can it be eaten? Why eat it? Has it been eaten? How can it be eaten? How will it be eaten? Who has eaten it? Why am I eating it? Should I eat it? Shouldn’t I eat it? Who shouldn’t eat it? Who can’t eat it? Who won’t eat it? Can it be eaten? And so it goes, on and on.