More-Than-Human Eating

Reconfiguring Environment|Body|Mind Relations in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This paper is concerned with emergent more-than-human eating practices and how they might challenge received understandings of bio- and geopolitics.After a brief review of the anthropology of food and eating and how its concerns may have to be expanded in the Anthropocene, we briefly analyse three empirical cases of anticipatory more-than-human eating practices: a set of artistic anticipations of future eating; microbiome research and related biohacking practices; and research on future food security in the context of planetary boundaries. We discuss how all three cases make the boundaries between body|mind|environment porous. The ‘I’ of the embodied human subject emerges as multiple – colonised and accompanied by a panoply of microorganisms. How might such a collective be subject to governance and ‘self’-technologies? We close by pleading for an experimental para-sitic anthropology that critically addresses emergent forms of bio/geopolitics in the Anthropocene.