AKITA

Food speaks to us. Food is a sensual and intellectual expression of culture and an ethical engagement with the world. Eating always touches the dignity of humans and non-humans, through consuming them or the products made by them under dignified or undignified conditions, through withholding or taking food away from them, or through enabling them to live a dignified life as a aware fair purchasers. When eating, I decide whether herbicides or insecticides destroy life, whether preservatives and other additives kill my body’s own microbiome - billions of living beings - or not. When eating, I decide whether fossil fuels are burned to heat greenhouses or to transport food over long distances in refrigerated containers. When eating, I decide whether I support a globalized, monopolized, speculative system or small-scale, sovereign producers. Each of these decisions is deeply intertwined with my intimate sensory perception. It is not merely an intellectual decision; in the end it determines my physical well-being, pleasure, or emotional numbness. Beyond that, each of these decisions is embedded in a cultural corset that I, as an individual, create together with my human and non-human environment - and to which I submit. What people eat depends on their culture. Both refined taste and disgust reveal every kind of bodily and mental origin of those who eat. The cultural technique of eating refers only (still) to a limited extent to the conditions of the nature surrounding the eaters.

Nevertheless, food culture—like human existence itself—depends on so-called nature, that is, the biosphere that keeps us alive. If, for example due to climate change, the biosphere of planet Earth were to change so drastically that the growth of plants and animals edible to humans were no longer sufficiently possible, humanity would become extinct. This means that we must not speak of climate or nature protection, but of the protection of humans. However, since food culture, as described above, is a cultural technique constructed by humans, it can change at any day and at any hour. It is entirely possible to shape food culture in a resilient and sustainable way, and because food culture directly corresponds to the sensory experience of all eaters—that is, all humans—every person feels the survival of their own species.

Text by Honey & bunny