Hands: Tools of Alteration

Metabolism as an internal biological process, transcends the mammalian body. The root of the word comes from Greek μεταβολή metabolē — change. In order to understand this thought we must acknowledge a prime human urge. The objects of the world that are altered by human hands are meant, in the broadest sense, to serve digestion, observes Vilém Flusser in his semi-fiction on the human condition while examining the vampire squid from hell. In many aspects, food culture or cuisine represents the human's capacity to control a metabolic system. The hand serving as a primal tool for this altering of states of existence. Through alternate ways of using touch and the grasp, humans alter themselves and those around them.

Anna Tsing alludes to the mastering of the atom as the ultimate stage of the human desire for control over nature. It clearly backfired. The dropping of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and the explosion of the Chernobyl power plant in 1986, were turning points for those dreams. With both human and other-than-human beings and structures being completely obliterated. Suddenly, the span of the livability of the planet came into question. With this came more extensive knowledge of pollution, mass extinction and climate change and what kind of human disturbances can we live with?, Tsing asks ... As art students we are predisposed to a significant level of precarity, but that is on a monetary basis, a fraction of our necessities to survive when put in perspective. But this calls for urgency over the fragile fate of the earth which we tread on so undisturbed, a universal precarity. How, through our routine concerns and a design praxis can we increase the chances of entrusting a wholesome environment for all future multispecies beings?

Foodstuffs are vastly ignored as a phenomenon of more than just gastronomical value. Due to its regard as an irrational knowledge based on the “low senses” of taste and smell, cookery is studied relatively little. Food culture implies history, social structures — the present metabolic regime we are participating in. Boiling, roasting, steaming, frying … these are all methods in which human separate themselves from nature as Claude Lévi-Strauss has proposed in his culinary triangle. Raw being unchanged by nature, rotten, a natural process as well, yet changed, a cooked being changed and therefore signifying human culture, the Touch. As no other animal processes its food like we do, this act can be seen as a very significant trait of our estrangement from the natural world. Every development of eating habits on Earth, shows something about the conditions under which they developed. They were never as we know them at present. The stove and the oven were human inventions. Cooking took a major leap with the advent of fire, humanoids started to change the state of objects, and that in turn changed them. A rift between nature and culture began to form. At the point of ignition of the first fire, the interspecies dialogues became separate. Due to the additional calories unlocked by cooking, the human brain was able to evolve to its current size. Fire has also been a main contributor to cultural and cognitive evolution, which eventually led to complex societies, the division of labor, and the evolution of knowledge and technology, creating a social order within which humans possess the agency to mediate and judge how to act through such concepts. Thus, the taming of fire and as a result — cooking can be held accountable for being a prime instigator of the rift between culture / nature, us / them. Food practices mark ideological moments, especially significant in the Western Europeans' interactions with the Other. Cooking is a cauldron for the domination of states, races, genders and dogmas.

The industrialized food system is such an elaborate spiderweb of metabolic processes and actors serving the consumers of today. Observed by punks who associate the civilizing process of producing and transforming food with the human domination of nature and with White, male, corporate supremacy. But it can be seen as something that can transcend binary material notions of alteration. Looking at these affairs more deeply can activate a reweaving of a rich web of relationships as Peter Buchanan puts it into words. Looking from within is the first step at grasping the position we are in. Our body takes in so much from the outside. Light and food is transformed into energy by the active agents inside of the mammalian organisms fluctuating between external and internal spaces.

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