Care, Toxics and Being Prey: I Want To Be Good Food for Others

Abstract

This article involves thinking with toxics and food chains, and complex systems, and where do all the chemicals and heavy metals go? What are the distributed effects? How might we hack legacies of toxic inheritance? What alternative rituals, practices and values are needed? It uses the theoretical tools of feminist environmental humanities to explore the question: what does it mean to be good food for others? Through engagement with different artworks-Karin Bolender's art project R. A. W. Assmilk Soap, Miriam Simun's the Lady Cheese Shop, Natalie Jeremijenko's Cross(x)Species Adventure Club and Jae Rhim Lee's Infinity Burial Projectalongside and through feminist environmental humanities, this article explores the ways in which artists complicate death/food relations and nourishment through their express acknowledgement of chemically burdened bodies. In grappling for ways to respond in permanently polluted worlds, the analytic device of viewing humans as "being prey," via Val Plumwood, alongside feminist ethics of care, is used to imagine what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa refers to as "more caring affective ecologies."Speculating on becoming prey and wanting to be good food for others-whether this is for a crocodile, fish, mushrooms or microbes in the soil-cuts into contemporary theories of toxicity and care.

Earth Repair: Mycoremediation Phenomena

“…Many mechanisms can be taken into account to eradicate such pollutant; one of them is called bioremediation that use microorganisms to degrade these complexes [27]. Bacteria can degrade many of these pollutants; however fungi can be used to degrade or sequester recalcitrant contaminants using their enzymes in process called mycoremediation [55] that is safe and economic compared to physicochemical mechanisms [20] as some of these fungi can be hyperaccumulators of heavy metals [28]. Additionally, fungi' has a vital role in our ecosystem is decomposition [29]; therefore, mode of fungi's action in degrading pollutants is secreting…”