It’s Chomping All the Way Down: Toward an Ontology of the Human Individual

Feeding relations: applying Luhmann’s operational theory to the food system

“…Mintz’s paradigm-launching work charts the contours of an emerging global food system and its reliance on multiple forms of oppression. It aligns, then, with Heldke’s challenge: to take seriously “relationships that run the gamut from mutualistic to parasitic” ( 2018 , p. 249). Historian Vincent Brown ( 2008 ) draws an even closer connection, arguing that enslaved workers were “ themselves consumed in the creation of wealth,” and that “[s]omewhere between the literal and metaphorical, then, cannibalism is an appropriate term for the process outlined in Sweetness and Power ” (p. 119).…”

“…Indeed, the entire intellectual project seeks to explain how agriculture, fishing, food-chain work, marketing, eating, and embodied affective experiences are all part of an interconnected web both within and beyond the production and consumption of food. In Heldke’s ( 2018 ) terms, agrifood studies focuses on food’s “with-ness” as well as its “thing-ness.” As one landmark example, Mintz’s analysis of “the place of sugar in modern history” ( 1985 ) explained slavery and plantation farming in the Americas and the changing lives of working-class Europe as two facets of the same process, connected by a commodified sugar trade that structured a global regime of racial terror. Mintz’s paradigm-launching work charts the contours of an emerging global food system and its reliance on multiple forms of oppression.…”

“…Both CAS and commodity-based approaches to defining and studying the food system are relational in that, in Heldke’s terms ( 2018 , p. 252), food’s “with-ness” is taken as seriously as food’s “thing-ness.” CAS approaches delineate the relationships among the human and other elements in the system while commodity-based approaches, like food regimes, examine the relationships instantiated by food production and trade within the capitalist world economy. In different ways, they confront a problem of defining a system’s identity in both space (what defines a system, and where are its boundaries?)…”

“…Philosopher Lisa Heldke ( 2018 ), reflecting on the indispensable role gut microorganisms play in human functioning, asks: what happens to our mental models of the world “if we take seriously the degree to which all life on this planet, including human life, is threaded through with relationships in which one creature sinks its ‘teeth’ into another and hangs on for dear life, deriving vital sustenance from that second creature, but sometimes imperiling the life of it as well?” (p. 247). We cannot continue to live without our gut microbiota, and thus, “at the (literal) bodily center of us,” Heldke writes, “we find not some solid, essential core, but the rest of the world ” (p. 248, emphasis in the original).…”

“…This process is what distinguishes the system from its surrounding context, and system structures are created and reproduced as the system is coupled to its environment. Luhmann’s decision to restrict the system’s identity to the active relation itself [Heldke’s ( 2018 ) ‘with-ness’ of food] affords a new and insightful perspective on the food system and its structures. For our model, the central, defining process of the food system is feeding, and food system structures are created and reproduced as the feeding process is coupled to its contexts in individual (“psychic” in Luhmann’s terms), political, social, economic, and ecological realms.…”