Metabolic Rift, Metabolic Thought & Thinking of Ourselves in Edible Terms

Marx’s notion of the metabolic rift has been a great importance in figuring why capitalism cannot but dig its own grave and should, as such, be considered the driving force after the ecological catastrophe we find ourselves in. This rift explains why the fantasy of endless economic growth cannot help but crash into the reality of natural processes – there is no economy without ecology.

Still, thinking from the metabolic is problematic. This is mainly due to the ways in which thinking in terms of metabolism (think: industrial metabolism, urban, social metabolism) has been drawn into dealing with ecological problems in techno-managerial terms. The thing with metabolism is that, historically, it describes the functioning of individual organisms, not the socio-ecological environments they are interrelated with. That is, if we take our cue from Santorio Sanctorius, who is considered the first student of metabolism and devised a chair with which he could calculate and account for what went into his body and what came out. Sanctorius eats alone.
Although metabolism can be construed as what American sociologist Hannah Landecker calls an “in-between concept” that is concerned with both individuation and environment, both time and process, it has instead become instead “muted and closed.” She gives two reasons for this. One is the conceptualization of the body as a combustion machine (into which fuel is fed) from the 19th century onwards, the other is the focus on what happens in cells between eating and excreting, which leads to thinking it terms of energy and matter in terms of laws. How can it be that organisms eat other organisms and persist in being themselves? By converting the world into themselves – we know what goes in, what happens on the inside and what comes out: mystery solved. However, metabolic systems have a dual nature. On the one hand they are concerned with self-assertion (what Landacker calls individuation), which enables organisms to stand apart from their environments, enabling it to emerge as a self. On the other hand, however, they are concerned with integration (what Landecker calls environment), which enables organisms to be integrated into their environments, making them inseparable from it.
It seems that in this ‘metabolization of everything’ we get stuck with the remnants of focusing on individuation only, disavowing the other part: the environment. What if, instead of thinking from metabolism, we think from eating? What happens when we conceive of ourselves in edible terms, as feminist eco-philosopher Val Plumwood suggests? What if we instead ask what it would mean to ‘eat well’ [bien manger], as philosopher Jacques Derrida suggests?

In focusing on eating, which is a social practice (which include non-humans too), we don’t focus on maintaining ourselves individually but broaden our scope to more collective processes. Eating well is not just about what I put in what I put in my mouth and what goes into my bowels, but includes where these things I ingest come from and where they go to after. As such, eating well does not just make room for ethics but also for politics. Were the metabolization of everything is at risk of naturalization and depoliticization, focusing on eating and the edible is not.

This is not to say that we have to take leave of metabolism all too hastily. For one, the question is if Sanctorius was indeed the first student of metabolism. As social theorist Maurizio Meloni explains, metabolism is usually conceived of as a nineteenth century term and concept, but when we do not take it for a scientific mechanism but as a concept that is concerned with forms of life more broadly, we can connect it to humorism, the study of the four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. This thinking in terms of the relation between bodies and their environment (or individuation and environment) is, then, something that was done well before the introduction of the notion of metabolism in the 19th century and, more importantly, humorism was already more concerned with the environmental part of the equation.
The question what it means to eat well and what it means to think of ourselves in edible terms also asks us to reflect on indigestion. For if anything, we are giving future generations many things to eat that are not easily digestible (to put it mildly), like plastics, CO2 and nuclear waste, as such deepening the ecological catastrophe. How to learn to give to eat, to digest and waste well?