Managing the Body through Food Law and Policy with Kyla Wazana Tompkins

In this episode we talk to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality studies at the University of Buffalo. She gives incredible insight into the relationship between the history of science and the history of food law and policy. We look at legislation like the 1906 Food and Drug Act to examine how food policy shaped and was shaped by American ideas about race, national identity, and the body. From $40 LA smoothies to the fermentation practices of the Appalachian peoples, we explore how the way we eat is always bound up with race and gender, both in the past and in the present.

Kyla Wazana Tompkins is a former food writer and restaurant critic. Today, as a scholar of 19th-century U.S. literature with a continuing interest in the relationship between food and culture, she writes about the connections between literature and a wide range of topics: food, eating, sexuality, race, culture, film and dance. Her 2012 book, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century, received the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize from the American Studies Association and tied for the Best Book in Food Studies Award, presented by the Association for the Study of Food and Society.

Reading List:

Deviant Matter: Ferments, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot, Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century, Kyla Wazana Tompkins

Fretwell, E. (2020) Sensory experiments : psychophysics, race, and the aesthetics of feeling.

On Boba, Kyla Wazana Tompkins - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/on-boba/

The Biopolitics of Feeling, Kyla Schuller (check out our archive for an episode with Kyla Schuller!)

Preciado, P.B. and Benderson, B. (2013) Testo junkie : sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era.

Spackman, C. (2024) The taste of water : sensory perception and the making of an industrialized beverage.

Reckson, L.V. (2020) Realist Ecstasy Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature.

McKittrick, K. (2015) Sylvia Wynter : on being human as praxis.

Sylvia Wynter, "On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory"

Alimentary Orientalism: Britain's Literary Imagination and the Edible East - Yin Yuan

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Inidgeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart

Transcript:

Due to some technical wizardry on Eleanor's part, the transcript has now been recovered! Enjoy the full transcript of our conversation with Kyla below.

Kerry: Hi, I'm Dr. Kerry McInerney. Dr. Eleanor Drage and I are the hosts of the Good Robot podcast. Join us as we ask the experts, what is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us work towards it?

If you want to learn more about today's topic, head over to our website, www.thegoodrobot.co.uk, where we've got a full transcript of the episode and a sample.

We love hearing from listeners, so feel free to tweet or email us, and we'd also so appreciate you leaving us a review on the podcast app. But until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the episode.

Eleanor: In this episode, we talked to Kyla Wazana Tompkins, chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality studies at the University of Buffalo. She gives incredible insight into the relationship between the history of science and the history of food. We look at how legislation like the Food and Drug Act and more recent advancements, and how we look at cells, shaped the way that the state categorizes toxicants and narcotics, according to their own ideas about race, national identity, and the body.

From LA smoothies to the fermentation practices of the Appalachian peoples, we look at food, progressive politics, being, and nationalism. We hope you enjoy the show.

Kerry: So thank you so much for joining us here today. Just to kick us off, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and what's brought you to thinking about gender, feminism, science, and technology?

Kyla: Sure. First of all, thank you for having me. And to prepare to talk, I had a good chance to listen to your catalog and learned so much, and it's a wonderful podcast. So really, thank you for that. And my name is Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and my pronouns are she, her, hers. I am a professor of feminist studies. I've taught in gender studies programs, and now department for twenty years. I'm the chair of the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality studies at the University at Buffalo here in the United States. But I'm Canadian, just to be clear.

And what brings me to the topic of gender, feminism, science, and technology is my longstanding interest in food. I've spent most of my career first as a journalist and now as a scholar writing in about the history of food and the history of eating. And when I wrote my dissertation, which became my first book, what I came to understand is there really is no discussion of the history of food and eating without some conversation with the history of science, often specifically with medicine and health, often specifically with the history of nutrition and domestic science, or reaching back into the nineteenth century U.S., which is primarily my field — dietetics, pre-nutrition, pre-modern science theorizations of what food is and what food could be.

But I would also say that I often think of the idea of food studies, which is one of my fields, and I'm going to read this. I'm going to read this as being someone in the same position as the field of feminist studies. In the early eighties, which is to say, just as a woman as a kind of ideal subject or object of women's studies was really a word that could not hold all the complexities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and therefore, the kind of struggles over that central concept made that field so much more interesting and so much more precise in its analysis. So the word food is really just too big to hold a field together.

Food, especially just really globally, food and medicine are the same thing. What is food? What is medicine? What is poison? What is a toxin? What is a narcotic? What is an intoxicant? These things flow in and out of each other, and how these things are categorized, how these things are theorized has everything to do with the history of science.

Eleanor: I'm really interested in your view on what a good technology is as part of our three good robot questions: What is good technology? Is it even possible? And how can feminism help us get there?

Kerry and I spend a lot of time talking about food or eating it. And I have a terrible immune system. So for me, good technology is all about multivitamins and optimizing my immune system in various different ways. I'm really interested in my gut microbiome and what I can do to create the right environment to make my body work as best it can. So can you tell us how you're thinking about technology in relation to food?

Kyla: Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about this question after you sent it to me, and I suppose the answer that I came up with, and then I'll drill down into it vis-a-vis food, is I think a good technology is a technology that enables life to flourish in balance with other life, with non-human life, in balance with ecology, and humans in balance with each other. And so that would be my operating sense of what a good technology is — a technology that allows life to flourish while minimizing harm.

This is important vis-a-vis food technology because, of course, our raging human hunger is eating the world. So how the industrialization of food, how monoculture — which, as historians of the Caribbean and indigenous historians are telling us, finds its origins in plantation economy — this so-called progress as it is attached to feeding the world, the work that the evil work that Monsanto does in the world, these technologies, while feeding many, also cause harm. So I would say that is a bad technology.

When I think of a good technology, I think a lot about, and your invocation of gut biome is, I think, really important because for me, the word technology, I think back to ideas of techne, which is really about science's origins in craft. And for me, the food technologies that are really fascinating really have to do with how people live at the level of everyday life in order to flourish within larger social and historical forces. So I'm always interested, for instance, in fermentation technologies and how people are fermenting in their lives.

And then in my own work, I'm interested in thinking about technology across scales, perhaps most particularly because I've been in conversation with Foucault's idea of biopower for, I think, really my whole career. It will be the central career concept that I've wrestled with. And Foucault's idea of technology. His use of the word technology, at least in English translation, is about the technologies of the self. But I'm really interested in where technologies of the self, which are really the technologies that intersect with food in our daily lives, come into conflict with, or are shaped by larger concepts of technology of scientific process. And then very specifically how questions of technology and scientific process and scientific discovery are taken up by the state.

Kerry: Wow, I really love that in part because I think whenever Eleanor and I are trying to think of our own examples of what good technology means to us, like Eleanor just excellently did with multivitamins or things that support our immune system, we often do come back to the two kinds of fields that you mentioned, that we come back to craft. So we often think about knitting or these kinds of overlooked forms of technological practice, often because they're gendered and racialized. And then we specifically often look at the craft of cooking or kind of food eating practice. Everything from the whisk, which Eleanor often says to me, the rice cooker being the closest thing to, I think, a perfect technology can be. And I think it is, a really nice way of reframing that. That it's not just that we see these things as being special because they've been overlooked, but also because maybe they tell us something about the heart of what technology is and what it can be in our particular lives and such.

I was super excited when you said yes to being on the podcast because I have been a longtime fan of your work and I just think that you, and a range of other scholars, who have been working at the intersections of 19th-century literature and history, and philosophy of science have been doing some of the most interesting, and critical, work on making us rethink some of the, um, scientific truths we take for granted in the present. And for Eleanor and I as scholars of artificial intelligence in particular, like a lot of our work is trying to destabilize the things that are taken to be as objective scientific truths. So that's why we wanted you on the podcast.

So you're the author of two books, Racial Indigestion and Deviant Matter, which is coming out soon. And for our listeners, we will link that on our webpage so you'll be able to click through and access them. We always have a transcript of each episode as well as a curated guide, so anything we mention in the episode will be there on our website. But in it, as you said, you've, you, you trace how race and gender shape and are shaped by eating. And also then consequently how we can trace through these patterns of eating, also the history of food policy and science in the U.S.

So you talked about how your work unexpectedly became this mapping and exploration of the history of science. So could you tell us what some of those encounters looked like?

Kyla: Sure. Food studies, when I first got into it, was a kind of a field that was being born. Because I think for a lot of scholarly history, people were like, food, so cute, that's what the wives do. And then food became a serious object of study, coming through anthropology in particular and then other fields. The first book, one of the places where I encountered the history of science was in trying to get away from what I felt was an overwhelming methodology in food studies, which was a focus all food objects themselves, in a way that didn't really destabilize or take up our central object in any kinds of problematic ways.

So for instance, there were like really good books on cod or salt or chocolate. And those are very good books by the way and great histories. But they were like the sexy academia because people, they bought that—people bought them because people want to read about chocolate because they want to eat chocolate. For instance, not me, I hate chocolate. So I spent the beginning of my dissertation research trying to look at these food scenes that I had seen in literature and in film and in art and look at the objects in them and trace the histories of those objects.

And I just kept hitting like walls. I kept hitting methodological walls. And then I realized that I was not interested in food in and of itself. I was interested in eating. And when I made that methodological switch, it opened up the project for me, because I came to understand that I was interested in doing a kind of a genealogy of eating, particularly as it relates to the formation of race, which is the fundamental ideological struggle, arguably, of the formation of the United States and its foundation over the last 500 years.

Once I made that shift, I started looking into dietetics. And so one figure that I came across was Sylvester Graham. Sylvester Graham is a 19th-century figure of the second Great Awakening, which occurred in the 1830s. He is a figure who begins to trace out idealized diets for the American body. Very specifically, he was focused on carving out a kind of Americanness that is ideal—a small-r republican post-monarchic republican body that is fully disciplined, fully in control of its passions, fully in control of its desires, and fully genial, the ideal liberal democratic body.

His Platonic ideal of food was wheat. So it was really interesting to me to follow his work. Of course, you know that the relation of science to fiction is pretty close in the 19th century—not always, but they were intuiting in a lot of places, especially in medicine. They’re relying on older humoral models still, for instance, and so studying what Graham had to say about food and eating was a study in how eating became a central technology for producing whiteness as an ideal citizen body in the United States, particularly in the moment when, in the U.S.—which is still, entirely and mostly located on the east of the Mississippi—is pushing west, displacing Indigenous peoples, moving Indigenous peoples and nations, and sovereign nations off of their lands and pushing monoculture, and specifically wheat, into the West.

This idealized notion of a U.S. body that eats American wheat, which he would say was plowed on virgin soil, and then also doesn't eat or consume things like spices, alcohol, sugar, coffee, and tea—these exotic ingredients that would produce a vicious body and a hypersexualized body. That’s one pre-free medical or early dietetic figure that I took up. And it’s tempting to say, “Okay, so you found this freaky dude in the archive and you wrote a chapter on him.”

Graham’s followers were, for instance, the Mormons, who adopted his principles and then moved into the West, displaced enormous sovereign Indigenous nations, slaughtered many Indigenous people, and really organized an entire state and an entire religion around these dietetic principles. Then there were people like William Alcott, who was a cousin of Louisa May Alcott and one of the founders of the American Medical Association, and Kellogg, who founded Kellogg’s cereals. So his inheritance continues to echo into our present moment.

That’s so fascinating. And just again, firstly, my new methodological practice is gonna be, “I found some freaky dude in the archives and I wrote about it.” That is excellent to me. But second, I also find it fascinating because, yeah, you have this valorization, particularly of American wheat, and yet—I’m not a U.S. history person, I wasn’t born or grew up in the U.S.—but wasn’t the mass planting of wheat also one of the driving factors behind the Great Depression and these huge economic and environmental catastrophes as well?

That’s right. That’s right. So a direct link to monoculture and to displacing Indigenous technologies and Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous technologies of cultivation, which settler colonists simply couldn’t see. They just couldn’t see what Native people had done on a large scale technologically in their sovereign nations and drove them out.

Yeah. And I could go on. There are other crazy people, but the 19th century, sorry, I don’t mean to throw the word "crazy" around, but the 19th century is full of wacky dudes.

Eleanor: I love these connections that you’ve drawn out between being and nationalism and food. And I always think of my dad and his very British microbiome—the inability of the white, middle-aged Brit to eat a spicy curry. The inventions of the British curries, like butter chicken and stuff with no spices.

And, I was sitting next to this incredible woman last night called Professor Mary Barker at my college at Caius. And she was divine. I think you’d love her because she thinks about food and progressive politics, and she tries to get young people to reclaim agency in the way that they navigate diet. Yeah, particularly pregnant young people.

Her research focuses on behavior change around diet to nutritional status. What she does is try to harness the power of the anger that lots of young people have towards life and towards the government as a way of changing food habits.

This is fascinating to me because we’ve had these programs in the UK on TV for a long time that have connected being—so who you are—to what you eat. There’s a very famous Channel 4 program called You Are What You Eat, and there was a very progressive politics that was attached to that. The idea that you could gentrify yourself by paying attention to these new fads of nutrition.

And when you talked about fermentation, it really made me laugh because if you know London well, it’s very hipster, the fermentation scene. Kerry’s been living in East London for a while now, so she can probably comment on that.

Kyla: But it's a really tricky thing to navigate. One of the arguments I made in that first book, or one of the kind of bells of alarm that I was trying to sound, was that Foucault said that the society of control will be accompanied by the elaboration of the individual. It’s a phrase I give to my students all the time.

I indulge in it all the time, but commodity activism, consumer activism, sometimes feels to me like a shell game. Or like a smokescreen for actually what we need, which is large mobilized group change at the structural level—and so fast. And yet I do it all the time; I buy very attractive greener cleaning products because they make me feel better when I clean, and they actually just motivate me to clean, which I never want to do.

So I have ambivalent relationships to foodie culture and to fermentation culture, because on the one hand, who could argue that these are attempts to make the world better? Any attempt to make the world better is important. And any attempt to flourish at the level of your individual body is important.

And also, I think that capitalism benefits when we allow ourselves to—and this is not criticism so much as what I’m trying, what I think about or what I try to think about, especially in thinking through food and political systems—is that capitalism plays a shell game with us where what we do at the level of the individual is meant to substitute for mass mobilized action.

And we can’t stop, and foodie culture feels like a very particular place in which a sort of elevated commodity citizenship is most seductive. We have this, a kind of running... I just moved from Los Angeles to Western New York.

And there’s a sort of very famous—you may have read about it or you don’t have to have read about it—but a grocery store called Erewhon in Los Angeles. And I can’t even walk in. It settled in a neighborhood very close to me, Pasadena, where I used to live.

And there was this massive scandal because their signature aesthetic is this heightened, elevated perfection. It’s just a kind of glowing, white, gleaming pine-floored, pine-shelved, polished perfection. Every tomato is perfect. Every berry is perfect. Every apple is perfect.

And then someone went behind the building and found all the imperfect food that they had thrown out. And that seems to me like your smoothie is $40, what is that? Something like £27, something like that.

So yeah, just, so that’s a kind of—I'm attentive to how food is the place where that shell game can be most seductive.

Eleanor: Can we draw out this idea of ambivalent progressive politics further in thinking about regulation and legislation as well?

Because you’ve talked about the 1906 Food and Drug Acts or the Wiley Act after Harvey Washington Wiley, an American chemist who advocated for food and eating to become under the purview of the state with all the imbrications between power and person that involves.

So can you tell us how new forms of body management, then like diet and hygiene, have been used as a form of state control? And perhaps can you link that to—what does the state have to do with Erewhon and these gleaming white, new buildings? There is a connection. So maybe you can flesh that out for us.

Kyla: Oh, boy. Okay. Let me see if I can get there. I’m interested in the 1906 Food and Drug Act. I ended the first book on it, and I start the second book with it because it feels like a watershed moment in the history of food and science.

Specifically as questions of consumption are taken up by the U.S. federal government. And the argument that I make is that the history I trace is about the emergence of what we would now call microbiology and bacteriology in Europe as it makes its way over into the United States. That happens two ways.

That happens through agricultural chemistry, and many American agricultural chemists—again, this push into the West, this push to maximize extraction from the land, agricultural chemists are at the heart of that—they’re going to Germany and they’re studying under Liebig and learning Liebig’s thermodynamic ideas about what it means to put energy into land and extract energy out of land.

And then it happens through this emerging understanding of fermentation via Pasteur’s ideas, which get to the states around the 1880s and then begin to be taken up by the state. So I see the Food and Drug Act as a moment in which the state begins to parse through and categorize forms of consuming and forms of matter.

Because of this new access to the cell, these new forms of visual access to the cell, and because of these new forms of visual access to eukaryotic cells, to yeast and to bacteria, the state and the state science project begins to see where it can maximize extraction—not simply at the level of this expanding land mass called the settler-colonial United States, but also down to the level of the molecule and the cell. So it's about the kind of expansion of the biopolitical project across these multiple levels.

And one of the things that they start to do in this sort of taxonomic fever is parse out what is an intoxicant? What is a narcotic? What is a medicine? What is a food? What is a beverage? They’re really like, is water a beverage? Is yogurt a beverage? Is yogurt alcoholic? Is kefir alcoholic? Is kefir different from yogurt?

There’s really like reams of unbearably dull prose, which I did read through, you're welcome world, to really understand this moment of this taxonomic frenzy. So, that kind of... that the Food and Drug Act is interesting to me because it's a moment where the state lays its cards on the table about where it is seeking to exert control over eating and consumption.

But, that was particularly interesting to me because, through the 19th century, the United States is essentially a drunk country, much like 18th century Britain—liquor and beer are everyday drinks. And fermentation is an everyday technology because, as we know, fermentation is how people manage their water supplies to make sure their water doesn’t kill them.

Fermentation is how people have succeeded in living for many millennia. And this need to exert control over bacteria actually is—it’s a management of fermentation. It’s a management of intoxication, and where these two overlap with each other, it’s very particularly targeted towards poor people.

It’s very particularly targeted towards poor Southerners, people in Appalachia, African Americans who have these century-old fermentation practices that make them self-sustaining. It’s a kind of—it’s a kind of almost like an anti-enclosure measure, it’s about taking people's ability to self-sustain away from them in the name of their own wellbeing and moving safety and nutrition and sustenance into the hands of industrialized food makers.

And I’m sure those scientists thought that they were doing it for people’s own good. But actually, ultimately it was about the changing shape of capital. But it was also about an emerging idea that comes out of the history of science of sobriety, rationality, objectivity, and reasonableness as desirable, affective states.

So like in 1905, I can walk down to the corner store and buy an ounce of cocaine because I have a toothache and I’m gonna rub cocaine on my gums. And then, oh, that feels good, and in 1905, what you begin to see is this growing literature of concern about Negroes—that’s the word, right? But African Americans, formerly enslaved African Americans, freed African Americans in the American South who seem to be using a lot of cocaine.

And then by 1906, cocaine is taken out of the drugstores and put into the hands of the American Medical Association as what we call a scheduled substance. But the scheduling and the management of that substance is also about the birth of certain kinds of criminality.

So as we seize control over substances, as we seize control over affective states, particular kinds of affective states and particular kinds of substances become racialized, and we see a kind of contribution on the part of the Food and Drug Administration in this relatively benign act to the growing carceral state in the United States.

These new forms of body management, again, like what I try to do in this book is think across scale. Like on the one hand, it's about the growth of hygiene as a state project. But on the other hand, it's about the dovetailing of hygiene as a state project with other forms of energy extraction and carcerality that serve the racial capital project of the U.S.

Kerry: That's so fascinating and I never would have linked together, this history of trying to understand what food is: is yogurt a beverage? Is yogurt alcohol? With the regulation and then the creation of the idea of the drug user, the drug seller. And again, this production of criminality, that's really fascinating.

Because I also think that what you're saying is such an important reflector of the way that different kinds of population science and body management techniques that are emerging and becoming resurgent in this time. Of course, like the eugenic projects of the early 20th century were in some ways very much and predominantly about race and racial control. But at the same time, were never just about race or I think it is really difficult to understand these projects without thinking about how much of it was to do with class-related control, how much of it was to do with disability. And then more broadly, this project of exerting kind of state control over different classes and types of bodies, according to the way that they were seen and profiled by the state.

I honestly could talk to you all day about this. But finally, and sadly to bring this to a close, I actually wanted to touch on one final part of your work, because you focus on eating. I think your work is like very beautifully sensory and like great food writing. Of course, it has to be able to evoke what it's like to eat, but I think that's where your focus on eating practice is particularly interesting to me.

I was just having lunch with my boss literally less than an hour ago, and we were talking about foods we do and don’t like to eat. He said, “I’ve eaten like most things, like really pretty much everything, but there’s only a couple of hurdles I’ve fallen at.” One of them was chicken feet, which you might’ve mentioned. I work quite a lot around the racialization of Chinese food in particular, so I asked him, “Out of interest, is it because you thought it was going to be crunchy, but it was gelatinous?” And he said, “Yeah, like actually, that’s exactly it.” I said, “Yeah, I think it’s like there’s a very different expectation of what the sense and the feel of that food is going to be like.”

So much of your work is around this sensory experience with food, and as a result, I was wondering how your work has engaged with this kind of science or this history of science when it comes to senses and sense-making.

Kyla: I’m not sure that if I were to review my second book right now, I would say that was the limitation of the book. I think there are other people doing fantastic work on the history of the senses—Erica Fretwell, Lindsay V. Reckson, and of course, Kyla Schuller in different ways—and then of course, there’s that whole amazing line in the history of the senses. So, you know, I am interested in the senses in so much as I’m interested in the practice of history.

As a historical materialist, taking up Marx’s idea that the work of history is a history of the production of the senses, I’m interested in where I can try to understand how the organizing of the senses in and through the state’s access to certain forms of matter dovetails with the idea that how our senses are organized fundamentally has to do with who does and doesn’t have legibility as a political citizen.

And so here I’m thinking with the theorist Jacques Rancière, but I’m also thinking with Sylvia Wynter. Sylvia Wynter’s proleptic, prophetic work on the production of the human in and through the production of race and through plantation economies and through indigenous displacement, which is to say that the history of natural science is the history of the extraction of certain kinds of human animals from their ecological backgrounds to make some of us human and some of us not.

Where Wynter and Rancière come together for me is that food, and food ecologies, and food economies, and food industries and their taking up by the state, their effects, is in essence to normalize particular forms of embodiment and normalize particular affective and sensory states of normativity. So I talked about sobriety, rationality, reasonableness, frugality—all the qualities of largely white citizenship—and then to produce others as overly sensory, exotic, sensual, unchaste, intoxicated, and so forth.

In my work, what I’m doing is tracing, in some ways, the racialization of certain forms of animate and inanimate matter alongside the racialization of various and differing or apparently different humans. In my new writing, I’m thinking much more critically about the science of the senses. I’m reading Christy Spackman’s wonderful new book, The Taste of Water. I’m learning so much from her about the emergence of the idea that water should taste neutral, and not like water from different places might have its own taste, and the industrialization of flavor and the emergence of flavor science and the idea of a flavor profile and flavor profile analysis in the mid-century U.S.

But I’ll tell you, a major moment of change for me was when my family—when we got COVID before the vaccine came out. Like many people, I was sick for almost two years, but we knew we were sick when we got anosmia, when we lost our sense of smell and taste. And that was, for someone who’s lived through eating for so much of my life, a moment of real methodological change for me because my senses disaggregated from each other. What I had originally thought of as flavor and thought of as taste shattered. I started to experience tasting and my own senses as the smell that I had lost, the retronasal smell, orthonasal smell, texture, flavor, sensation, mouthfeel. All of these became really disaggregated from each other and also from time. Time became disaggregated from flavor because I was so disappointed by everything I ate. It was not at all what I expected.

For instance, my absolute comfort food in the world, I grew up in Chinatown in Toronto, is Cantonese food. When I want comfort, as I wanted in the pandemic, I crave Chinese Cantonese food in particular. But it was disgusting. When you have no sense of smell, for me, it was like someone had vomited into my mouth. All I got was mush and texture instead of all the flavors that I had been craving, which are so close to my heart. The question of the senses has emerged as pressing for me because not only have I encountered my own senses in a new way, but I’ve come to ask how it might be possible to re-educate the senses and what a re-education of the senses might have to do with fostering political change.

One intersection where I think that’s particularly pressing, where people who are not me are doing great work, is around, for instance, addiction to sugar. Sugar emerging from plantation ecologies—sugar as one of the worst foods in particular forms that we can eat, but sugar that we need to make it through our days as they have been structured as work under late capitalism. My thinking with the senses right now is about trying to critically approach the senses as something formed by capital.

But asking whether the senses might be a way to reeducate ourselves out of capital… I don’t have an answer. But I have a question.

Eleanor: Oh, that’s so interesting. Thank you.

My great aunt has lost her sense of taste and a bit of her sense of smell. And the only thing that she can enjoy is lemon and sugar.

Kyla: That’s interesting. Does she eat fermented foods? Because when I lost taste, what I wanted was pickle juice.

Eleanor: I really doubt it. Yeah. I’ll suggest it because that might solve a string of health-related problems as well. And you did join the progressive-era laws to the grocery clinic that is Erewhon. You did, because sobriety and the way of performing the Good American—Khloe Kardashian’s clothes brand. Absolutely - like, this way of behaving and not drinking, behaving well, going to the gym, all that I think is definitely part of the way that the progressive American has to perform their lives.

And I wanted to say that even though Paul Preciado is not great on race, their book Testo Junkie is really interesting about the way that the state allocates testosterone to people and in what doses, and this is a way of policing gender as well.

I loved what you said about when different things that we consume are divided into different categories—what’s an intoxicant, what’s not a narcotic.

So much for joining us today.

Kyla: Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for your wonderful podcast. It’s really, I think, forging great new conceptual ground, and we really need it.

Eleanor: This episode was made possible thanks to the generosity of Christina Gaw and the Mercator Foundation. It was produced by Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney and edited by Eleanor Drage.