Foodscapes of the Anthropocene

Food is one of the most decisive issues of the Anthropocene. As the 2019 report of the Lancet Commission on “Food in the Anthropocene” bluntly states: “[F]ood production is the largest cause of global environmental change.”¹ Indeed, all of the geophysical and socio-economic indicators in the iconic “Great Acceleration” graphs² (e.g., increases in water use and fertilizer consumption, loss of biodiversity and forest cover, or rising concentrations of nitrous oxide and methane in the atmosphere) are tied to substantive changes in how food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed. In the problem of how eight billion human beings can be fed, the future of humanity and the fate of the Earth are revealed as inextricably intertwined. Changes at a planetary scale are connected to changes in social organization and human physiology, all the way down to the biochemical level. Thus, some scholars have begun to speak of “Anthropocene bodies” as sites where planetary and molecular processes converge.³ The development of artificial nitrogen fertilizer early in the twentieth century, for example, both enabled an unprecedented increase of the human population and reconfigured terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, most dramatically by creating the many “dead zones” that are now lining the planet’s coastal waters. But the technologically produced oversupply of nutrients simultaneously transformed individual human bodies: while the percentage of people suffering from acute hunger has steadily declined, almost a quarter of the world’s population are now overweight or obese, a similar number is suffering from mineral and vitamin deficiencies, and the global incidence of diabetes has doubled over the past three decades. These developments have resulted from a general shift to diets that are largely based on refined grains, starchy vegetables, sugar, and a growing share of red and processed meat.⁴ The consequences of this shift are no less devastating to the health of the planet than they are to the health of individual humans.

Food thus both validates and complicates what has become a commonplace assumption about the Anthropocene, namely that it undoes the illusory divide between nature and culture.⁵ In the mundane act of eating, that dividing line has always been crossed, crossed out, and reinscribed. For as long as humans have existed, our need to be fed has been a constant reminder of our fraught kinship with other living things, of the ways in which human flesh is woven into the larger trophic tapestry of the biosphere. From the very beginning, too, this relationship has involved technology, as the use of fire in the preparation of food shaped the course of hominid evolution, engorging the brain while shrinking guts and molars.⁶ For Claude Levy-Strauss, the culinary use of fire marked the passage from nature into culture, such that the distinction between the raw and the cooked functions as the semantic master key to mythologies the world over.⁷ From the vantage point of neo-materialist theories and multispecies studies, however, the relevant point is that this passage can never be completed—that it is not a linear journey out of one domain and into another, but rather a spiraling, co-evolutionary dance in which humans and their nonhuman partners continually modify each other.

Bruno Latour and many others have argued that modernity is founded on the denial of such entanglements.⁸ However, even a cursory glance at the transformation of food practices under the auspices of modernity reveals that these changes were premised not on the assumption of a categorical difference between humans and the rest of nature, but to the contrary on a recognition that humans were one biological species among others. The German chemist Justus Liebig is famous for his discovery of the crucial role nitrogen plays in plant growth, and for his early advocacy of artificial fertilizers in scientific agriculture. But as I have pointed out elsewhere, he was also engaged in the development of Liebig’s Extract of Meat, which was supposed to accomplish similar goals for the human body.⁹ Thus, artificial fertilizers and nutritional supplements spring from the same conceptual matrix: the modern realization that the human body is merely a special case of general metabolic principles that apply across the living world, which can be empirically studied, and whose productivity can be systematically enhanced. It can fairly be said that at the heart of what Foucault described as biopolitics, there is a massive reconfiguration of what ecologists call food webs or trophic cascades.¹⁰

From the vantage point of the Anthropocene, the most important manifestation of biopolitics is undoubtedly the rise of industrialized agriculture. The new forms of plantation agriculture that developed after the European conquest of the Americas and the so-called agricultural revolution of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, driven by both commercial and technological innovations, were early harbingers of this development.¹¹ Yet it is really only during the second half of the twentieth century, in tandem with the “Great Acceleration,” that industrial agriculture spread beyond Europe and its settler colonies and assumed the forms we are familiar with today: a system in which artificial fertilizers replace compost or animal manure; pesticides replace local knowledge about how to keep noxious species in check; standardized and improved hybrids take the place of landraces adapted to local conditions; and expensive, energy-hungry machinery enables economies of scale which increase agricultural outputs while reducing the need for skilled labor and tethering farms ever more tightly to the commercial vagaries of a global market for foodstuffs.¹² In the development of this system of food production, the different strands of the multiscalar transformation of the living world converge.

The rapid rise of “social movements organized around the environmental, social, and health consequences of industrialized agriculture”¹³ in many parts of the globe over the past two decades reflects a growing recognition of these interconnections. It has found its scholarly counterpart in the development of critical food studies as a new area of study that brings together insights from cultural studies, geography, political ecology, science and technology studies, as well as numerous other disciplines. The contributions in this volume move within this wider ambit, but their scope is more narrow: we explore how literature and other forms of cultural production in Asia have responded to the transformation of local foodways under the sign of the Anthropocene. By singling out texts from or about Bangladesh, the People’s Republic of China, India, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan, we do not wish to imply that these countries somehow form a culturally or historically coherent unit. However, it is not a coincidence that strategic thinkers have recently found it necessary to coin a term that refers to this large and heterogeneous geographical area as a single unit: today, the “Indo-Pacific” is the most populous and most economically dynamic region of the planet, and therefore a region which will play a decisive role in shaping the trajectory of the Anthropocene.¹⁴ That the highly problematic rise of Hindu nationalism has also entailed a rise of vegetarianism in India, for example, is of vast importance for the Earth’s future; so is the undiminished importance of meat consumption as a marker of social status and economic progress elsewhere in Asia.¹⁵

In approaching these issues, we have found the portmanteau “foodscape” to be especially helpful—not, it should be said, because of its conceptual clarity, but rather because of its metaphorical suggestiveness and the ways in which it allows us to locate our objects of study within multiple contexts that, like food itself, are always at once political and cultural, economic and ecological, material and semiotic. The term “foodscape” came into use around the mid-1990s and has been widely adopted in the social sciences, where it has been employed, e.g., in analyses of the impact of unequal access to healthy food in urban neighborhoods, in studies of consumer behavior, or in critiques of the global corporate food regime.¹⁶ Our use of the term in this volume, however, is more closely aligned with Arjun Appadurai’s work on globalization and modernity, which famously characterizes the transformations that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century in terms of disjunctions between different types of “cultural flows,” each of which constitutes a distinctive “scape,” such as the global flow of people (“ethnoscape”), the spread of technologies (“technoscape”), of images (“ideoscape”) and money (“financescape”). By designating these flows as “scapes,” Appadurai draws attention to their geographically uneven distribution and internal heterogeneity (their “fluid, irregular shape”), as well as to the fact that they are the socially produced building blocks of what, with reference to Benedict Anderson, he calls “imagined worlds.”¹⁷ Just like landscapes in the conventional sense, which attain their unity only through a human act of framing, Appadurai’s “scapes” “are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather, […] deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors.”¹⁸

Appadurai thus highlights a dimension of the issue that is especially relevant to the aims of this volume. The transformation of food production and consumption in Asia over the course of the “Great Acceleration” is not only about changing flows of biological species, chemical compounds, or money. It is just as much a matter of changing desires and affects, of new stories about the good life—spread via texts and images—taking hold of people’s imagination. It is about changing patterns of sociality, of family and workplace relationships, and about the ways in which beliefs, religious or otherwise, continue to shape what we consider to be “good to eat.”¹⁹ Literature and audiovisual media give expression to the imaginary dimensions of foodscapes, and they also actively participate in shaping them. They help us reflect on the gains and losses of the “Great Acceleration,” and on how the large-scale transformations of the Earth system in the Anthropocene are articulated with equally dramatic changes in people’s everyday lives. Perhaps most importantly, they are privileged sites for exploring how humans can act together to make collective flourishing possible. Given the relentless focus on the agency of the nonhuman in much of recent ecocriticism, this latter point bears special emphasis. There is a reason, after all, why the call to recognize nonhuman agency is rarely addressed to nonhumans, but always to other human beings. What distinguishes humans from other animals are the ways in which they organize their collective forms of life through the use of symbols. Humans do not simply “have” agency in the way many neo-materialists claim all sorts of matter do; they acquire it through what Appadurai calls “the work of the imagination.”²⁰ In order to properly inhabit the foodscapes of the Anthropocene—that is to say, to understand the ecological implications of how we eat and to actively change our culinary habits, as well as the political and economic structures by which they are conditioned—we must first of all learn how to imagine them.

The essay with which this volume opens goes straight to the heart of the matter. One of the most durable symbols organizing human foodways, not just in Asia but around the world, has been that of the nurturing mother. It is a symbol that implicitly aligns women with nature, identifying them with the sphere of “merely” reproductive labor as opposed to the political and economic spheres reserved for men. Indeed, this deeply ingrained gendering of food may be one of the principal obstacles to our grasping it as a genuinely political matter, in the first place. Adeline Johns-Putra opens her essay by delineating how generations of ecofeminist thinkers have struggled with this legacy. “Spiritual ecofeminists,” including the hugely influential Indian activist and writer Vandana Shiva, affirmed the linkage of women with nature, arguing that women’s innate capacity to nurture and care for life naturally predisposed them to resist the exploitation and destruction of nature at the hands of men. “Structural ecofeminists” such as Carolyn Merchant and Val Plumwood rejected the idea that a feminine ethics of care could be grounded in the biology of the female body, instead viewing the imagined proximity of women and nature as the product of a long history of victimization, sponsored by a patriarchal ideology which mandated the subjugation both of the female body and nature in the broader sense. However, they continued to affirm the idea that this history endows women with a privileged insight into the rapacity of the patriarchal order and a unique capacity to resist it. As Johns-Putra points out, such a view tends to homogenize the ways in which different groups of women have been positioned within patriarchy. By compressing their variegated experiences into a singular female identity, it runs the risk of reinscribing the very binary distinctions it set out to dismantle and thus effectively constricts women’s agency. Building on the work of Catriona Sandilands, Johns-Putra instead advocates for a strategic essentialism that embraces the symbolism of the nurturing female selectively and ironically, as a matter of expediency rather than as a first principle. Such a strategic use of ecofeminist tropes, she goes on to show, informs Sarah Joseph’s 2011 Gift in Green. The novel narrates the struggle of a small island community of Dalits in Southern India against the nefarious designs of a developer who wants to turn the mangrove forests from which they derive their livelihood into a modern city. Initially, the women who lead this struggle appear as picture-book illustrations of the nurturing female, one with the land and protective of its power to feed their people. Yet in the end, it is the intervention of a city-based, thoroughly modern female lawyer and the women’s willingness to jettison traditional gender roles which allows them to prevail.

Chitra Sankaran approaches the connection between women and food from a different angle. In her readings of three contemporary novels, she shows how food figures ambivalently, both as a vector of intergenerational trauma and as a medium of communal bonding and healing. For Nenita, the narrator of Merlinda Bobis’ Banana Heart Summer (2005), the perennial lack of food in her poverty-stricken home in the Philippines is inseparable from the emotional and physical abuse she suffered at her mother’s hands, which is itself a displaced effect of the latter’s humiliation by her rich family. Nenita’s retrospective narration and her present-day work as a cook in the US, to which she is passionately devoted, are symbolically identified, both functioning as ways of dealing with her traumatic past and the troubled relationship with her mother. The ten-year-old narrator of Balli Kaur Jaswal’s Sugarbread (2016), Pin, belongs to Singapore’s small, tightly knit Sikh community. She learns to read her mother’s substandard cooking as a kind of text in which a history of sexual abuse is encoded; her family is set on a path to healing when Pin herself learns to prepare food for her mother. Rather than on the relationship between a mother and a daughter, Niaz Zaman’s The Baromashi Tapes (2011) is focused on a young Bangladeshi couple. The novel purports to be a transcript of cassette tapes passed back and forth between the wife and her husband, who is a migrant worker in the palm oil fields of Malaysia. It is structured by the contrast between the harrowing conditions on the plantation, which wear down the husband’s health and will to live, and the wife’s exuberant descriptions of the food she helps to prepare with other women in her family, even while her own appetite is slowly whittled away by her grief over her husband’s fate. In all of these novels, food gives emotional substance to the complex diasporic geographies which the characters inhabit. Women’s role in preparing food for their families is presented not as an index of their oppressed social status, but rather as a potential source of empowerment; the kitchen becomes a site of female solidarity and communal bonding.

The foodscapes through which these characters move are emphatically sensuous. However, one of the most striking aspects of the Anthropocene is that it involves processes which elude humans’ natural sensorium—be it because they have to do with substances that humans cannot see or feel, or because they unfold at temporal and spatial scales that are too small or too large to be perceived by us—but which nonetheless affect us in the most intimate ways. Adjusting ourselves to the Anthropocene, therefore, must entail something not unlike the surrealist program of a systematic reorganization of the senses. Both of the novels examined in Yuki Masami’s contribution to this volume can be seen as undertaking such a project: in Kobayashi Erika’s Madamu Curie to choshoku wo (Breakfast with Madame Curie, 2014), cats feed on radioactivity while the women who take care of them are impregnated by the “voices of light,” souls of victims of nuclear disasters past and present; cats and light-begotten women form a kind of multispecies family devoted to keeping alive the repressed memory of “slow violence” and to repairing its ravages. In the Japan of Tawada Yōko’s sci-fi satire The Last Children of Tokyo (2014), an unspecified “contamination” has prolonged the lifespan of the pre-catastrophic population to the point where centenarians are now caring for the younger generations, whose bodies have become androgenous and hypersensitive. The novel is focused on 108-year-old Yoshirō’s desperate efforts to feed his great-grandson Mumei, who reacts violently even to such ordinary foods as spinach or lemons—but who, in stark contrast to his elders, accepts the conditions of his existence cheerfully and without fear for the future. As Yuki points out, Tawada does not present Mumei’s posthuman physiology simply in terms of disease, but also as a form of attunement to the radical transformation of the Earth itself.

The Last Children of Tokyo is also one of the texts discussed by Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt and Aidana Bolatbekkyzy; however, whereas Yuki highlights the qualified message of hope in Tawada’s novel, they focus on the ways in which texts written in the wake of the 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant critique paternalistic state policies that subordinate life to economic imperatives. In Satō Yūya’s short story “Same as Always” (2018), a young mother uses the government’s assurances that food from the contaminated areas is safe to eat as cover for a concerted effort to poison her own baby—a baby whom she violently resents for the powerful hold it has on her affections and those of her family, reducing her to the role of nurturing mother. Bollard Disease (2014) by Yoshimura Man’ichi extrapolates real-life exhortations by the Japanese government to consume contaminated food as a patriotic act of solidarity into the scenario of a nightmarish police state. In the fictional town of Umizuka, the public consumption of contaminated food is turned into a ritual of submission as people’s lives are sacrificed to the goal of economic prosperity. This theme is also central to Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground (2014). Its narrator is a Tokyo woman who, against the strenuous objections of her husband, volunteers to work on a cattle farm inside the exclusion zone whose owner has refused government orders to kill his animals and vacate his property. Her decision, like that of the cattle farmer, comes to figure as an act of resistance against an extractivist logic that views all life merely under the aspect of capital accumulation. Even more directly than the other three texts, Sacred Cesium Ground converges on the insight that patriarchy, as a system pivoting on the unpaid reproductive labor of women, has become inseparable from capitalism as a way of organizing nature, as Jason Moore has argued.²¹

This linkage between patriarchy and the larger system of beliefs and practices that produced the Anthropocene also stands at the center of Simon Estok’s reading of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2015) and Ang Li’s The Butcher’s Wife (1995). As Estok shows, these two novels can be seen as dramatizing Carol J. Adams’s contention that carnivorism is inextricably tied up with patriarchy, as both rest on the systematic infliction of violence on bodies coded as “natural.” In The Vegetarian, Korean housewife Yeong-hye suddenly refuses to eat meat or prepare it for her family—an act of brazen insubordination to the authority of her husband, which escalates into a refusal to eat anything at all and eventually lands her in a mental asylum. Whereas Yeong-hye thus introjects patriarchal violence, the protagonist of Ang Li’s novel takes the opposite route: when Lin Shi can no longer endure the sexual abuse and constant humiliations inflicted on her by her husband, she butchers him like one of the pigs he had killed for a living. In both novels, the price for challenging patriarchy and carnivorism is social and literal death—but, Estok argues, with their merciless exposition of the exploitative violence that stands at the heart of traditional gender and species hierarchies in Korea and Taiwan, they deliver a salutary shock that may push these societies further away from both sexual oppression and ecologically destructive habits of meat consumption.

Kathryn Yalan Chang’s essay turns to somewhat sunnier subject matter, focusing on the work of Chinese internet celebrity Li Ziqi and Taiwanese lifestyle blogger and author Yeh Yilan. Over the past decade, Yeh has established herself as one of the best-known champions of “slow food” in Taiwan, advocating for traditional Taiwanese cuisine using local ingredients, which she often presents in tastefully minimalist settings (and markets via her own branded chain stores). Li Ziqi shot to internet stardom in 2017 with videos that show her living the simple life in rural Sichuan—practicing traditional Chinese handicrafts, growing vegetables, foraging for wild mushrooms on horseback, and preparing lavish traditional meals for her grandmother. Similar to Yeh, Li leveraged her popularity to branch out into e-commerce. As Chang points out, both Yeh and can be criticized for capitalizing on the longing for an escape from the exploitative market economy, effectively commoditizing the nostalgia for an imaginary past. At the same time, however, they can be seen as performing valuable cultural work, as they articulate a deep-seated dissatisfaction with contemporary consumer capitalism and steer their fans toward the cultivation of different, less ecologically destructive pleasures, in line with Carlo Petrini’s arguments for a “new gastronomy” and Kate Soper’s concept of an “alternative hedonism.”

The last two essays in this volume turn their attention to poetic works from Hongkong and Macao—two (post-)colonial port cities where Asia and Europe have clashed and mingled, and whose history is inseparable from that of the global trading networks which have played such a key role in propelling the Earth into the Anthropocene. Both Leung Ping-kwan, who is the subject of Winnie Yee’s essay, and Un Sio San, whose poem “Coffee” Brian Skerratt analyses in his contribution, view food as an index of the cultural hybridity and divided cosmopolitan consciousness which characterizes these cities. Each in their own way, they also draw attention to the history of colonial violence that is at once implied and occluded in everyday culinary practices. As Yee shows, Leung’s multimedia works such as Foodscape (1997) (which takes its cue from Arjun Appardurai, as discussed above) and “Taste of Asia” (2002), in which his poems interact with visual artwork, push against the reduction of food to mere commodity, prodding its readers with irony and whimsical humor to appreciate the complex layers of meaning and material agency imbricated in the things that we eat.

Similarly, Un Sio San’s “Coffee” treats the titular beverage both as a metaphor for the harsh realities of a globalized economy (embodied in its shape-shifting protagonist, the female migrant worker Ima) and as a substance whose unique chemical properties have made into an emblem of modernization. Like several other psychotropic substances that have risen to prominence over the past two centuries, coffee is not consumed for its nutritional value, but rather for its capacity to enhance human performance. Produced by underpaid manual labor in the tropical periphery, it fuels cognitive labor in the industrialized center, helping people to adjust to a work time regime that has become increasingly untethered from the rhythms of natural daylight. Coffee, Skerratt argues, thus opens a window on a deep history of human self-shaping such as it is outlined by the historian Daniel Smail.²² In this history, enhancement and loss of agency, liberation and addiction are often impossible to tell apart.