How can we think through the body towards infrastructure? How are our bodies produced and reproduced across the infrastructural lines of the food system? In what ways are (our) bodies differentiated — sustained or harmed — through these complex systems and networks that comprise power relations, historical processes and social phenomena and construct scarcity for many and abundance for some?
In this question, we center the production and reproduction of bodies in relation to the infrastructure of the food system. In other words, bodies are contextualised within the complex systems and networks of supply(chain), labour(force) and distribution. Through this question, we can begin to consider how our own bodies are positioned and organised along the supply chain, allowing us to trace the interdependent practices and processes of infrastructure from the micro (individual) to the macro (transnational) — Recognising this interdependent relationship allows us to question how our bodies are formulated and conceptualised as a consequence. From here, we can question whose lives are neglected or improved through the infrastructure of the food system.
The Marxist ecological theory of the Metabolic Rift (1850s) is used as a starting point to understand the historical processes and power relations which have configured the agricultural food system to date. Subsequently, the metaphor of Metabolism is used throughout the brief as a tool to think with and through as it situates the body and embodied practices of food consumption at the center of the research. Similarly, it engages an inseparable relationship between body, environment and infrastructure.
Infrastructure is that which sets things in motion; … ‘material forms that allow for the possibility of an exchange over space. They are physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people and finance are trafficked’ (B.Larkin, 2013).
Our bodies* and the processes within and surrounding them vis-à-vis infrastructure, link to the social codes and relations that keep our bodies connected to infrastructure, or demand particular types and/or certain divisions of labour, which often reinforces or reproduces our bodies across gendered, classed and racialised lines as well as interspecies hierarchies.