A Line We Draw And Defend Against The Outside

Eating is border crossing: a conscious, complex, and difficult act mirroring social relations, political, and environmental conditions. Just as nation-states can be perceived as bodies with organs, including digestive systems, what is allowed to pass through the membrane of a national border is subjected to questions of what appropriately serves and nourishes the ‘civilized appetite’—what is good food and what is bad food. A Line We Draw And Defend Against The Outside explores how eating, and the act of choosing what we put into our mouths, is a continued negotiation of what is self and what is other—how food serves as a medium: matter storing memory, speaking of the passing of time, and the perishability of bodies. As a moving body traverses the world, the world moves through an eating body—nourishing, sustaining, and permeating it. It is this act of ingesting that makes the choice of what we put into our mouths a mirror of social and spatial dynamics—a matter of place and perception, privilege and politics—as well as a metaphor for solidarity, belonging, and exclusion.