Posted Date: December 3, 2020

Episode Description: In this episode, LAC member Müge Gedik welcomes Dr. Margot Finn (University of Michigan) to talk about her project “Belly Full of Stars: Feeding Multitudes of Multitudes in Apocalyptic Times.” This conversation begins with Margot Finn’s approach to the Anthropocene and her conceptualization of apocalypse. She underlines the importance of the ways we tell stories about time, the future, what it means to coexist. Coexistence and symbiosis become crucial tools for the discussion of multispecies justice in food futures in the Anthropocene, elaborated through examples of eating and thinking with companion species such as the lichen, the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and the Matsutake mushroom. Margot Finn points at the difference between the metaphorical distinctions between symbiosis and parasitism and the biological reality where interrelations are not usually mutually beneficial. Finn highlights the ways the pandemic has forced her (and she hopes others) into a new awareness of the dual racist epidemics of violent policing and disproportionate COVID-19 deaths in Black & Indigenous & Latinx communities.

Guest Biography

Dr. S. Margot Finn has a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI) focusing on Food Studies, Media and Cultural Studies. She teaches at the University of Michigan as a unionized non-tenure track lecturer in Applied Liberal Arts and affiliate of the Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, Margot employs interdisciplinary topics like food to help students integrate the many different academic disciplines they encounter in their liberal arts degrees while connecting academic work to their personal lives. She encourages critical thinking skills and more informed perspectives on contemporary food debates by examining multiple perspectives on topics such as the ecological impact of Organic vs. conventional agriculture, local vs. imported foods, the biology and culture of fatness, and the history of attempts to reform the U.S. food system.

Margot’s research examines popular beliefs about food and eating in the U.S.; her 2017 book, Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution, investigates how the contemporary food movement was shaped by class anxieties created by middle-class income stagnation and declining class mobility since 1980.

Project Title: Belly Full of Stars: Feeding Multitudes of Multitudes in Apocalyptic Times

Project Description: The Covid-19 pandemic and experience of quarantine has made newly clear to many of us just how hard it is for us to be apart from each other. Social isolation proves with new viscerality how meaningless any notions of freedom or independence are if we don’t also foster communities where we can be safe and connected. In this talk, I explore some of the implications of how the experience of isolation has destabilized popular buy-in to the notion of the liberal individual subject and belief in its supposed rights and powers.

The apocalyptic revelation or uncovering of the insufficiency of the liberal individual subject and emptiness of the ideologies built upon it enables more of us to see ourselves as not-one but many. I draw primarily on two bodies of thought: the recent philosophers of symbiosis and their friends, especially Lisa Heldke, Donna Haraway, Scott Gilbert, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and the Black Caribbean scholar-poets of multiplicity, especially Aimee Cesaire, Edouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter, and Dionne Brand.

These thinkers and the stories we tell about symbiosis offer some guidelines about how we ought to behave if thinking of ourselves as multiple: approaching our constituent selves and symbiotic partners with curiosity; ensuring that decisions take place somehow in the presence of those who must bear their consequences; protecting the poor among humans, the most vulnerable among species and populations, and more diverse over less diverse systems; and exercising vigilance against the self and will to power.

Additional Resources

Conference at the University of Tasmania, Australia: Food Futures in the Anthropocene: Place-Based, Just, Convivial

Margot Finn, Keynote Address “Bellies Full of Stars: Feeding Multitudes of Multitudes in Apocalyptic Times,” Margot Finn 

 

 

Recommended Readings

• Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 2011.
• Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016.
• Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None, 2019
• Lisa Heldke, “It’s Chomping All the Way Down: Toward an Ontology of the Human Individual,” The Monist (2018) 101, 247-60.
• Warren Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, 2006.