Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  It became clear over the last year that the world as it exists does not facilitate my survival. What I am doing in Detroit is nudging an entire tiny ecosystem toward a state that will allow my participation, crafting a mini biome with millions of other beings. My worms are my closest collaborators in this project; an added benefit is that they keep the process visceral. It is one thing to bury food scraps in the back yard, it turns out, and another to keep pooping worms in your pantry. The latter can churn the stomach, which is only appropriate. A whole, new ecosystem should be felt in the gut.

  Both backyard and vermiculture composting have captured the imaginations of a growing number of folks in recent days, alongside a rise in urban farming and the popularity of the sustainable food movement. It is not uncommon to heap a healthy dose of hyperbole in with the food scraps for the backyard bin, either: composters tend to infuse their talk of rot and decay with grandiose notions of life-force sustenance and metaphors for Important World Events.

  The LA Times predicted the trend with a short piece of compost boosterism published in 1989, just as the Berlin Wall began to fall:

  [R]ecent events in Eastern Europe notwithstanding—among the several things about which Karl Marx was right is the uncontestable fact that consciousness is determined by one’s relationship to the means of production. And what finer method to approach the consciousness of one’s garden than to partake in its death and regeneration.1

  Hyperbolic, maybe, but provable. Among the many rewards of composting listed are the horticultural (of course), the political (which we’ll address in a moment), and the metaphysical. I’ll personally attest to this last: I know I’ve never felt more connected to the spiritual cycle of life—the one that exists beyond sight, taste, smell, sound, and touch—than when I am digging around in one of my several delightful piles of rotting gook and poop and death and pondering my own demise with a certain measure of serenity and hopefulness.

  The metaphysics of compost, according to writer and researcher Kim Hall, is more than just a woo-woo guide to backyard gardening: it may help inscribe justice into a mainstream food movement currently distracted by inherently capitalist notions like sustainability and consumption. Food often acts as invitation, a means of sharing both physical space and a nourishing—potentially educational—experience. Considering food within this larger sociocultural context allows us to envision it not as mere site to improve the minutest impact of globalization, but as an easy access point to politics that are rooted in resisting oppression.

  Consider that recent darling of the mainstream food movement, the farm-to-table restaurant. These serve what’s often called “pure” food, sourced from local growers in a manner termed “sustainable.” Such establishments are often chided as elitist, and they are, but farm-to-table eateries pride themselves on crafting healthful meals that provide pleasure.

  Yet charges of elitism aren’t just tossed out over the high cost of locavore dishes: such facilities are often unlikely to respond to individualized food needs, a stance that quickly privileges the able bodied over those who may have more pressing reasons to seek healthful food options. I’ve heard more than one server suggest that if I don’t “like” ingredient X—one that may trigger pain or dysfunction, but which the chef has determined is a part of how a meal tastes best—I should probably just eat at home. This same suggestion was once offered a friend who has no food restrictions, but is larger-framed than I and requested an untiny table that she could more easily access, so even the built environment seems to cater to a particular variety of eater. Many restaurants, too, fail to install ramps for wheelchair access or other devices for mobility assistance; few offer large-print menus for the visually impaired; and I’ve yet to enter a restaurant that offers American Sign Language as a matter of course. Far from mere oversights (and occasional violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act), such tendencies build to a pattern that infuses the mainstream food movement with ableism, centering it on a desire to ward off—instead of treat existing—disease and disability. (Hall reminds us that nutritionless but cheap fast food is served in ADA-approved facilities and often available for extended hours, which gives us a solid glimpse why the drive-thru may arguably be more “sustainable” for people with disabilities than the average farm-to-table eatery.)

  There are grander implications to positioning food as “pure,” too, even besides the mythos of white supremacy the term calls up. I’ll attempt to outline an economic argument based in my own experience. Let’s grant a normal, healthy body—one capable of gaining all the nutrients it needs from meals—a weekly food budget of $100, and assume that, for the sake of argument, to be standard. Folks with any sort of health concerns, however, are likely to have a diminished ability to process certain nutrients, whether from illness itself or as a side effect of a treatment program. Supplements can be expensive: mine cost approximately $120 per month, or $40 per week. Which leaves me with a starting (imaginary) weekly food budget of only $60. So when food is presented as healthful, but not priced with budgetary diversity in mind, it appears to be targeted mainly toward those who are already free of serious health concerns. The “purity,” of the sustainable food movement then, is not an attainable state for all clientele: it is granted only some, perhaps before even entering the establishment, and they must guard it carefully.

  Yet everything, we know, must end in decay, and Hall writes of eating, disability, and the myth of sustainability in this context. We are, she reminds us, messy: how we eat, and, even more, how we navigate relationships around eating. “Food practices are sites where the meanings of community, identity, relationship, and food itself are materialized and negotiated,” she writes in her essay, “Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food.”2 The notion of purity, she argues, or even untrammelled longevity, has no place in how we really eat. Even tastes change over time, after all.

  Food politics that center on justice, Hall contends, would hold the relationships forged by what we eat and how we acquire it as equally important to the nutritional properties of what is ingested. In real terms, the labor practices at that farm-to-table restaurant would come under consideration as another aspect of our health. Does a restaurant that touts sustainability see providing for its employees as important as nourishing its customers? Is an eatery that fails to respond to the needs of customers with disabilities or food restrictions truly concerned with ecologically necessary biodiversity?

  The metaphysics of compost, according to Hall, “understands bodies and food as . . . contested sites where boundaries are questioned, negotiated, and open to transformation, not fixed.” She urges us to consider food as a complex of relationships. Between my worms, for example, and my neighbors; between me and the microbes that live in my backyard; between local restaurants capable of responding to individualized diets and farmers reliant on sound environmental practices; between the potential interactions that could be formed if high prices and swanky design did not prohibit a diversity of bodies from gathering in any particular locale. (I have taken, of late, to hosting parties in my new home to which no one is allowed to bring other food. Because I wish to ensure others can eat, too, I communicate with each individual in advance of the gathering, requesting dietary concerns and other requests necessary to ensure physical comfort. These are extremely time-consuming activities, this is true, but they allow for an unusual intimacy to emerge quickly in a roomful of strangers.)

  Hall calls for a movement centered, therefore, not on a metaphysics of food, but on a metaphysics of compost. “There are no pure bodies,” she writes, summing up her argument for why even food itself should be situated within the ecosystem that supports both its growth and its decay. “No bodies with impermeable borders.”

  Hall may have been a bit ahead of the game, but the data is now catching up to the theory. Critic Jonathan Weiner writes in the New York Times last year:

  [A]s you read these words, trillions of microbes and quadrillions of viruses are multiplying on your face,
your hands and down there in the darkness of your gut. With every breath you take, with every move you make, you are sending bacteria into the air at the rate of about 37 million per hour—your invisible aura, your personal microbial cloud. With every gram of food you eat, you swallow about a million microbes more.3

  Science has finally moved beyond “germ theory”—the presumption that all microbes cause disease—and is beginning to understand that important bodily systems depend heavily on the microbes that inhabit them. The immune system, for example, a malfunction of which is the cause of my own ongoing ailments, turns out to rely almost fully on what Weiner refers to as “immigrant microbes.”

  “According to the latest estimates,” he writes, echoing Hall, “about half of your cells are not human—enough to make you wonder what you mean by ‘you.’”

  The metaphysics of compost offers a food politics centered on the health and needs of the diversity of beings that contribute to—and turn out to largely constitute—“you.”

  Material evidence can be found in Detroit that the metaphysics of compost is not unimplemented theory, but already daily practice. It is a city filled with friendly people but associated internationally with images of ruin and decay; crumbling building are quickly overtaken by vegetation both planned and accidental. On my block, largely inhabited by immigrants from Bangladesh, most backyards are filled with herbs and vegetables from home countries that most certainly foster microbial life forms foreign to my system. (I will note here that these immigrant microbes are not only delicious, but kindly intentioned.)

  This city is often called to represent failure; in fact, it turns out that narratives about the need to rebuild Detroit have been circulated several times in the city’s history, casting it in an impossibly permanent state of decay, fully oppositional to any notion of sustainability. In that, Detroit also points to the flaws of a politics rooted in sustainability, serving as a geographic reminder that all processes do end.

  What we know in Detroit, and what I am experimenting with daily—alongside my neighbors, some worms, and a million friendly microbes—is that decay truly is useful, and must take place for life to flourish.

  An earlier version of this essay was published on the Write A House blog.

  Three months after emerging from your deathbed, you may find that you wonder why you bothered. You will have just survived a remarkable medical feat, perhaps with no explanation, and you are expected to be filled with gratitude. You try. Many days, you shed tears of relief, or unprocessed fear. On other days, you cry because for however long—three months, maybe—you had wished yourself off your deathbed under the unshakeable belief that something bigger and better was awaiting you. Now you see that it was not. What terrifies you most after emerging from your deathbed is realizing how little difference your death would have made; how little difference it didn’t end up making, after all.

  You may become angry with yourself; in fact, you will. You are an ungrateful shit to have survived such trauma and emerge from it with only malaise. How dare you take this hard-earned gift of life and treat it so unkindly? When you watched movies on your deathbed, which you did quite often, and characters said unthoughtful things about the meaninglessness of life or ending it all, you would cringe, or yell, or cry. Remembering a friend’s casual joke about wishing she were dead on the day your doctor gave you bad news about your heart function still makes you wince. Now you say such things yourself. Your anger compounds: for you are not only an ingrate, you are also a hypocrite. Perhaps you should have died, perhaps you should die now, because you are so horrible.

  At the three-month mark, perhaps you will remember how you used to cope with your always precarious future, before it came under direct threat. You may recall, too, how you used to make plans with friends to ward off rare stretches of unstructured days, how you enjoyed the company, the conversations that moved freely from topic to topic. Even remembering that you used to do this is a sign that your enthusiasms are returning. You also used to apply for things: opportunities, awards, jobs. You did this to exercise intellectual promiscuity. It felt expansive. You used to plan trips, some you would not even take. And work! You used to love it, although you cannot now remember why. You used to read things that had nothing to do with your immediate physical survival, or eat foods because they seemed interesting and not because they contained healthy elements your kidneys or muscle tissue could not do without. You will remember this, and begin to wonder if you will ever have the excess of energy required to do it again. To make plans as if you had all the time in the world, as if you could follow through with them. You had forgotten what it was like to operate without a deadline, or that it was possible to do so.

  Your friends, especially if they are middle-aged, will say: Oh, I know. What is the point. I feel exactly the same way. It is the politics/the season/climate change/the economy. You will say, Yes, but also I almost died. And they will say, Oh yeah. I’m glad you’re feeling better now. You will feel disappointed by this, although it is unclear why. You completely understand why your friends would be bored by your recent medical drama. You, too, are bored of it. You also understand that they are middle-aged, and you are middle-aged, and maybe really it is a phase of the life you just saved that you cannot escape: malaise. Maybe the thing about emerging from your deathbed is that it ended up mattering so little, your survival, that you are still beholden to the same whims and extravagances that fill regular people’s lives. Maybe your life, in fact, is just like everyone else’s, deathbed or no.

  You might visit a therapist. If you had been seeing a therapist while on your deathbed, the therapist will remind you that you have made remarkable progress, will exclaim that just so many weeks ago you did not know if you could make plans to see friends or if you should bother buying groceries. The therapist will remind you that the increase in energy required to meet all the minimum daily upkeep tasks you now perform to stay alive displays an enthusiasm unprecedented in recent days; that you can even consider taking a long view at this time and pondering the worth of it all shows great progress over a few short months earlier. The therapist will ask you to refrain from taking a critical view of your life right now. Unfortunately, the therapist will have no idea who you are, really, no idea what your life was like before the deathbed, no idea that a little over so many months ago, you could never have invited such feel-good meaninglessness into your life. It is not an excess of bitterness you sling in the therapist’s direction, but a real and relevant question: If I survived all this, why?

  In other words, you do all the things at the three-month mark that indicate emotional healing. You take steps to consider and improve your worldview. (That the worldview itself does not improve seems only to bother you.) You maintain a daily regimen of physical health, however minimal. (Although privately you calculate its cost and purpose.) That you get out of bed at all seems enough for everyone around you. Was it ever enough before? The people congratulating you now have attended your book release parties, your art openings, your award ceremonies, your graduation events. Were they faking it then, by saying that they always knew you were capable of greatness? Or are they faking it now, by telling you that they are just happy you are alive?

  One day, three months after you emerge from your deathbed, a friend will invite you to sushi. He once abandoned you at a moment of great need. He had failed to recognize the danger you were in while you were on your deathbed, and remained wrapped up in his own drama when you needed him to concentrate fully on yours. But it is much easier to forgive him for these transgressions than to forgive yourself for having become sick. So you agree to go to meet him and to eat sushi with him.

  As you sit down to order, you will remember about sushi. It will be the first time in many months that you have considered the wonder of eating raw and perfectly prepared seafood: the coldness of it. The extraterrestrial aroma and sharp, clear colors. The perfect alarm of wasabi and the clean, earthy warmth of long-grained rice. The delightful nuance of flavor
s in fresh-caught fish from different parts of the world, subtly complemented with saltiness, tanginess, sweetness. You have not even ordered yet but looking at the menu will stir something in you. The restaurant will be busy and the couple sitting next to you appear to be on an awkward first date. They have come to the best sushi restaurant in one of the best sushi cities in the world, and you will be reminded about all the minor life choices that it took for you to even know about this place: how you found yourself living with your friend in an art residency on the east coast, how you became close under unlikely circumstances and then, under even more unlikely circumstances, ended up visiting him on the opposite end of the country on a fairly consistent basis. You weren’t sure whether or not you would ever actually be friends, or who this person even was, until one day he put a banana in his pocket as you were piling into a car to attend a group function and he sat next to you. You made a joke: Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? The joke then became something else, not about erections or men being inappropriate or fruits that look like penises or even an unspoken attraction between you two, but a joke about carrying bananas around town, because in the end that was the funniest part: that someone might ever, for any reason, be carrying a banana around in their pocket.