An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and Its Problematic Nature

3. Food

55 CHAPTER THREE Food Of all things, food most directly implicates our finitude. We experience hunger as a void, a lack that punches holes in any delusions of our selfsufficiency . Our need to eat reminds us ever and again of our visceral being-in-the-world dependent on innerworldly beings. From the perspective of developmental psychology, the unanswered cry for nourishment first awakens in the infant the distinction between self and not-self. The world, thus, unfolds from the infant’s growing realization of the neediness and limitation of its existence brought on by the discomfort of hunger. Our worldly being is essentially gustatory. The infant puts every object within its grasp into its mouth because at this earliest of stages the world remains saturated in the hunger from which it originally arose. Ontologically speaking, food, which nourishes human being’s mortal finitude , constitutes the world. At its root, food is ontological, since as a phenomenon it always directly refers to our essentially constitutive finitude. This unusual interpretation of the significance of food resonates well with many religious interpretations. The Upanishads, for example, express the fundamental relation between Being and food: From food, verily, are produced whatsoever creatures dwell on the earth. Moreover, by food alone they live. And then also into it they pass at the end. Food, verily, is the eldest born of beings. Therefore, it is called the healing herb of all. Verily, those who worship Brahman as food obtain all food. For from food are beings born. When born they grow up by food. It is eaten and eats things. Therefore is it called food.1 Food gives birth to beings by virtue of its connetion to Being: On this, my dear, understand that this (body) is an offshoot which has sprung up, for it could not be without a root. And what else could its root be than food? And in the same manner, my dear, with food as an offshoot, seek for water as the root; with water, my dear, as an offshoot, seek for heat as the root; with heat , my dear, as an offshoot, seek for Being as its root. All these creatures, my dear, have their root in Being. They have Being as their abode, Being as their support.2 Yet the partnership also runs in the reverse. Being has its abode in food, the most basic element of world. Being finds shelter in human hunger, for this primordial deficiency opens us up for the revelation of beings. In this sense, our eating nourishes Being. Embodying finitude, food connects intimately with waste. Every meal, no matter how fine and dainty, eventually ends in excrement and all the fear and ambivalence that the latter so readily excites transfers easily to the former. For example, among the Trobriand Islanders off the eastern tip of New Guinea, food underlies the entire social, economic, and moral order. Individuals make ostentatious display of their food supply to announce their wealth, and they donate of it liberally to prove their virtue and largesse. Deficiency in food amounts to a social disgrace. Yet for all the societal significance placed on food by the Trobrianders, the actual consumption of food is far from convivial. They prefer to store up their food, to secure it, than to eat it. The “Trobrianders eat alone, retiring to their own hearths with their portions, turning their backs on one another and eating rapidly for fear of being observed.”3 Compare this secretive behavior with the imperative placed on the adult males of the East African tribe of the Chaga. The initiation rite into manhood included the following commands: Don’t emit wind in the presence of women and uninitiated youths. If you do, the tribal elders will slaughter your cow. Beware lest you be surprised by women when you defecate. Always carry a stick with you, dig your faeces in, and scratch here and there, pretending that you are digging in some charm. Then if a women should have observed you, she will seek there and find nothing.4 The reason for this undue fastidiousness lies in “the myth of the power of retaining one’s faeces [that] is employed by the men to justify their claim to ascendency over the female race.”5 Natural scatological functions are considered by the Chaga as signs of inferiority and weakness. They betray 56 AN ONTOLOGY OF TRASH a lack of control over the...