Lindsay Kelley

fringe foods, metabolism, bioart, uncommon modes of food preparation & ingestion

After Eating: Metabolizing the Arts

After Eating is available open access from MIT Press, thanks to the MIT Direct to Open initiative.

After Eating: Metabolizing the Arts explores the emerging field of metabolic arts, practices which engage the materials and methodologies of not only food and ingestion but also digestion and metabolism. Vocabularies of food and eating have become nuanced and sophisticated, but digestion and metabolism are usually described either with colloquial language about everyday bodily situations (gaining or losing weight, pooping, bloating, farting) or with the technical language of biochemistry (anabolic and catabolic pathways, cellular respiration, phosphate bonds). Cultivating a neglected middle ground between the everyday and the scientific, this book and the art and design projects gathered in its chapters complicate how digestion and metabolism enter sociocultural life. From public diets to interspecies gestation to crocheted ecosystems, artists use immersive and sensory research-creation methods to produce the kinds of subjectivities and engaged publics that scientific findings will soon depend on in order to be understood. Metabolism moves beyond the cell to become a method for responding to the most difficult cultural, philosophical, and political challenges of the contemporary moment.

Table of Contents

Introduction: A Metabolic Reading of Mutaflor xv

I Feminist Diets 1

1 Stuff Change: Body Image to Body Process 7
2 Food Babies 35
3 Eggs, Kale, Cancer, Fertility 57

II Giant Creatures 79

4 Adenosine Triphosphate: Metaphors and Materials 85
5 Poop Circus 107
6 Holobionts against Representation 139

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