These causal relations connect the dietary habits of (some) humans to the remaking of the environmental medium of life itself, as individual acts of consumption aggregate into large-scale processes of landscape reorganisation.
New data infrastructures are emerging to make these relationships visible, revealing which foodstuffs drive agriculture’s vast environmental footprint and which might offer more sustainable pathways. These data-intensive methods synthesise vast amounts of information about the ecological impacts of different farming systems and their interactions with the planet’s biophysical processes. Increasingly, such modelling technologies are being used to design and promote sustainable diets.
Large-scale modelling projects and reports grounded in these methods and ambitions are working to create a corpus of aspirational metabolic subjects — individuals who reflect on, and act in response to, the planetary implications of their food choices. Paying particular attention to the EAT-Lancet Report and its influential Planetary Diet, this talk explores emerging modes of environmental subjectivity that take shape around these metabolic, dietary, and ecological interactions.
This new form of subjectivity, made possible by novel data infrastructures, operates across two registers. On one hand, metabolic subjectivity involves the internalisation of ecological concerns into individual habits, desires, and agencies. On the other, becoming a metabolic subject entails participation in a distributed spatial-material network of power composed of the metabolic capacities of individual human bodies.
Please bring your own lunch. Coffee will be served.
Bio
George Cusworth is a Post-Doctoral Researcher on the Dynamic Territory: A Normative Framework for Territory in the Post-Holocene project at the University of Oslo. His research focuses on food and agriculture, drawing on geography, the anthropology of science, and philosophy to understand how humans and nature are connected through agricultural landscapes. He studies how complex ecosystems are known through scientific and cultural representations and explores how the food system complicates traditional territorial approaches to social and environmental governance. His current work seeks to develop political and philosophical frameworks that better account for the food system’s spatial complexities.