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spiralizing food for diabetes, mood, gut feminisms, new materialist design -- Katie King's A4-expression of interest, mutual learning and exploration for: Care - maintenance, repair and mending in a time of post-industrialism. A symposium at Umeå Institute of Design, 12-14 June 2016
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I have type 2 diabetes and work hard to maintain my blood sugar through food choices, meal timing, portion sizing. Over my life I've dealt with depression, which has implications for diabetes, and also to some extent, food phobias. We are learning so much now about how all these elements of personhood are impacted by our gut microbiome. Elizabeth Wilson's new materialist book Gut Feminism doesn't take up diabetes, but does offer paths into all this by looking at SSRIs and the gut. Jane Bennet's Vibrant Matter takes up the issues of the distributed embodiments we can trace when we examine fatty acids in a political ecology of things. Diabetes in its various forms, are increasingly understood within complex embodiments across public infrastructures and systems: from food industries creating new food elements from waste products (high fructose corn syrup) to what counts as public health emergency (obesity epidemic) to new research linkages between brain, gut, appetite.
What is broken here, needing maintenance, repair and mending? Cultural narratives about food, and the impact of capitalist production on alternatives need care. Even, say, promoting veganism is increasingly interpolated through industrial agrobusiness's need to sell carbohydrates as transport stable and storage durable, as waste products that can be redesigned as new foods, as loaded with food elements that trigger body reward systems and pleasure.
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