Eating
Can eating be a source of plant agency?
Two challenges confront us.
The first challenge involves the entrenched idea of plant as food and eating as negation. The human-centric tendency to place human as the subject of eating and plant as the object is not without basis. Ecologically and scientifically speaking, organisms are divided into two categories: producers (autotrophs) and consumers (heterotrophs). Autotrophs produce their own food with inorganic substances from their environment, and heterotrophs do not. Heterotrophs directly or indirectly depend on autotrophs for food. This line of energy transfer creates the familiar concept of a food chain. Plants are autotrophs that are placed on the bottom, and heterotrophs constitute the levels above. Autotrophs are producers, and heterotrophs, consumers. A plant makes food, and we eat.
Attempts have been made to decentralize the human by opening agricultural history up to an environmental plot. Yuval Harari famously proposes a different history of agricultural revolution as wheat domesticating human, not vice versa, citing our failure to account for the agency of other species.[1] The articulation of plant agency becomes more salient in Michael Pollan’s work. With a popular and personal spin on the cultural and sociological studies of food history, Pollan suggests the impacts of food production and consumption—agricultural histories and psychoactive chemistry—shall be attributed not to human desires or activities but vegetal ones. In The Botany of Desire, for instance, Pollan sets the tone by naming the introduction “The Human Bumblebee,” indicating a reversal of relations that turns domestication upside down. Agriculture is not human exploitation of plants but plants mobilizing human resources for their reproduction. This gesture is justified because “in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.”[2]
Indeed, the shift from vegetable to vegetal presents an opportunity for interventions onto agricultural histories with ecological ones. Consider monocultural farming. Monoculture in industrial farming can be considered a prolongation of a certain crop’s monodominance in nature before human intervention. Scientists such as David Wood have argued for a recognition of monodominance as a natural phenomenon that is often the result of seasonal ecological stresses, such as wildfire, flood, and soil nutrient deficiency, as well as extra biotic pressure from herbivores.[3]Therefore, historical narratives of monoculture and agricultural modernity should account for vegetal power as much as human action. The problem with Harari and Pollan’s reversals, however, is that although they produce a sense of plant agency through a semiotic redistribution of subject and object, they also remove the effect of human doing. In other words, they evacuate all other forms of agency in order to erect the plant—but the plant does not exist in a vacuum, and nor can its agency. This is what David Graeber means in his critique of Harari’s provocation: that to think of wheat domesticating us would require us to think like a Paleolithic man at the beginning of Neolithic farming, which is difficult if not impossible, and what ends up happening is a kind of mythmaking that narrates the past in a way that “makes our present situation seem somehow inevitable or preordained.”[4]
The need for critique is, however, indicative of a certain rhetorical energy that deserves some dwelling upon. Senses of nonhuman agency achieved by semiotic means are not new. Classical Chinese poetry, for instance, is known for animating inanimate objects in its portrayals of landscape. A famous example involves the opening line of Lu Zhai (“The Deer Enclosure”) by Wang Wei.[5] A literary word-to-word translation reads: “Empty mountain not see(ing) people” (空山不见人). Popular readings mostly presume the perception of a human viewer (the poet or the reader) looking at the mountainous landscape with no people in sight. Critical yet often missed is that the syntax also allows an animist reading of the mountain as the entity who sees no visitors. The semiotic play with obscurity ushers in a palpable sense of nondualist dynamism. Here, agency is not a form of power bounded to one entity over another but draws attention to what Bruno Latour suggests is a “common ground of agency before we let it bifurcate into what is animated and what is deaminated.”[6] Consequent to such framing of agency, Latour argues, we must reconsider the subject position: “To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy.”[7] This illuminates why the logic of man-eaters in plant horror does not quickly lead to conclusions of eating as plant agency. Whether it is a pitcher plant’s pitfall traps or a Venus flytrap’s mouth-like lobes edged with interlocking bristles, plants can have an anatomy that lends well to a familiar concept of eating. Yet, plant monsters remain mythmaking with vegetal otherness.[8] This takes us to the second challenge: animal ingestion and digestion as the paradigm of eating.
Eating modeled after animal ingestion and digestion starts with a digestive tract, where food is broken down into substances for absorption inside the body. Digestive organs and their functions have served as points of departure for theorizing towards animal intelligence and designs of higher order.[9]Hegel, for instance, considers the digestive system as one of the three systems characteristic of the animal organic unity.[10] Similar in hierarchical orientation but seeking a different direction, Michael Marder lands on a deficiency of the vegetal by linking eating with satisfaction: “Whether or not the plant is a desiring being, it experiences no satisfaction when it exercises the only capacity of its soul for nourishment.”[11] The characterization of eating with inwardness, purpose, and satisfaction is marked by what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the fundamental relativity of knowledge, aims, goals, and practices,” that is, “the ways in which each species, from the humblest to the most complex, orients its world according to its interests, capacities, knowledge, and uses.”[12]In other words, there is an inevitability in our ideation where our concepts are shaped by the ways in which humans experience and perceive activities of the world. If we accept Grosz’s invitation to experiment in order to obscure this human relativity, the least we can do is to wonder: How, exactly, do plants eat?
Plants eat differently. They do not have a digestive system in the usual sense. When they do digest, the process of mechanically and/or chemically converting food to sustain bodily vital functions takes place near their skin surface, through photosynthesis, and external to their body, through the root system. The external digestion by plant roots, for instance, provides an environmental counterpoint to the inward model of animal eating. Plant roots are responsible for a significant acquisition of nutrients. They accomplish nutrient extraction and acquisition through complex chemical communication (such as acid secretion) and exchanges with microbes that feed on the organic matter of dead plant-root cells. Additionally, when nutrients are stuck to soil particles in an alkaline soil, the root can also secrete acid to create a more acidic rhizosphere where nutrients are more accessible. Essentially, a plant not only eats in its environment, it creates that environment as well. It is also this capacity to liquefy their food externally and alter their environment enzymatically that makes plant eating a source of horror and subversion.
In his discussion of predator/prey relations, Kinji Imanishi offers an iteration of eating as an evolutionary activity that resonates with the environmental orientation of plant eating: “Through the division between predator and prey in one place a synusial complex was created. [ . . . ] This means that,” Imanishi explains, “[predator and prey] arose and developed originally from one thing, and predators cannot survive without eating and prey cannot survive if they are eaten.”[13] In other words, predators and prey are not what they are because of each other but only emerge in their roles when eating links them and stimulates in both the need for survival. Neither predator nor prey is reacting to a specific other but to an environment. Imanishi says:
living necessitates eating food, avoiding enemies and seeking a mate, but food, enemies and mates are all a kind of environment. Therefore, in recognizing these things, organisms specifically choose them from the whole environment. That is to say, to recognize is to choose. It is not that something becomes food after being ingested, or becomes prey after being eaten [ . . . ] Only when living things react, does the environment make them live.[14]
Moving from Imanishi’s predator/prey relation to the grazer/grazed, the cactus spine exemplifies Imanishi’s account of reaction to environment as making-live. Cacti’s evolutionary conversion of leaves to spine is not only to reduce their surface of exposure to the scorching sun but also to protect themselves from grazers. The hardiness of the spine can often be used as an indicator of the climatic severity of their native habitat, because it is proportional to their grazer’s determination to eat and willingness to suffer for sustenance. The tougher the environment, the rarer the food. The hungrier the grazer, the stronger the spine. In this scenario, it becomes clear that eating is not limited to an act or process performed by an animal or enabled by certain bodily organs. Rather, it is an evolutionary stimulus that solicits materialized transformations in response. Eating is not regulated by any individual animal or species. It is not that which comes after animal functions or behaviors but proceeds them. Eating stimulates the eater and the eaten equally. As such, eating is no longer connoted as a form of negation by one species of another but that which provokes and arouses difference and change where the eaten gains agency as much as the eater.
Eating as a relational and differentiating activity also means that the eater here is the eaten there. Such is the connectivity and equality of Amerindian multinaturalism in “those who eat souls shall be eaten by souls.”[15] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro characterizes eating as the key operational concept of Amerindian metaphysics:
[Amerindian thought] thinks a dense universe, saturated with difference-hungry intentionalities, which sustain each other reciprocally from their respective perspectival differences; where [ . . . ] all relations are schematized by an oral-cannibal imagetic, an omnipresent trophic topic that declines all conceivable cases and voices of the verb “to eat”; tell me how, with whom and what/who you eat (and what/who you eat eats), by whom you are eaten, who you feed and for whom you abstain from eating, and so on—and I will say who you are.[16]
In a more succinct fashion, Viveiros de Castro describes the Amerindian perspectivism as “where everything that is [ . . . ] eats.” [17]For Viveiros de Castro, eating is not an explanatory concept but a relational one. The reader could draw out a map of ecological relations of the Amerindian world through the concept of eating, but more importantly, eating makes palpable the relating of differences that takes place in anthropological works. This raises important questions as to how to formulate and examine the relation among different worlds, human or plant. Viveiros de Castro suggests attention should go to “the very idea of a relation” rather than “the content of relations,” because “it is not the relations that vary, but rather the variations that are related.”[18]It is in this direction that Viveiros de Castro’s “cannibal metaphysics”[19] finds in eating provocativeness and poetics of difference and discomfort. It alerts us to the disingenuity in pretending that we could begin to comprehend or inhabit the Amerindian worlding that is radically different from ours just by reading some academic interpretations. If cannibalism offers an option on how to draw our distance from the Amerindian, maybe eating can do the same for our love for plants too.
Notes
[1] Harari writes, “Moreover, the new agricultural tasks demanded so much time that people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat fields. This completely changed their way of life. We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.” Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harper Perennial, 2018), 81.
[2] Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire, A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (Random House, 2002), xxi.
[3] David Wood, “Agroecology: Searching in the Wrong Place,” Outlook on Agriculture 52, no. 3 (September 1, 2023): 254–63.
[4] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 230–31.
[5] 鹿柴，王维 (?–761 CE) “空山不见人，但闻人语响。返景入深林，复照青苔上。”
[6] Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (December 2014): 7, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0003.
[7] Latour, “Agency,” 7–8.
[8] In the introduction to Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), especially “Thesis 1: Plants Embody an Absolute Alterity,” Dawn Keetley makes a connection between plant horror and absolute otherness.
[9] In his theorization of plant time, Michael Marder observes Hegel’s admiration of the digestive tract as intelligent design only characteristic to animals and humans. He says, “No wonder then that one of the physiological features of the human being Hegel admires the most in Philosophy of Nature is the length of its digestive tract—directly proportional to the time of life freed from the exigencies of feeding! Beyond the kingdom of plants, dialectical time first arises in and as a suspension of the immediate nutritive activity, mediating and sublimating nourishment within the organism, thereby liberated for other pursuits.” Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia University Press, 2013), 108–09.
[10] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michael John Petry, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (Allen & Unwin; Humanities Press, 1970), section 277.
[11] Marder, Plant-Thinking, 108.
[12] Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Duke University Press, 2011), 21.
[13] Kinji Imanishi, A Japanese View of Nature: The World of Living Things, ed. Pamela J. Asquith and trans. Pamela J. Asquith, Heita Kawakatsu, Shusuke Yagi, and Hiroyuki Takasaki (Routledge, 2002), 59.
[14] Imanishi and Asquith, Japanese View of Nature, 74.
[15] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Immanence and Fear: Stranger-Events and Subject in Amazonia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2, no. 1 (2012): 27–43, 32.
[16] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Metaphysics as Mythophysics: Or, Why I Have Always Been an Anthropologist,” in Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology After Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), 259.
[17] Viveiros de Castro, “Metaphysics,” 270, n. 12.
[18] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds (HAU Books, 2015), 13.
[19] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, 1st ed. (Univocal, 2014).