November 23, 2015 - 17:53
"you are what you eat".
when i was little and first heard this phrase, i laughed, picturing myself as a giant orange or a glass of milk or a slice of pizza. how silly! people don't become whatever they eat.
as i got older and realized how the saying was commonly used ("if you eat healthy, you'll be healthy"), it made more sense to me. I accepted it, as one does with most idiosyncrasies of language and idiom, and didn't think twice.
What I see Stacy Alaimo positing is that not only are you what you eat, but that you're what you surround yourself with. She gives "body" a very wide definition by referring to any type of system in which individual units cooperate to perform a larger function as one. We learn in Bauer's interview of Daniel Beiting that our bodies, in a sense, are our own vast biological worlds.
As is stated in several of the other texts, the human microbiome is a complicated and permeable thing-- a thing that is influenced by the larger systems which we're a part of. In other words, we aren't as separated from our surroundings as we might think. We are both in and of our environment. This in turn has interesting effects on the environmental conversation we've been having in class. I feel like we've been focusing on "how can we save the environment?" But this expands the dialogue to ask whether the language of "saving the environment" doesn't imply that we exist outside the environment, that we can save it. Alaimo states that "The problem with thinking of nature as elsewhere, of thinking of culture as outside of nature, is that it cultivates a way of thinking that makes ecological issues seem like the peculiar concern of people who like spotted owls and beautiful canyons." Perhaps we need to realize that we're intimately connected with our environments, both inside and outside.
But how does this affect how we talk about contact zones, or environmental concerns, or racial divides? If we follow the logic that everything, simply by being a part of our environment, affects us, and that we in turn affect our environment back, then aren't all these issues somehow related?