The Opacity of Food Production
This project was tested and coauthored with Nathaniel
Goals
1) Partial surfacing of the technologies of industrialized food production
The first goal is to have the user cut or fork food with Makey Makey hardware clearly attached. In other words, the wires, the Makey-Makey device, and the computer should all be plainly visible to users. By cutting or forking food that is clearly attached to electric leads and hardware, we want the user to feel startled, suspicious, or curious. In other words, the recognition of food connected to electronic technologies should be mildly disturbing. The user should question why the food and cutlery is connected to wires. They should wonder if the food has been modified in any way, and they should begin to question how the food came to be presented to them in such a strange manner. The users’ inquiries should provoke them to think more critically about the technical and mechanical dimensions of food production in industrialized systems. The users should also think about their connection to and inescapability from technical systems that intertwine with their lives. A piece of meat or plant connected to a set of wires should reify the reality of complex technologies that are inextricably entwined throughout an industrial systems of food production.
2) Make visible human labor involved in industrial food production through video
The second goal is to surface the human labor, specifically migrant labor, associated with industrial food production. We want the user to watch a video that plays when a food, such as a strawberry or some other kind of hand-picked produce (e.g., cucumber) is sliced by a knife. We want to user to feel any number of emotions. If a user felt enriched and thankful for seeing and understanding the human cost and labor of food production, we would consider it a success. If a user felt horrified by the abhorrent labor conditions some migrant workers endure, we would have met this goal. If a user felt outraged by the realization of child labor in food production, we would have met this goal. We want users to think more critically about the human costs, to migrant laborers and children specifically, that are inherent in industrial food production. On a less explicit level, we want users to think critically about the kinds of negative stereotypes associated with ethnic groups, in particular Mexican migrant workers. By taking a normal, mundane action such as slicing a strawberry or cucumber, we want users to think about their own participation and complicitness in oppressive economic and cultural systems.
3) Make explicit the consequences of meat production on animal bodies
The third goal of this project is to make the user an actor in the making of meat. When users cut the meat on a plate and view a video that reveals aspects of the typically shrouded processes of making meat, users become an imaginative and literal actor in of the process of meat making rather than just passive consumer. The slicing of meat is essential to this goal. When a video plays, the brute reality of animal processing is revealed. A number of feelings would make this goal a success. Users should feel shock and compassion for animals and their inhumane treatment in industrialized food production. Users should feel revulsion to the unpleasant realities of meat production. Users should feel anger or intense feelings of dislike. We hope that a range of emotions as described above will spur users to think more critically about their complicity with industrialized meat production systems, especially with systems that employ inhumane practices. We want users to recognize the connection between consumption of processed, readily available meat and the physical realities of meat production. In other words, we want users to think about the connection between animals and meat rather than meat as a foodstuff that magically appears wrapped in plastic at the supermarket.
Specifications
For the purposes of this specification, we will describe an audio experience. The sound of distressed pigs squealing, without video, will be the effect. Other arrangements (as described in the goals) may include video and audio.
On a tall table similar to one used to offer customers samples in supermarkets, a Makey Makey shall be connected from the “Space” slot to an all-metal knife by a supplied alligator clip wire. A second alligator clip wire connects a “Ground” slot on the Makey Makey to a piece of food, in this case a thick-sliced cut of deli ham, folded in half if necessary for good grip with the alligator clip. The Makey Makey shall be connected to the computer, and the computer shall be facing away from the user on the table. (With a video effect in addition to the audio, the computer shall face the user.) On the computer, audio of distressed pigs squealing loudly is prepared to play at full volume on the press of the space bar. Behind the table, offering the knife and ham to the user, is the administrator.
The administrator, perhaps disguised as an employee in a supermarket offering a free sample, gives the knife to the user and offers a slice of ham. When the user slices into the ham, the the circuit is completed and the space bar is triggered through the Makey Makey. The audio of loud, squealing pigs is triggered and plays until the knife touches the ham again or at the administrator’s discretion. Alternative configurations may present users with a strawberry to slice, which triggers a video of migrant workers in fields picking strawberries as the audio of a child migrant workers describe the conditions under which they labor.
Rationale
This project seeks to surface and make visible the materiality of bodies and labor as they intersect with neoliberal economic systems of food production that sediment and erase both human laborers and animals through the opacity of techno-political systems of production and distribution. During the execution of this project, we broadened our understanding of the technical and material dimensions of food production. It’s easy to take for granted the complexity of the technical, political, and cultural systems that layer onto the industrial production of food. By engaging this project, a walk through the supermarket becomes ever more enlightening. From fresh produce to frozen pizzas to deli meat to packages of cheese, the products we considered for this project all began to reveal invisible networks that trace back to a technical system of food production that produces exploitive political, social, and economic conditions. While none of this was particularly new to us as information, the affective impact of the project served to reveal a new, more intimate, intensified, and urgent understanding of the exploitative conditions that bodies endure throughout industrial food systems that operate with brutal technological efficiency.
First, it is important that the Makey Makey device and all of its connections to food and computer be visible to the user. In one respect, this elaborate setup to the simple act of, for example, slicing a piece of deli meat begins to mirror the elaborate and technical systems of food production that are typically opaque to consumers. Bernard Stiegler describes a “deep opacity” associated with rapidly evolving technologies at the close of the 21st century (21). While Stiegler’s larger scale project is primarily historical and descriptive, this project seeks to confront a similar deep opacity that may be located in a specific complex technical system, namely industrial food production. The visible technologies of computer interface and Makey Makey device, alongside the image of food wired to electronic interfaces, seeks to make concrete the first goal of this project, described as a partial excavation of the technologies of industrial food production. Before that slice of deli meat showed up on a plate ready to consume, it traversed a number of technical systems. In other words, a series of digital and mechanical systems transformed a sentient pig into cheap deli ham, sliced thick. Those technical systems include, among others, systems of shipping, packaging, slaughtering, and farming. Those technical systems, each of which could be dissected into smaller technical subsystems, are shaped in part by technocratic political and economic systems, effectively making knowledge and understanding of food production opaque to particular individual. The Makey Makey, wires, and computer, therefore, become essential visible components to this project. In one respect, the visible fusion of animal or plant and machine invokes Donna Haraway’s image of the cyborg: “A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point” (295). Users seeing these devices and connections alongside food offered to eat are goaded into thinking, either consciously or subconsciously, about the technical systems that layer the production of food, in this case meat. In other words, The more awkward and strange the setup looks, the better the execution of the project as it relates to meeting our first stated goal.
The second goal of this project seeks to make visible the work of human, migrant laborers in industrial food systems. Speaking of the labor of Navajo women in early computer technologies, Lisa Nakamura compels us to see into technological systems for “[r]eally looking at digital media, not only seeing its images but seeing into it, into the histories of its platforms, both machinic and human, is absolutely necessary for us to understand how digital labor is configured today” (Nakamura 920). Nakamura’s project is drawn from Haraway’s call in the “Cyborg Manifesto” to form “effective oppositional strategies” (295). Opposing neoliberal politics of “free trade” and “free market” conditions that produce exploitive labor conditions is the aim of this goal. The more technical and complex the system of food production, the easier it is to veil the labor of workers, especially migrant workers. Migrant worker labor is hidden from the end use, much like the Navajo women Nakamura seeks to make visible in early computing production. The point here is to surface the material bodies and labor of humans in the production of food in industrialized systems. In part, such a surfacing serves to effectively oppose racist stereotypes of migrant workers, e.g., that they are criminal on the one hand, lazy on the other, and also simultaneously industriously stealing jobs from native citizens. Connecting food via a Makey Makey to a video of migrant workers discussing unfair and challenging labor conditions serves a number of purposes. It humanizes migrant labor, allowing a food consumer a window into the exploitive conditions fellow humans face. It provides a political statement opposing rose-colored neoliberal talk of “free trade” via the unveiling of exploitative labor conditions. And the playing of a video provides an agentive platform for migrant workers to speak in their own voice, even if it is recorded and mediated via a computer. In other words, understanding the exploitive conditions that mark the work of migrant farm workers becomes a more effective strategy of opposition when discussed from the perspective of actual migrant farm workers
The third goal of this project is to make visible the bodies and grim fate of animals in industrial meat production. In one sense, this goal seeks to make other kinds of bodies visible–namely animals’ bodies. We seek here to extend humanistic conversations about the ethical treatment of bodies to all sentient beings by surfacing the processes of meat production, an otherwise opaque technical enterprise. In other words, passive consumption of meat produced through industrialized food systems sediments the lived experiences of animals. It veils the conditions under which animals are bred, farmed, slaughters, and sold as meat. Much like Stiegler’s conception of the deep opacity of technics, industrial meat production is profoundly opaque, and laws designed to make it even more opaque are common. This goal, in part, seeks to peel back some of those layers of opacity to open a space for inquiry into the bodies and experiences that are sedimented by industrial meat production. In short, this goal seeks to make the opaque technical processes of meat production more transparent through visual and audio media of animal processing. The actual cutting of the meat places the user in a position to see and hear the connection between ready-made meat on a plate and the animal the meat came from. The user’s actions de-sediment or make more transparent the technical systems and bodily consequences of meat production.
Works Cited
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.” Springer Netherlands, 2006. Print.
Nakamura, Lisa. “Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture.” American Quarterly. 66.4 (2014): 919-941. Web. 5 Jan. 2016.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Print.