A Bite of the Forbidden Fruit: The Abject of Food and Affirmative Environmental Ethics

2.1 In exile

The idea of exile, of course, can be traced back to the ultimate exile from Eden that characterizes the Western attitudes toward nature not only distinct from culture but also inaccessible via restriction and deprivation embedded in the human anthropological disposition.

The drama of uncertainty, which permeates human beings, is expressed by the myth of creation in the Old Testament. Is it not peculiar that God prohibits eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge? Is knowledge not the very thing that should be regarded as virtuous? Well… yes and no. A literal understanding of this myth (and there are those inclined to accept such an interpretation) would certainly be wrong assuming that wisdom and knowledge are automatically sinful. Here, I venture to discuss only one explanatory aspect of the myth of creation.

If viewed as an explanation for an existing condition, myths resemble science – a description, rather than a prescription of how things ought to be. Thus, the myth of creation depicts the uncertainty, the erroneous and complicated existence humanity must endure, presumably because of self-awareness that positions humankind “outside” of perceived materiality that they “are,” highlighting the inbetweenness and indetermination that being caught between nature and culture prescribes. The picture it paints is astonishingly precise, even positioning inbetweenness as a historical event, which has plagued mankind with “god-like” knowledge – the cognitive revolution, perhaps? The explanatory character of a myth, however, does not prevent the myth from taking part in world-building – the explanation is both descriptive and prescriptive, in the sense of co-production of knowledge and experienced materialities and, thus, takes on also an affectual form in co-creating the affect of shame, sin, bad-conscience, etc.

One could also associate the exile from Eden with a similar approach to biology – the biogenetic law of Ernst Haeckel, often expressed in the famous formula “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”^[40] – on a psychoanalytical level the story encapsulated in the myth is the story of every individual human being. In this sense, the “Eden” – the determinate and safe environment embodied by the mother’s uterus/breast must be left to experience what it means to be human. This is associated with a great sense of doubt and anxiety, which does not leave the human being and functions as one of the driving forces for further development.

To comment on this ultimate affectual exile that is also reflected in ontological and symbolical categories and discourses in Western society, I turn to Erich Fromm’s interpretation of the myth.^[41]

Erich Fromm states:

The curse with which God sends his children out into the world also is in keeping with this same male attitude. The son must work; he will no longer live like the infant at the mother’s breast.^[42]

It seems that this is the price man has to pay to attain what the snake calls: “You shall be as Gods” – creators and destroyers, yet humans have not gained the true transcendence of a God^[43] and are caught in the clutches of mortality vs trans-naturality. The process of civilization that impacts human relations with food can, thus, be viewed as a manifestation of the inner conflict of humanity. Fromm writes:

Adam is beset by the existential dichotomy of being within nature and yet transcending it by the fact of having self-awareness and choice; he can solve this dichotomy only by going forward. Adam has to experience himself as a stranger in the world, estranged from himself and nature, to be able to become one again with himself, with his fellow man, and with nature, on a higher level. He has to experience the split between himself as subject and the world as object as the condition for overcoming this very split.^[44]

Fromm’s interpretation of the myth of creation, thus, touches upon the “atopicality” of humanity that is also encapsulated in the symbolical structure of an exile from Eden. Humankind is always “displaced” – a part of nature, yet, transcending it, reflecting upon it, “knowing what it is” is a blessing and a curse. Transcending nature is forever incomplete – man has not eaten from the Tree of Life, and thus is forever caught in-between. This inbetweenness and the dichotomy of transcendence vs mortality has attracted the attention of many philosophers, especially in the sphere of philosophical anthropology.

The wisdom of the myth, as well as its interpretation by Fromm, is seemingly obvious and simple yet it leaves a lot of unanswered questions and is often misread. Most interpretations of the inbetweenness of man seem to adopt a view that the source of this inbetweenness coincides with its origin – i.e., that humanity is tainted with original sin (namely, erroneous) or conversely – superior to the non-human world, rather than, for example, bears an embodied ideology that perpetuates the experienced atopicality.

Thus, one is often inclined to think that the inbetweenness is expressed via the mind and experienced as a split between mind and body or human spirit and animal flesh. Consequently, one might assume that the self-awareness adopted by man, expressed in our I-consciousness, is also the factual origin of culture, civilization, and everything associated with a “human” lifestyle, and thus humankind is literally “between” nature and culture.

In such a case, only two roads ahead presumably lie – either one tries to overcome the “sin” of knowledge by pacing a bioconservative path “back to God,” or one tries to “transcend,” investigating the freedom (presumably – from nature) that the exile from Eden provides. Knowledge, hence, both divides and subtracts, as well as provides new opportunities for investigating the freedom that it gives.

As a radical humanist, Erich Fromm accentuates the second version, tracing freedom and transcendence as the necessary solution for humanity. While his work does show affinity to enfleshed materialities,^[45] the conceptual apparatus is rather problematic, as to how the human enlightenment and maturing might occur. He suggests rather a transhumanist solution that requests humans to completely abandon and sever the “umbilical cord” that leads to frustration of not being able to “return” to nature, mother, natural state. The frustration of inbetweenness, thus, would cease in favor of freedom from the bond itself. Hence, Fromm, for example, writes:

Indeed, if we look at man’s development in terms of historical time, we might say that man proper was born only a few minutes ago. Or we might even think that he is still in the process of birth, that the umbilical cord has not yet been severed, and that complications have arisen that make it appear doubtful whether man will ever be born or whether he is to be stillborn.^[46]

This solution is, however, problematic and ultimately presumes a transhumanist thought paradigm. Interestingly, the transgression that marks the atopicality and the following exile of the human being within the myth of Eden is not an act of “word” (in contrast to the world being created by the word of God), but an act of indulgence – eating a fruit. This apparent paradox of humanity being exiled from nature via a seemingly natural activity informs the dialectics of nature versus culture as a double-edged sword. The dialectics of the transgression of the natural via the alienation of nature is also mirrored in the transgression of culture (the word of God) via the use of knowledge and thus seemingly leaves the human in an impossible double-bind that restricts humanity both from nature and true knowledge.

Namely, the act of eating is here exposed as an act of transgression that detaches the eater from the eaten, constituting its subjectivity with regard to the objective, while simultaneously also reaffirming the “animality” of the eater. How is it that we come to “know thyself” via eating while eating is also a humiliating act (and the first demeaning action)? Here, eating is demonized in as far as one knows of oneself eating, namely, with knowledge via difference from “the other” also comes the shame of assimilating the other via consumption,^[47] and with knowledge (in a broader sense) – the shame of one’s naturality. The dialectics therefore operate upon the grounds that what is most unnatural about the human is precisely their naturality (while what is most civilized – eating not only for sustenance – also the most ungodly – i.e., the original sin) and hence, the act of transgression is a natural indulgence, in as far as it is framed by knowledge, i.e., in as par as the act of eating is a known use of the natural.

If one translates Fromm’s writing in the terminology of Julia Kristeva and regards the affectual experience of inbetweenness via the concept abject,^[48] the severing of the umbilical cord might mean that the ultimate freedom from the original sin entails freedom from abject realized through completely severing the tie that humanity has with nature.^[49] Abject – something or some event outside of the subject–object dichotomy that is constituted as a not-subject and by this constitution enables tracing the boundaries of what is thought as a subject. Thus, feces, sweat, or even one’s mother can acquire the state of abjection, since these phenomena force the self to realize the fragility of the boundaries of the self. As the not-subject, the abject defines the relations of objectivity and subjectivity allowing the world to be ordered within the dichotomy of a self, confronted by an alienated and objectified not-self. It is the third element that needs to be repetitively pushed out of the self, to reorganize and reaffirm the autonomy and self-containment of a self, or else, the evident entanglement with the processes of the world threaten to denigrate the fragility of selfhood.

Food traces the vector of enfleshment very directly, as well as serves as striking evidence for the processual character of the body, and ultimately also our selfhoods. Since food, its ingestion, and digestion transgress the habitual limits of the self so forcefully, it also holds the potential of being experienced and functioning as abject, which results in pushing food out of the sphere of the mind and subjectivity to avoid experiencing the fragility of the borders of the self and maintain the subject’s integrity. The abjection of food has many consequences, one of which might also be the tradition of excluding food from philosophical discussion (except for ethical regard). Annemarie Mol, one of the rare philosophers reflecting on food, associates this lack of interest with the mind-centeredness of the philosophical tradition in the West: “That people get physically mixed up with apples is bad enough as it is. But thinking and eating should be kept apart.”^[50] Food, hence, might be the most often experienced existential limit-situation that is constantly leaped across to sustain the continuous subjective experience of a seemingly whole selfhood. Thus, food also serves as a reminder that the inbetweenness of humankind is only perceptual, instead of ontological – we are entangled with the world, yet choose to rather ignore it, for the sake of maintaining a stable subjectivity. The perceptual inbetweenness is directly related to what could be termed as “affectual abjectivity” – a felt sense of food as abject – foreign yet not fully object, since it is a permanent reminder of the entanglement that threatens the boundaries of the self.

In the case of embodied food ideologies, the overcoming of the world could then mean, for example, the overcoming of a need to eat at all, thus, freeing oneself from the “sin” and “bad conscience” of eating the world, since food, experienced as abject, reminds of human entanglement with the world – the enfleshment and “animality.”

The negative framing of environmental issues often employs the affects connected with the feeling of disgrace, shame, and disgust of the enfleshed reality of needing nutrition from the earth to survive. For example, in Latvia, a vegan initiative takes place every year, with the motto “Don’t eat the world,” challenging everyone to abstain from animal foods for 30 days. While the challenge itself seems fun and creative (in the form of sending the participants exciting recipes for vegan foods), the slogan sends the message that instigates bad conscience and a disconnect from the environment – I am the outsider, the predator who stalks the world for my own satisfaction, basically a “foreign body” that does not fit into the rest of the non-human Umwelt.

Thus, by freeing from the need to eat one would presumably overcome the affectual abjection of being part of the world and simultaneously looking in from the outside, becoming a completely detached and independent outsider, i.e., becoming God, as the reactive nihilism paradigm suggests as an ideal.^[51] Here, the association of abjectivity and perceptual inbetweenness with the imagined factual inbetweenness works both ways similarly, as the perception is sought to represent factuality, factuality is thought to be overcome by overcoming perception. Namely, while inbetweenness is accepted as an ontological disposition, the natural result of which is the affectual abjection, a teleological solution is imagined to be possible in the future, when humankind would sever its ties with nature, thus, freeing nature from the burden of humanity, while also freeing the human being from the affectual abjectivity. A transhuman desire for freedom from “flesh” (and thus, also animal and vegetal flesh as food) ensues. Thus, losing the affectual abjection (via freedom from body–environment entanglement) would presumably force an ontological change. The affectual abjectivity is, thus, employed in evoking environmental awareness that in this abject-mediated form often leads also to apathy or climate denialism, or, alternatively, to climate grief, shame, etc., by facilitating the feelings of guilt. Simultaneously, corporations and the global food production industry also exploit the affectual abjectivity, by packaging and designing food in ways that conceal its visceral and fleshly origins, creating a misleading landscape of objectified, “pure” foodstuffs that escape the affect of abjection. Both processes, although following opposite moral codes, facilitate the alienation of body–environment association further, each inviting a form of the transhuman overcoming of the enfleshed entanglement. The ideals of each, however, depend on the ontological inbetweenness, where the human is either a dangerous predator (and, hence, the Anthropocene), responsible for all the ailments of the world or, alternatively, a super-human genius, who, in turn, will better the world in his image, but either way – radically exiled from the natural order.

It is often said that there is no nature and no wilderness anymore, for example. On either side of the argument, some view this “fact” critically as a major loss and others see it as a human victory over the natural order. Each of us may be on each of the sides in particular situations – getting the news of a new cure for cancer one might feel victory over a natural illness, while hearing about the cutting down of a rainforest puts one in an opposite position. Yet, one can only accept that there is no nature, if the touch of a human is imagined to be as an impurity contaminating anything it touches, or as the touch of a God – creating new supernatural worlds. Either way, it is a touch from the “outside,” a foreign invasion to an otherwise self-contained world. If viewed in a nature–culture continuum, it is, however, clear that the human is neither a devil, nor a god, and a change facilitated by human habitats is a naturecultured^[52] part of bio(il)logical processes. If I am not a foreign body to the rest of the world, is it not the intangibility of the environmental entanglement that suggests that solutions must always be sought in exiling oneself from enfleshment?

Although I started the article by stating that ontologies do affect materialities to a certain extent, they can only do so by constructing and creating and not by reconfiguring something that is already in place. Thus, one can imagine the ontological nature/culture divide to be responsible for the way our cities today are built, furthering the ontological premise, yet one cannot presume that such a divide would also institute this divide in any universalistic way, since the development of the human body, for example, is a co-constitution of both the ontologies we live by and the genealogies that come before us.

Thus, the freeing from abject, although somewhat possible, as a try to “escape” human entanglement with the world,^[53] is also based on an unjustifiable premise that humans were, in fact, exiled from Eden in the first place and can only choose from either losing their independent will and freedom to create or overcoming world-entanglement entirely.

If, however, a nature–culture continuum of senseful materiality is considered, the exile from Eden proves to be a perceptual divide, since culture is beyond humanity and does not depend upon freedom from material embeddedness.

2.2 Eden unlocked?

The previously discussed state of the exile, thus, suggests that when considered as an ontological nature/culture divide, the exile from Eden symbolizes “nature” as forbidden to humanity, thus, inviting the completion of overcoming human material embeddedness in a linear trajectory of transcendence.

However, today ecocritical and posthumanist scholarly attempts have re-envisioned the myth of Eden based on a nature–culture continuum,^[54] where consciousness is the result, instead of the origin of culture, and as such, the alienation of nature is rather a genealogical occurring, captured by the myth, than an inevitable part of being human. The reinterpretation enables considering that the human mind or self-awareness is not what is poisoned by the Tree of Knowledge – it is rather the flesh itself. The myth of exile might provide a key here – an apple is a food, and as such, it poisons the flesh, not the mind alone. The poisoning of the flesh is also expressed by the displacement. Displacement (exile of Eden) does not make humankind more cultural or more spiritual, but rather, robs nature of its spirit – we see humans in exile from Eden, viewing land as a mere object, a cause of pain and suffering. And indeed, Adam and Eve feel dire carnal consequences. They can be understood both metaphorically (they must die might just mean that now they are aware of dying, yet that does not mean that awareness of thyself is the only source of cultural life) and literally – as by stripping nature of spirit (namely, attributing sense only to knowledge and thought), the world is stripped of its liveliness and left barren. Considering the exile as an inner exile through which humankind robs the nature of its spirit demonstrates more clearly the perceptual nature of the experienced inbetweenness.

Man suffers from this loss of oneness. He is alone and separated from his fellow man, and from nature. His most passionate striving is to return to the world of union which was his home before he “disobeyed.” His desire is to give up reason, self-awareness, choice, responsibility, and to return to the womb, to Mother Earth, to the darkness where the light of conscience and knowledge does not yet shine. He wants to escape from his newly gained freedom and to lose the very awareness which makes him human.^[55]

The quote clearly depicts the ontological interpretation of the exile of Eden that also anticipates an essentialist view of nature as the “Mother Earth,” as well as highlights the two reductionist possibilities that humankind face when captured by the imaginary of the exile, to either return to “nature” by giving up reason or imagining that “what makes one human” is the exact opposite of “nature.” This is a double bind, however, reflected on the one hand by a self-negation (or passive nihilism ^[56]) or an affirmation of a super-human future (reactive nihilism).

What suffers is the flesh, robbed of its spirit via the alienation of the mind. This self-alienation isolates and creates a “split” in the self, a “split” that is nevertheless the unique quality that humankind experiences as “the self.” It is, thus, the path of confusion, doubt, and indetermination, and simultaneously also probably the only possible way to be human. The flesh is poisoned with the ontology of dualism and, thus, indeed freed to create civilizations, yet, not stripped from the world in any ontological sense. Again, referring back to the exile from Eden, the mindset of exile is what enlivens the disposition of exile, creating embodied ideologies of “forbidden fruit.” Here it is possible to move beyond the dialectics and the symbol of the forbidden fruit is inverted – it is not the presence of abject that constitutes the sin (restricting those who know too much from that which is naturally given), it is rather the idea of the sin, i.e., the idea of transgression via indulgence that has poisoned the land and made it barren.

The idea of trespassing Eden then might be associated with a critical posthumanist stance of creating understandings that trespass the idea of the exile itself. In the words of Donna Haraway:

Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.^[57]

Rather than overcoming abject, one should rather be inclined to experience and reflect upon the abjective, thus, also reevaluating the negative felt affects, such as shame, disgust, and bad conscience,^[58] creating understandings of tangibility and entanglement, to provide opportunities to reengage with Eden beyond exile. Freedom that humanity has sought to be possible only through exile might lie beyond humanity within the naturecultured materiality that is life, possible rather with the non-human entanglement than only as an individualizing force of conscious action that is oftentimes a self-deception. The individual ethics of food are, thus, only imaginable via affirmative ethicality of processuality, caring, and interdependence, outside of embodied normative moral mores. That, of course, does not exclude negative affects, as the argument in favor of embracing abjection rather than overcoming it suggests the usefulness and necessity for negative affective relations of disgust and shame, as exemplified also by affect theory.^[59] Here, however, it is important to highlight the processual entanglement of becoming that prevents from accepting a fixed state of moral reality and evidences the ethicality as a relational and transforming part of becoming human that rather resembles the art of living than an established form of conduct and invites self-reflection and joyful openness to the world. Probyn accentuates this issue, saying that multinationals such as McDonald’s are more aware of people’s needs for positive food affects that proliferate the affect of caring and solidarity, and successfully markets their products with this need in mind,^[60] while food philosophies often disregard this problem, thus, proliferating negative associations.

The problem, however, is to align affirmative food affects that allow the bite into the forbidden fruit with the care for the environment,^[61] since the affect of exile also cooperates in building materialities. Namely, as the global climate crisis demonstrates, the affectual intangibility of the environment has resulted in materially experienced alienation that has produced many problematic issues regarding food ideologies, food production, and marketing strategies. How to combine caring for the world with a posthumanist allowance to experiment and trespass the Eden that we already own?

One such attempt of theorizing a solution is offered by Tom Hertweck in terms of affect theory, where he writes on embodied food ideologies and states that:

The point is not to blame someone who loves, say, strawberries – arguably the most resource intensive, pesticide laden, and migrant-labor exploitative mainstream agricultural commodity – for their bad environmentalism and social injustice. Environmental thought has for too long wasted unnecessary energy chastising behaviors that feel right. Instead, affective environmental politics could include the habit of acknowledging the Pandoran desire made possible by global markets – say, the relatively recent development of having strawberries in grocery stores all year – and casting a valued counternarrative that thinks through the consumer’s desire and the discourses that produce it.^[62]

Food, “takes something external to the subject and literally transforms it through the mechanism of digestion into a part of the body and powers the subject’s life and thinking. In short it brings the world inside and makes it a part of us.”^[63] Hence, as humans, we are all innocent in our need for the forbidden fruit that we reach for in hunger for life and knowledge, trespassing the Eden we were never exiled from, yet the thought-forms provoking negative affects of exile, bad conscience, and disgust toward ourselves turn also outward and threaten to destroy our lived materialities via the wish to transcend the felt abjection. To bring it back to the discussion of ethics and morals, one could say that rather than witnessing the birth of an essentialist human form, the myth of Eden sees the birth of essentialism itself, thus, depicting another genealogical factor that plays into the development of morals as an imperative that creates a world of pervasive sinfulness. Tainted by the original sin, humankind is doomed to feel the distraught of abject, when consuming fleshly vegetal, fungi, or animal life, and, thus, prone to transform, upend, and reconfigure the seemingly rigid “laws of nature” it faces, to conceal the abject and facilitate transcendence and freedom from the strains of enfleshment.

Eating forbidden strawberries is probably no more a sin than inhaling polluted air – one tries to avoid it if one can but does not feel shame or regret if that is not possible. Building fortresses of plastic and advertisements against the abject, we act, indeed as the biblical Adam and Eve hiding their nakedness from the world, for it is not the nakedness of processual entanglement that one should fear, but the fear itself that threatens to destroy us.

How can, then, food become mine/ours again? – Only by recognition of never having lost it in the first place.