Allegory of the Long Spoons

There is a story that has permeated various religions about two rooms. The first room is in hell, where the people have row after row of tables with laden with a feast of delicacies. Yet the people sitting around these tables are emaciated, moaning in hunger. In their hands, each held a long spoon, but their arms were splinted to wooden flats, so they could not bend their elbows to bring the spoons to their mouths.

In heaven, there is an identical room, with people in the same predicament of spoons. However, in heaven, the people sitting around these tables are comfortably sated. There, the people had discovered that it was only possible to feed each other, by reaching across the table with their long spoons to bring the food to each others' mouths, being fed depended on everyone being kind to one another.

Recently, Mark Bittman had an article in The New York Times called, Why I'm Not A Vegan. It's more a promo for his book, VB6 (Vegan Before 6), a lifestyle choice he made for health reasons. The idea behind VB6 is to basically eat vegan until dinnertime, although he admits to frequent cheating. It's very similar to meatless Mondays, forms of scheduled moderation for diet and health.

I've written previously on this blog about the concept of ahmisa, but today I'm thinking about community, and how eating is a communal act.

Even when a person dines alone, rarely did they grow or hunt their food themselves, or at least, not all of it. They are the end of a (typically) long producer/consumer chain. In most cases, this chain is invisible. It brings to mind an article I read several years ago about how the definition of "cooking" has changed in America to include opening and heating up a can of soup.

With its invisible status, this producer/consumer chain is not considered part of most people's communities. But what if our thinking were to change? What if we started seeing eating as a form of engaging with community - not just through dinner conversation, but through product consumption? It might mean that we want more of connection to said products - by knowing the farmers, by shopping locally, by gardening ourselves, and that a faceless corporation is not a good dinner companion.

And what if we went beyond that? Aldo Leopold suggested the idea of in A Sand County Almanac, "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land." What if we considered the pollinators such as bees, or the microbes in the soil, part of our community? They certainly contribute to our food production. What does it do to our thinking then?

What sort of spoon could you extend?

Body as Site

Happy News! This project has been selected as one of the recipients for a 2013 Artist-Investigator Grant from the Triangle Arts Lab at Intersection for the Arts and California Shakespeare Theater! The funds will assist in video documentation and the cumulative event.

The grant is designed for open-ended, more experimental projects like this one. Last week, I attended the awards ceremony for the event, which included short talks describing the projects by some finalists and all recipients (for short descriptions of each of the ten finalists, please visit here). From what I learned there, I was the only recipient without at least some sort of theater or video/film background.

After the presentations, both Cal Shakes and Intersection said that part of their goals for these projects was to discover the next direction performance might take. In the initial call, they asked for proposals that asked had a "how" or "where" focus - although some apparently felt that they were both. So they turned the discussion to that of common themes that were cropping up - such as how the mediated experience might be a part of some of them. One suggestion that was made was the relevance of site-specificity, but it was pointed out for my particular project, my body is my site.

Which is interesting, not just in terms of new directions in performance, but in how the body relates to energy, food consumption, and food choices such as locavorism and the 100 mile diet. If the body is a site, what does it mean if the body can make it's own decisions? What does it mean for a body-as-site to move through space, or restrict its movement, particularly in regards to petroleum-based transport? How does a personality affect a body as site?

I think this project will involve bringing others to me, as site and as performance, as I envision cooking and hopefully interviewing investors in my space, in my home. Interestingly enough, this also makes me think about some of my criticisms of Land Art, namely, that it sees nature and landscapes as things to be exploited (and I am exploiting my own body).

Right now, this body has a lot of ideas and thoughts in its head, but I am enjoying how this idea keeps making connections with others. At the awards ceremony, two gentlemen from CalShakes told me that my project had been one of their favorites, and they were really looking forward to seeing how it worked out. More than anything, I want to thank the Triangle Arts Lab, Intersection for the Arts, and the California Shakespeare Theater for this support.

PLEASE NOTE: The Carbon Corpus Project is still looking for investors! If you are interested, please contact me at michelle(at)michellewilsonprojects(dot)com .

Initial Public Offering

Please click on the image to see the larger version.


Friends:


The undersigned, Chief Executive Officer, Chairwoman of the Board, director and shareholder of Carbon Corpus LLC (the “Company”), which takes corporeal form in the body of Michelle Wilson, in consideration of global warming, underwrites this initial public offering of the securities of the Company (“IPO”) and embarking on the IPO process, hereby agrees that, subject only to consummation of the IPO, the undersigned shall comply with each of the following covenants and agreements.

1.The Company exclusively surrenders all animal-based carbon credits to purchaser, and shall eat an exclusively vegan diet for the amount of time purchased.
2.The minimum period of purchased time is one week.
3.A week is defined as a seven-day allotment.
4.During the IPO period, the value of one week of corporeal carbon offset is $50.


By purchasing a share in Carbon Corpus, the purchaser (the “Patron”), will henceforth become a shareholder upon receipt of payment. The Patron will receive a certificate as authentication of this agreement.

This letter agreement shall be governed by and construed and enforced in accordance with the laws of the State of California, without giving effect to conflicts of law principles that would result in the application of the substantive laws of another jurisdiction.


Michelle Wilson
Carbon Corpus CEO

If interested in becoming a shareholder, please contact the artist at michelle(at)michellewilsonprojects(dot)com.

Food Police

I had a conversation recently with someone who misunderstood this project, who happened to ask me, "So, how much weight do you think you're going to lose?"

It took me a second to realize she wasn't joking. After clarifying the focus of this project, her comment has led me to think about the moralizing of food and eating that has happened in America. It brought me back to a night out with friends in my early twenties, when a friend turned to me as we placed our order and said, "I'm being bad: I'm drinking soda." Now, I'll admit soda is not a healthy option for a beverage, but her words implied a punishment was deserved for her crime.

I spent some time thinking this morning about how food moralizing is inflicted on women versus how it is on men in America. Women in this country learn, very early on, that thinness is equated with healthiness and our value as human beings. (This is not to discount the growing fat positive movement, which is awesome.) We are not taught to recognize healthy bodies, or even how to define a healthy body. I actually don't know how to describe what evaluation could be used to describe a healthy body based on non-medical knowledge and only on appearance, other than something like, "No evidence of rash, post-nasal drip or flu symptoms."

Which has led to dieting being a moral act, rather than a healthy choice. Kate Harding has a great post in the Shapely Prose archive about the "Fantasy of Being Thin," and how women are encouraged to diet as a means of coping with depression or saving a marriage, and how women often are convinced that weight loss will grant the prize of the good life. Or inversely, someone who is not thin does not deserve happiness.

Which leds me to food policing. Women do it to ourselves, telling ourselves that by eating the fat-free/low-carb/sugar-free/whatever we are being good, rather than making a choice about what we want to put into our bodies at that particular moment. This is not to criticize someone who is making informed food choices for personal, religious or health reasons, however they are defined by that individual. Instead, it is to clarify that eating a certain way does not equal virtue. The reward for dieting is not angel wings, a Ryan Gosling look-alike, or something else.

Not being a man, I can't claim familiarity with how men absorb America's perception of food morality. Though from the outside, I do think it is less focused on what is perceived as healthy for men and more focused on eating food that is equated with strength and hierarchy over the food chain: meat. Eating meat, by extension, suggests hunting and butchering, activities that are regarded as male. Additionally, the stereotype of eating meat is defined as pleasurable, while eating vegetables is perceived as work.

These concepts, albeit implying heteronormativity and generalizing though they may be, are examples of how our food morals are tied to gender roles - women must preserve their bodies in order to be beautiful (read:pleasing,acceptable, virtuous), men must eat that which demonstrates power.

Which brings me back to the comment about me losing weight. I'm not sure if the person automatically assumed that a woman doing a project about eating a certain way meant weight loss was a goal, but I think it may have been part of it.

So let me clarify: this project is not meant as a judgement on myself or anyone else. This project is not about altering my body or my weight. Not to deny the scientific evidence of the health benefits of a plant-based diet, but this project is to investigate how my carbon footprint and the carbon footprint of others intersect in the food system and food choices.

Click here to read the introduction and description of this project.

Introduction

Carbon Corpus is a project examining environmental issues and alternative economies. This project aims to not only educate others about how to make less of a carbon footprint, but also to examine and critique the difficulties of achieving this goal in modern society. I am beginning this project by selling the animal-based carbon credits to my own body to purchasers. In exchange for their purchase, I will eat a vegan diet for the period of time they purchase. Buyers will also receive certificates of the authenticity certifying my commitment and the amount of carbon offset. As the project develops, I will document the process, my decisions, my successes and failures photographically on this blog.

During this project, I aim to engage in a dialogue with those who purchase my body’s carbon credits, by asking questions as to what permissions they feel such a purchase grants them, and how they are choosing to behave. On my part, in addition to a vegan diet, I will make an effort to source my food as locally as possible, either from my own garden or local farmer’s markets. I also plan to build my own solar cooker, to further reduce some of the carbon generated in my own cooking processes.

I invite others to comment, critique, or suggest alternatives and possibilities with the goal of finding solutions for food system based global warming. Please feel free to leave comments or to contact me at michelle(at)michellewilsonprojects(dot)com.