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Somatosphere Presents

a book forum on
Harris Solomons

Metabolic Living
Food, Fat, and
the Absorption of
Illness in India

Contributions from
Ed Cohen
Rutgers University
Bharat Jayram Venkat
University of Oregon
Heather Paxson
MIT
Stefan Ecks
University of Edinburgh

with a response from


Harris Solomon
Duke University
edited by
Todd Meyers
New York University,
Shanghai

Somatosphere Presents
A Book Forum on

Metabolic Living:
Food, Fat, and the Absorption
of Illness in India
by Harris Solomon
Duke University Press
2016, 304 pages
Contributions from:

Ed Cohen
Rutgers University

Stefan Ecks
University of Edinburgh

Heather Paxson
M.I.T.

Bharat Jayram Venkat


University of Oregon

Harris Solomon
Duke University
Edited by

Todd Meyers
New York University, Shanghai
Harris Solomons Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic
disease to tell a story about the enfoldingthe absorption and regulationof food in and
about the body in Mumbai. Solomons book is a powerful ethnographic reflection on how
factors held as exterior (local and global cuisine, evolving and competing norms regarding
eating and body image) are wholly interiorized. We are happy to present a lively set of
commentaries.
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Meta-Metabolism, or Governing from the Inside Out


ED COHEN
Professor, Womens and Gender Studies, Rutgers University

HARRIS SOLOMONS METABOLIC LIVING ruminates on the absorption of metabolic disease


in India as a bio-political index for globesity. No doubt, from a public health perspective
the questions of obesity and its physiological effects weigh heavily upon national
populations and the individuals that comprise them. The high economic, psychic, and
physiological costs of obesity and its metabolic sequela certainly give rise to political as well
as medical concerns (although whether obesity is a cause or an effect of metabolic disorders
remains an open question). Yet the adoption of the category metabolic disease to
encompass this complicated nexus reveals the limited ability that biomedical frameworks
have to adequately address these public health concerns, in their most global and most
local incarnations. Harriss book therefore offers us a unique opportunity to reflect on how
biomedical and bioscientific discourses have come to colonize the ways we think both about
public health and about the publics for which it cares. Moreover, it provides an occasion to
recognize the constraintsat once epistemological and ontologicalembedded in these
ways of making sense of the vital entanglements that constitute human existence and/as
coexistence.
As a category, metabolic disease actually deconstructs itself. Since it is simultaneously
a singular and a plural concept, it refers both to a generic dimension of biochemical
dysregulationwhich includes a wide range of specific conditions, including a host of
genetic disordersand to a particular syndrome (or cluster of syndromes) that seem to
predispose some people to adult onset diabetes. This generic singularity troubles both the
reigning ontological theory of disease and the concomitant localizations of disease in the
body. Moreover, the very notion of (a) metabolic disease destabilizes the at once
biopolitical and biomedical presumption that the body constitutes a self-unified and selfunifying field of biochemical transformations of matter and energy. Since metabolic disease
makes evident the tensions that always potentially exist within such transformations, it
unwittingly reveals the transductive co-arising of individual-milieuwhich Francisco Varela
called the paradoxicality proper to the individualas simultaneously a condition of and a
problem for the living organism. Yet, metabolic disease also enables biomedical discourses to
conceal this vital paradox by rendering it as pathological. Placing metabolic disease under
the sign of pathology, biomedicine not only denies the very paradox which enables us to
continue living at all, but it also disavows that containing this paradox is what made it
biomedicine in the first place.
The notion of metabolism only emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century, after
the experimental physiologist Claude Bernard invented the concept milieu intrieur, and

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

thereby precipitated (in Georges Canguilhems words) the historical rupture which
inaugurates modern medicine. This rupture occurred both within medical discourse and
between the organism and the world in which it lived. Until Bernard, organisms and milieus
could not be conceptually separated, which is why no one before him thought that
laboratory experiments on living organisms would yield true knowledge about them.
Bernard, a committed vivisectionist, overcame this objection by doubling the milieu itself,
and thereby conjuring the milieu intrieur as a meta-milieu. He proclaimed that the milieu
intrieur constitutes the real theater of life, while the corresponding milieu extrieur only
concerns the living in a mediated fashion by altering the organisms own quasi-autonomous
processes. Indeed, Bernard framed this quasi-autonomy in the language of liberalism (since
autonomy is after all a political and not a biological concept) by insisting that the milieu
intrieur makes the higher, a.k.a., human, organism free and independent (again political
not biological concepts).
While all contemporary lab-based bioscience and biomedicine now depend on this
conceptual innovation, unfortunately no one seems to have paid much attention to its
oxymoronic overtones. After all, the literal implication of the phrase milieu intrieur would
be something like outside inside. Yet, by incorporating milieu intrieur simultaneously
within the organism and within the experimental discourses of biomedicine and bioscience,
Bernard rendered this outside-inside contradiction superfluous, since for him only the
interior defined the real domain of vital processes. Following in Bernards wake, questions
concerning public health increasingly shifted from focusing on questions of living together
(e.g., by insuring clean water, adequate sanitation, salubrious air, sufficient housing,
unadulterated foods, etc.) to the individual, the modulation of whose milieu intrieur (e.g.,
through getting vaccinated, quitting smoking, practicing safe sex, or losing weight) would
concomitantly alter the incidents of disease in the population at large. Harriss careful
exploration of the complications, literally the foldings together, that underwrite the
increasing concern with metabolic disease in India exposes the failure of biomedicallyoriented discourses to grasp the convivial nature that subtends the problem they seek to
treat. Arguing that metabolic disease only makes sense meta-metabolically, Harriss
important new book helps us to understand that governing from the inside out leaves a lot
to be desired.
[Online: http:/somatosphere.net/forumpost/meta-metabolism-or-governing-from-theinside-out]

Ed Cohen teaches Modern Thought in the Womens and Gender Studies Department at Rutgers
University. His most recent book is A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the
Apotheosis of the Modern Body (Duke 2009). His essay Gut Wisdom, or Why We Are
More Intelligent than We Know appeared in the Commonplaces series on Somatosphere.
Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

Mumbai Metabolism Mysteries


STEFAN ECKS
Programme Director, Medical Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

IN METABOLIC LIVING, Harris Solomon takes us to Mumbai, Indias largest city, to find out
how people deal with illnesses attributed to modern food habits, especially to the
overconsumption of fatty and sugary foods. He aims to show that metabolism provides a
prism of the anxieties and tenshuns of urban life in India. The book comprises chapters on a
huge variety of topics, ranging from obesity, to food adulteration, to surgical procedures on
the digestive tract. Solomon presents richly detailed insights into life in Mumbai and of
clinical consultations between patients and specialists in metabolic illnesses.
The choice of metabolism as both a topic and a conceptual frame is, in some ways,
straightforward. As many other scholars working on India have noted before, food and
eating are so centralin relations of kinship, caste, care, hospitality, ritual, politicsthat
one could hardly go wrong with foregrounding them. As one of Solomon's nutritionists
rightly emphasizes, were a food-centered society (165), and food, eating, and digesting are
key themes in the anthropology of South Asia. Metabolism also provides an entry point to
some of the epidemic diseases that India is grappling with, in particular, diabetes.
Metabolism helps Solomon to discuss a gamut of medical problems, such as obesity, thyroid
problems, gastric bypass surgery, and food contamination, alongside each other.
Nonetheless, there are some pitfalls in choosing metabolism as an ethnographic topic.
Biomedical notions of metabolism are highly abstract and have only very limited traction in
popular notions of the body, anywhere in the world. Metabolism may be a widely known
term, and some of the building blocks of metabolic processes, such as proteins,
carbohydrates, or enzymes, are terms most people will have heard. Yet only very few
people will be able to say what they actually are and how they relate to each other.
Elementary principles of metabolismthe chemical reactions that are involved in
maintaining the cellular structures of living organismsbaffle most non-experts. Even the
most basic ideas, such as the distinction between catabolism (breaking down molecules to
obtain energy) and anabolism (synthesis of compounds needed by cells) is hardly the stuff of
everyday conversationsand they never appear in the book either. Despite the centrality of
metabolism in biomedical understandings of body, disease, and therapy (both
pharmacological and nonpharmacological), what happens in metabolic processes remains
beyond non-experts models of health. The conversations on metabolism reported in the
book, both those between Solomon and his lay informants (everything is normal now
because I took the doctor seriously), or between clinicians and patients (eat more salad),
tend to feel short of substance.

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

There are not many parts of the book where Solomon engages with the knowledge
biomedical experts have about metabolism. Whenever we hear about concepts such as
glucagon-like peptides or the Y-Y paradox, Solomon's book is at its strongest. In my view,
the history of the discovery and formulation of metabolism in the biomedical sciences
during the past century should have been given much more prominence. Questions of
transmission and local relevance, such as how biomedical notions of metabolism have
come to India, or how biomedical views might agree or clash with Indian medical traditions
such as Ayurveda, are barely addressed. The Mumbai meanings of metabolism remain a
black box.
An incomprehensible agency of the individual metabolism is cited by patients who,
despite all their best efforts at sticking to a prescribed food regimen, say that they should
not be blamed for a lack of willpower: No amount of responsibility and compliance can help
patients if their metabolism doesn't respond favourably to dietary treatment (185).
Metabolic problems are said to come from it being slow or imbalanced, but what does
that mean, exactly? Solomon wants to pay attention to foods movements in and out of
bodies and surroundings to demonstrate how persons and food interrelate in ways besides
instrumental eating (227), but we get surprisingly few details of this.
The black-boxing of metabolism is at odds with other current scholarship in medical
anthropology and in social studies of science, where how stuff works matters greatly. It is
difficult to imagine an anthropological study of, say, tuberculosis in India, that does not take
into account what causes the disease, what the past and present epidemiology of the disease
is, or how various drug treatments work. Why are neither clinicians nor patients
understandings of metabolism explored at much greater length?
It could be argued that metabolism, in its biomedical definitions, is not the focus of the
book, but metabolic living. Solomon defines metabolic living as an actively ongoing
process people endure to survive the porosity that all life entails (9). Metabolic living allows
to explore the ways that people complicate and even dissipate boundaries across the skin
and thus show how bodies and environments are mutually porous (9). Solomon's main
reference is Landecker, from whom he takes metabolic living as a conceptual space that
brings the somatic together with the environmental, the inside together with the outside. (If
Landecker should be the reference can be debated; she explores how metabolism
is in history and emphasizes changing bioscientific models.) A conceptual space of
porousness and blurred boundaries has long been established in anthropological writings on
Indian bodies, and Solomon rightly cites (in passing) McKim Marriott and others. These
older writings on how substance exchange relations in India are simultaneously biological
and moral do not need to unpack biomedical definitions of metabolism because they are
interested in the co-constitution of self and society.
Yet how different kinds of people in Mumbai experience metabolic illness is not the
theme of the book either. Solomon lived in Bandra, one of Mumbai's richest suburbs, and
met mostly Catholic East Indians, but why are there no direct lines between neighbourhood
Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

encounters and clinical encounters? We see Solomon walking through the city with a variety
of people, but they do not walk in and out of clinics together. Solomon says as much when he
points out that Mumbais diversity dissolved difference in ways that made cultural
moorings difficult to isolate (16). None of the usual themes in the anthropology of South
Asia (e.g., how groups draw boundaries by distinguishing between vegetarian and nonvegetarian food; hierarchies of eaters and the eaten), nor the common themes in
postcolonial histories of India (e.g., diet and nation-building; domestic versus public
spheres) are taken up at any length. This makes some sense, as far as Metabolic Living is
concerned with the present moment and its discontents with processed foods, plastic
contamination, or lack of exercise. It also makes some sense because this is not an
ethnography of a particular community. Still, I would have loved to learn more about the
different knowledge effects of metabolic sciences among different kinds of people in
Mumbai.
[Online: http:/somatosphere.net/forumpost/mumbai-metabolism-mysteries]

Stefan Ecks is Programme Director for Medical Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. His
recent publications include Eating Drugs: Psychopharmaceutical Pluralism in India (New York
University Press, 2013). His current research explores the crises of global psychiatry, health
inequalities in India, and "habitography" as a different way of doing anthropology.
Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

More Mango Madness


HEATHER PAXSON
Professor, Anthropology, M.I.T.

IF YOUVE ENTERED the United States from abroad, its not unlikely youve smuggled food,
whether craftily or cluelessly. In a given day, 400-600 pounds of foodstuff will be confiscated
from passengers flying into one international terminal at New Yorks JFK airport alone. So I
learned watching a 1:53 video produced by A Great Big Story, Where Illegal Food Goes to
Die, which made the Internet rounds in December 2015.1
The videos opening shot pans over mounds of tropical fruits, part of a messy foodscape
arrayed on a vast stainless steel table that also includes salami from Italy, Serrano ham from
Spain, and lots and lots of avocados. The camera zooms in on two words typed on a slip of
paper Mango / India before looking up at U.S. Customs and Border Protection supervisor,
Ellie Scaffa, whos explaining: The reason why were confiscating all this stuff is not because
its harmful to the human being. Its harmful for our plants and our animals. Indeed, her
concern is not strictly speaking with the stuff of, say, ham and mangoes; its that, as Harris
Solomon notes in Metabolic Living, his ethnography of metabolic illness and food politics in
India, things eaten have travel companions (6). Bisecting confiscated fruits with a longbladed knife, Scaffa is on the look-out for foreign pests in the form of insects or larvae
that, if absorbed into our plants and animals, could harm domestic agricultural industries
or natural resources and thereby, as Solomon might say, damage the metabolism of the
United States body politic.
In Metabolic Living, Solomon approaches metabolic illness in and of urban India by
theorizing the absorptive capacities of human bodies alongside the absorptive capacities,
and limits, of the city of Mumbai in which those bodies dwell. Bodies and bodies politic alike
are shown to be intimately intertwined. To explore metabolic living, Solomon writes, is
to explore the ways that people complicate and even dissipate boundaries across the skin
and thus show how bodies and environments are mutually porous. Porosity requires work:
work by persons who open up to or refuse materials like food, and work entailed in moving
materials across uncertain boundaries (9). For residents of a modernizing Mumbai,
recently outfitted with corporate weight-loss plans and stainless steel food carts, discerning
whats harmful and whats healthy to ingestwhats properly or effectively absorbable and
whats notmeans weighing conflicting advice and competing risk factors, judging
unstandardized measures, and accepting that all is not, in fact, in view and under ones
control. Thus, Mumbaikars communicated to Solomon, how much absorption is truly
livable is an open question (12).

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Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

Solomon offers metabolic living as an ethnographic heuristic (12), one I find


generative in beginning to think about the gastro/bio-political work of moving edible
materials across another set of uncertain boundaries: the borders of a nation.
Mango. India. Those two typewritten words taped to a piece of confiscated fruit signal
that mangoes are metabolic provocateurs (66). The juicy-sweet, Proustian-return-tochildhood taste driving the springtime mango madness that, as Solomon describes,
predictably impels diabetic urban Indians to break agreed-to diet regimes may also impel
international travelers to risk confiscation, to chance steep fines, orperhaps most severely
in 2016to lose the privilege of shorter security lines by having Global Entry status revoked.
Food does stuff to people. Our desire can be such that we break rules for it, which precisely
deepens our obsession.
In tracing how people live with metabolic uncertainty, obsession, and illness, Solomons
chapters examine the gastropolitical work of Mumbais food cart vendors, political party
officials, housewives, shop owners, dieticians, biomedical clinicians and others in probing,
assessing, sanitizing, stopping up, and maintaining the porous boundaries between bodies
and environments, homes and streets, domestic and political spaces, foods and their eaters.
Gastropolitics (cf. Appadurai 1981) doesnt just remind us that the personal (and edible) is
political; it reveals the political to be tangibly material and socially intimate. Moreover,
gastropolitical improvisations on the everyday norms of what Appadurai calls commensal
transactions (e.g., apportioning, serving order, expressions of culinary appreciation,
dishing out dietary advice and smuggling mangoes or yelling threats at Border Protection
agents who seize them) can reveal, in Solomons words, the material forces that interlink
bodies and their surrounding space (75).
The gastropolitical boundary work of CBP agricultural specialists such as Ellie Scaffa
concentrates such forces: political, economic, social and environmental together. To be sure,
absorptions of foreign bodies into the American homeland happen all the time via
designated points of entry (airports, shipping ports). In the month of December 2015
alone, 2,456,752 international passengers (and most of their luggage) passed through
customs inspection at JFK airport.2 International borders servefor most airline passengers,
most of the timemore as gateways than as obstacles. But who, and what, gets to become a
passenger in the first place? Or not?
Mango. India. In what the New York Times heralded as probably the most eagerly
anticipated fruit delivery ever, the first legal shipment in decades of Indian-grown
mangoes arrived at JFK airport in spring 2007.3 Until then, the mango seed weevil, endemic
in India but unknown in North America, had precluded Indian mangoes from reaching U.S.
soil. For Indians in America, The taste of mango was a price of immigration.4 But in
January 2006, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its Indian counterpart struck a deal:
the U.S. would allow importation of the desired fruit if India assumed the microbiopolitical
job of exposing it to low-dose radiation to kill or sterilize lurking larvae.5 Irradiation occurs
in a USDA-certified facility 125 miles from Mumbai, close to the prime coastal orchards
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Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

growing Alphonsos,6 considered the king of Indias some 1,500 varieties of mango.7 USDA
preclearance centers in India represent a contingent moving of the border outside, similar
to how incoming passengers may clear U.S. passport control en route at Irelands Shannon
airport. Demonstrating a sort of parasitic state metabolism, as of 2014, 30 countries
participated in the USDAs Plant Protection and Quarantine Preclearance Offshore Program.8
Here, as in many other venues, Solomons metabolic living provides an indispensable
guide to tracking and comprehending how processes of bodily absorption and rejection
begin well before a cargo container is packed, a plane boards or, to be sure, a morsel of food
is forked.
[Online: http:/somatosphere.net/forumpost/more-mango-madness]
Works Cited
Appadurai, A. 1981. Gastro-Politics in Hindu South Asia. American Ethnologist 8(3): 494-511.

Notes
1
http://www.greatbigstory.com/stories/where-illegal-food-goes-to-die, accessed May 31,
2016.
2
Port Authority of NY & NJ December 2015 Traffic Report.
3
Karp, David. A Luscious Taste and Aroma from India Arrives at Last. The New York
Times May 2, 2007, pg. F6.
4
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104881449
5
Any shipment found to have live pests is rejected prior to prophylactic irradiation. APHIS
Factsheet: Questions and Answers: Importing Indian Mangoes to the United States, Animal
and Plant Health Inspection Service, US Department of Agriculture, April 2007. Available
online: www.aphis.usda.gov/publications/plant_health/content/printable_version/faq_imp
_indian_mango.pdf, accessed June 15, 2016.
6
Karp, David. A Luscious Taste and Aroma from India Arrives at Last. The New York
Times May 2, 2007, pg. F6.
7
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104881449
8
USDA Office of Inspector General, Plant Protection and Quarantine Preclearance Offshore
Program. Audit Report 33601-0001-23, September 2014. Available
online: https://www.usda.gov/oig/webdocs/33601-0001-23.pdf. Accessed June 22, 2016.

Heather Paxson is Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the author, most recently, of The Life of
Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in the America (University of California Press, 2013).

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

Metabolic Living with Madhur Jaffrey


BHARAT JAYRAM VENKAT
Assistant Professor, Anthropology, University of Oregon

AFTER PUTTING DOWN Metabolic Living, I reached for Indian Cookery (1982), a volume of
recipes originally prepared for British television by the still-undisputed doyen of Indian
cooking outside of India, Madhur Jaffrey. Put simply, Jaffrey is the Julia Child of Indian food.
Since the 70s, she has undertaken a tireless quest to untangle the complexities of what she
calls, without any fuss, Indian food.
Say what you will about Jaffreys cookbooks, but her recipes are distinctly made for
cooking. Missing a vital ingredient? No problem, she explains, soothing the anxious home
cook while laying out an array of alternatives. About a year ago, I met an editor at a large
trade press who lamented the lack of Indian cookbooks with simple recipes that could be
prepared after a long day in the office. This came as a shock to me, as Jaffreys body of work
includes Quick & Easy Indian Cooking, Step-by-Step Cooking, Curry Easy and wait for it 100
Weeknight Curries.
Arjun Appadurai suggests that cookbooks belong to the humble literature of complex
civilizations (1988:3). Yet, the apparent humility of many cookbooks belies, I think, a much
grander desire for remaking oneself and ones loved onesa desire articulated by many of
Harris Solomons interlocutors in Mumbai, who are faced with the complex biological and
ethical challenges of modulating their porosity to the world. In Metabolic Living, Solomon
draws our attention to the semi-porousness of bodies and environments, of street food carts
and processing plants, of home kitchens and slaughterhouses, of rooms for drugs and rooms
for amputation. Throughout these spaces, substances are substituted, adulterated, refined,
contaminated and fortified. Depending on who you ask, this is either deeply threatening or
reason for optimism. Now, we can enjoy our favorite vada pav without suffering from food
poisoning. Or: now, nothing tastes the same anymore, and who knows what those
preservatives might do to us?
Im reminded of a scene early in his book, in which Solomon stops by the home of his
research assistant, Mary:
Paying her a quick visit at home one morning before a day of interviews, I watched
the wind rustle waist-high stacks of paper that lined her hallway. All of these papers
were about food. Mary had accumulated recipes from cookbooks, womens
homemaking magazines, and newspapers over decades. She also had accumulated an
archive of weight-loss diets in the carefully curated, crumbly sheaves. [7]

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11

Coyly, Mary referred to this titanic archive as her dowrya collective recipe for slimness.
However, these papers also seem to represent the means through which Mary attempted to
navigate the dangerous porosity between body and world. This is not to say that body and
world are known in advance and necessarily kept apart. Just the opposite: through the
constant vigilance over dietabstinence in the face of vada pav and sugar, for exampleand
through the metabolic surgeries and amputations that Solomon describes later in his book,
worlds enter into and remake bodies that they had already, in a sense, contained. Exposed to
such worlds, it seems to me that Mary had built a selectively-permeable wall of paper.
Here, too, Jaffrey anticipates our concernsthey are hers as well. In the 1980s, she was
already grappling with the mixed blessing of industrialized food. Since chicken is now mass
producedand fairly cheap, its status has been greatly reduced, she laments.
This saddens me. I was brought up thinking of chicken as something special . . . and
there are such wonderful ways to cook it . . . if you are on a diet, you can eat
Tandoori chicken which is cooked without fat and when you want to indulge
yourself, you can dine on Shahjahani murghi (Mughlai chicken with almonds and
raisins). [1982:64]
Remaking oneself and others is about more than just successfully preparing reduced-fat
chicken. The many people we meet in Solomons Mumbaiincluding Maryteach us that
what is at stake is the modulation of our absorptive capacities. We absorb too much and too
little, too much of the wrong things or not enough of the right ones. Food and medicine,
which are often one and the same, reformat the conditions of porousness between body and
world.
Ethnographers-in-training are often taught that openness to other ways of knowing and
feeling is a virtue. But in worlds that are, following McKim Marriott, biomoral, there can be
no hard-and-fast distinction between spirit and substance. Certainly, we cannot help but to
be open. Yet, what Mary and others teach us is that there is also a value in closedness, in
creating and maintaining selective porosities within tragic milieus that are figured as
simultaneously nutritious and toxic. The vada pav from the street is tastier, but who knows
what microbial threats might lurk beneath its deep-fried deliciousness? Industrial chicken is
cheaper, but what are the consequences of consuming animals raised on a steady diet of
antibiotics? In such worlds, openness tout court is far from a virtue.
Writing from a place and time overshadowed by the phantasmagoria of Trumps wall,
and keeping in mind those relations of caste that undergird Marriotts formulation of the
biomoral, I fear that questioning the value of openness might play all too easily into racist
and casteist political formations for which I hold no sympathy. Yet, insisting on open and
closed as the only viable moral and political positions hinders us from accounting for the
ways in which selective porosities are constantly remade.

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

12

This, to my mind, is what Solomon so admirably manages in his work. Toward the end of
his book, he describes the cruel optimism surrounding metabolic surgery, a set of
procedures that were touted by some as a cure for obesity and diabetes. One patient, Neha,
looked to metabolic surgery to be let off the hookin other words, a release from
regimented meals and endless prescriptions. Instead, what she finds waiting for her after
the surgery is medicinal atyachaar, (192) a kind of pharmaceutical torture required to
maintain her new metabolism. Cure operates as a desire for finality, for an end to an
unrelenting anxiety about the porousness of the body. Yet, Nehas body has not become
closed, but rather differently porous. What Neha discovers on the other side of surgery is a
reformatted porosity, one that looks depressingly similar to the one of which she was
cured. Cure demands further cure. Absolute closure is impossible. But in the opening that
remains, we might do worse than sneaking a taste of Jaffreys Shahjahani murghi.
[Online: http:/somatosphere.net/forumpost/metabolic-living-with-madhur-jaffrey]
Works Cited
Jaffrey, Madhur. 1982. Indian Cookery. London: BBC Books.
Solomon, Harris. 2016. Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India. Durham:
Duke University Press.

Bharat Jayram Venkat is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. He is


currently at work on a book manuscript, India after Antibiotics: Tuberculosis at the Limits of
Cure, an ethnographic and historical study of tuberculosis treatment in India from 1860 to the
present.

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

13

No Recipes A Reply
HARRIS SOLOMON
Assistant Professor, Cultural Anthropology and Global Health, Duke University

IN MAY 2016, I handed Metabolic Living to the individual I call Mary in its pages. For years she
had guided me through the neighborhood that anchors the book, through homes and clinics
and their connective spaces. Now, she flipped through the books pages. A lot of text, a
picture here and there. She looked up. No recipes?
I had no good response at the time. What sort of recipe would be adequate to lead a
reader through a book of tastes: tastes of the creep of metabolic disease, of body-city blurs,
of people eating food and of disease eating people? The food in Mumbai and the Mumbai in
food are connected domains of absorption, and most days, people can sit with that. But
diabetes and obesity unseat comfortable mix-ups. In hopes of a fix, expert and lay
knowledges demand a rewind from a recipes end product. Surely theres a discernible
problem in there. Just keep breaking things down, we are told. There must be a recipe in
there, we hear. Maybe you can find it through reverse-engineering, a recipe pushed
backwards.
It is tempting to let ethnography mirror these demands for elemental beginnings and
rewinds. But as the respondents in this Forum note, that is a tricky proposition. Each offers a
different take on the scramble of mixture and bare ingredients in the book. Each offers a
challenge as to how to read and write the metabolism moving forward. I am deeply grateful
for their thoughts.
The comments converge on questions of porosity and absorption, which are the books
central themes. How much openness is truly viable? How do people and places concretize a
tussle over the margins between body and environment? The commenters parse these
questions generously, through cases of alimentary uncertainty in real-time events, in
philosophy, in global politics, and in ethnographic method. My hope in writing Metabolic
Living was precisely to provoke questions like these. A recipe is a directive, one easily
followed (ideally). But during fieldwork and while writing the book, what became clear was
the impossibility of a clear recipe for injured metabolisms and their redress. The book, then,
focuses on how people live out that problem.
People with metabolic disease are eaten alive, physiologically. In clinical contexts and
elsewhere, they face demands to unscramble their mixturesof political formations, of daily
rhythms of food and work, of hopeful answers found in biomedicine and surgery. Confusions
between cause and context proliferated. Yet no recipe was at hand for people to explain that
confusion. The demand for an explanation, though, left marks. The book traces how people
must still live (and eat) amidst ever-changing and ever-increasing expert knowledges about

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morbid and mortal body-environment haziness. The commenters take this incongruity in
several compelling directions.
Heather Paxson's lucid and prescient thoughts take us to border zones. Food does stuff
to people, she writes. The people in her essay here are not patients, however, and this is
one of its sources of insight. The people are travelers, and also the USDA and Border
Protection inspectors who make food a problem of geographic uncertainty. To be sure,
absorptions of foreign bodies into the American homeland happen all the time via
designated points of entry (airports, shipping ports), Heather writes. A mango seizure in
an airport basement rescales the absorptions between what counts as element what counts
as mixture. From the body-city, street-mouth pathways that occupied me, Heathers
comments take me to the hours of air travel that enabled the book to in the first place. At
each end of the journey, there are always pangs of anxiety. There are treats to bring for
relatives, informants, and mentors. Obligations to fulfill. Heather accounts for the many
different desires to regulate the stuff of obligations. In doing so, she demonstrates how the
passage-points of border zones crystallize a sensorial politics of control.
This is especially evident in Heathers recounting of the film Mango/India, where she
questions the slash between the films titular elements. A Border Protection guard bisects
fruits to inspect them. Seeing requires cutting. The guard cuts the final product open, back
to its seed. She is alert to pests who may have hitched a ride. The guard tries to rewind, to
think back to the elements. But if the alarm goes off, its really the combine that gets
chucked.
What, then, constitutes causality when things are taken out of their ordinal position
(first, second, third; third, second, first), and turned back into plain-old cardinal positions?
What happens when morbidity, and recourses to stem it, feels like a game of duck-duckgoose? Ed Cohens wonderful essay notes parenthetically that although whether obesity is a
cause or an effect of metabolic disorders remains an open question. This insight is open,
indeed, and draws upon his fascinating writings on vital and mortal milieux to address a
broader concern: What kind of ethnographic analysis and writing can face this looping of
cause and effect? Eds thinking about the blur of cause-effect reminded me of Carlo
Ginzburgs reflections on conjecture: When causes cannot be repeated, there is no
alternative but to infer them from their effects (1979: 23). So it is with metabolic disease,
too: food, like the bodies eating it, is pre-disease. A preamble to morbidity. A precursor to
the zigzag paths between living and dying.
Ed delves into the political valences of this tangle. His reminder that Claude Bernard was
a committed vivisectionist is striking. The one who opens the body to discern its insides is
surely the one to declare inside-outside recursivity complete. Ed explains how an
incommensurable notionoutside/insidecan become a force of governance. This surfaces
in his own work on immunity. But it is quite resonant for India as well. For many South
Asian Studies scholars, the public of contemporary India has been an ingredient problem,
a question of which elements can add up to a sensible aggregate. In Mumbai, this is the basic
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stuff of daily events: whose claims to the city incorporate as an acceptable urban form? For
Ed, though, there is a challenge here: it is actually public health, that deserves analysis,
not simply the public. The public is always in compounded relation to bodies and vitality. Ed
kindly notes that the book helps us to understand that governing from the inside out leaves
a lot to be desired. The shape of that desire is where I now turn, thinking through the
reflections that Stefan Ecks offers.
Stefan points out the books preoccupation with an incomprehensible agency of the
individual metabolism. He shares with me inspiration from writings in South Asian studies
that take food as the hinge between self and society. The challenge I faced in my own
fieldwork was that science qua biomedicine upset any comfort one might take from such
models. This is because of the forensic force of nutrition. For instance, nutritionists walked
patients backwards through the day in order to uncover some hint of bodily rupture.
Stefans interest lies in the different knowledge effects of metabolic sciences in Mumbai.
My answer to that interest is to suggest that metabolic science is not a mix terribly
amenable to isolation. This is a problem facing ethnographers, too. Anthropologists want
answers to questions about meaning (such as Stefans interest in knowing what does that
mean, exactly? in reference to people in Mumbai naming body-work as slow or
imbalanced.) I am reminded here of Katie Stewarts reflection on peoples vaguely relevant
descriptions of the ungraspable things. For Stewart, reports of things felt or seen are like
bread crumbs left to initiate the very recognition of a problematic that has to be walked
around and examined from angles and lines of egress (Stewart 2016: 34). Movement is key
here (and indeed, my questions into how a person possibly sensed metabolic disorders often
were answered with the pithy chalta hai, Its going.) Stefan asks questions aimed at
precision, but what is the nature of this ask? My sense is that our current toolkit of inquiry
has a static fuzz to it, rather like forensic inquiry of certain sciences of the body. The tools at
hand offer us certain questions: How did we get to Z from A? Surely, we must go backwards
to trace it. And that, I agree with Stefan, is a necessary pursuit. Sometimes. But metabolism
has no emergency brake one might pull in the name of inquiry. Its fidgety. One must find
precision in movement.
In movement, one might be able to work out of the problem of too-open or too-closed,
one of the driving thoughts that Bharat elaborates. Bharat unpacks this question through
food writer Madhur Jaffreys wisdom. It is the wisdom of substitution: Missing a vital
ingredient? No problem, (Jaffrey) explains, soothing the anxious home cook while laying out
an array of alternatives. So many of the dietitians I observed did precisely this, substituting
this for that, atta (wheat flour) instead of maida (white flour); baked snacks instead of fried
ones; more vegetables instead of more rice. The soothing of Jaffreys cookbook prose comes
from implied comfort that you can scramble the ingredients and things will still wind up ok.
Bharat is likely unaware that I received a copy of Jaffreys memoir Climbing the Mango Trees as
a going-away present on the cusp of fieldwork. The book, and Jaffreys mode of tastememory-pedagogy has been a longtime friend. It is a delight to return to in Bharats writing.
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Bharat raises the issue of remaking oneself and others through cooking. Like Cohen, he
stays with the trouble of the politics that emerge in remaking. One has to be open for
remaking, willing to eat the dry crackly snack instead of the (likely) more satisfying fried
one. Crucially, Bharat hovers on the potential of being closed off to rearrangements: there
is also a value in closedness, in creating and maintaining selective porosities within tragic
milieus that are figured as simultaneously nutritious and toxic. He titrates this in the face
of anthropological accountability to current events the US, India, and elsewhere where one
can quickly succumb to nourishing one's own likeness, and walling off others in the process.
Absolute closure is impossible, Bharat writes. The task at hand might then be to
proceed with close attention to the things that are more gateways than obstacles, to use
Heathers contrast. If you cant close the cookbook, and paging through it in order brings no
relief, perhaps it is time to release a bit from attachment to the procedural or forensic force
of recipes. The liveliest option may be to open the book, to wherever it may go, and stay.
[Online: http:/somatosphere.net/forumpost/no-recipes-a-reply]
Works Cited
Ginzburg, C. 1980. Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.
History Workshop 9: 5-36
Stewart, K. 2016. The Point of Precision. Representations 135: 31-44.

Harris Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University.

Somatosphere | October 2016

Book Forum: Metabolic Living by Harris Solomon

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