El alimento como tecnología, obesidad y cambio climático

Abstract

This article draws on the effect that the production, distribution and consumption of food has for the generation of greenhouse gas emissions and public health, and argues, through a critical approach to western metaphysics and the example of obesity as a global health problem, that food has been produced as an ‘instrument’. In so doing, food has become a technology that halts the production of shared ecological and political knowledge, thus diminishing what they were intended to enhance—public health and the environment. Informed by tseltal and tojolabal knowledge, the article proposes that beings are not to be objectified as ‘food’, as this abstraction compromises the interaction and shared knowledge that are fundamental for health and care and the balance between a multiplicity of beings that co-inhabit the planet.