Biomonotony

If the key to the current situation cannot be found in a lack of cognitive abilities, it has to be sought in the form of the world to which those very abilities are applied.

—Bruno Latour, Down to Earth, 2018¹


Meal Plan
Everywhere I go, things are beginning to taste the same. Or, they are radically depreciating in taste altogether. At first I suspected this flavorless flattening of my palate's capacities was the accidental but still egregious outcome of mass consumption as it was indexed to and organized by a food supply chain both globalized and monopolized. In a word: McFood. Or, was I just eating so frequently in airport bars and train restaurant cars that I forgot the taste of real food? Staring from the Deutsche Bahn window as endless fields of generic cereals flickered past outside, I wondered: Am I really eating a tomato right now, or is this just some 3D-printed interpretation of a sultry, acidic nightshade overcompensating nutritionally for what can't be delivered by way of terroir flavor? Still, if it tasted like this, I couldn't help but think it was probably the nutritional equivalent of eating the copy of Der Spiegel lying beside the train-size dinner plate on the train-size micro-table. Or, at times even more bluntly, though consumed on a different mode of transit and from the sad launchpad of a tray table in turbulence: How can the Dutch even eat this shit? In my work as a curator, these questions began to arise more and more frequently during conversations with both artists and scientists: Was food losing its taste? How are we to make sense of, let alone swallow, the planetary meal plan of global capitalism?

Lesson Plan
During a recent guest seminar, while discussing the politics of respiratory dependencies, a graduate student abruptly interrupted my remarks on the so-called insect apocalypse to ask: “Does biodiversity even really matter anyway?” (Although it was decidedly not a rhetorical question, I hereby report the incident in italics because I want you, dear reader, to focus on it rather intently.) Perhaps he thought my concerted plea for attention to the entomoafaunal extinctioncrisis—which follows from decades of human-insect extermination fantasies, while anticipating numerous other kingdoms, including that imagined kingdom of human dominion over all others, collapsing into oblivion—was simply some kind of granola-infused, herbal-minded moralizing about how students in the graduate school of design ought to care, or care more, about what we so often and so casually call nature.