In the last few years, a renewed interest in metabolic exchange, and in ideas of a porous and permeable body, has come from disciplines like microbiomics, nutrigenomics, and epigenetics. Moreover, a number of technological changes from food manufacturing to different body/technology interfaces have brought to light conceptions of a “new metabolism” offering “a window onto profound changes to the material and conceptual constitution of …
Tag Archives: Metabolism
Book Forum––Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living: Food, Fat and The Absorption of Illness in India
Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic disease to tell a story about the enfolding––the absorption and regulation––of food in and about the body in Mumbai. Solomon’s 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. …
Making up “persons” in personalized medicine with metabolomics
Imagine a world where you can walk into a hospital, submit a urine and blood sample, and be told 20 minutes later that you not only have a particular type of ear infection, but also a 50% chance of developing diabetes in the next ten years. Such is the promise of “personalized medicine,” in which the development of molecular diagnostics …
Gut Wisdom, Or Why We Are More Intelligent than We Know
Gut feeling. Go with your gut. Gut of the problem. By default I’m a gut guy. At the age of thirteen I was diagnosed with acute Crohn’s Disease. For the next ten years I was borderline incontinent. Then I had a small bowel occlusion that resulted in complications precipitating a near death experience after which several feet of festering small …
Top of the heap: Janelle Taylor and Hannah Landecker
This is the first post in a new series we’re calling “Top of the heap”. Following the lead of Cultural Anthropology (see their “Playlists” feature) and others, we’ve asked scholars whose work we enjoy reading to tell us a little about what they’re reading or planning to read. In this first installment, Janelle Taylor and Hannah Landecker…