Material Acts - Amy Zhang - Feeding: Metabolic Symbiosis and Cohabitation

Feeding: Metabolic Symbiosis and Cohabitation

Amy Zhang

Arc_MA_AZ_01

A typical family farm in Guangzhou. Inside the former hog house, a biotechnology company is experimenting with rearing black soldier flies as a new form of feed and protein. Photo by author.

Material Acts
November 2024










Notes
1

A household farm is distinct from backyard farms, farms that raises fewer than five pigs per year, and large-scale factory farms. A household farm specializing in hog production typically operates with an annual pig production of between 10 and 500 pigs per year and accounted for the majority of pigs raised in China in 2009.

2

Daisuke Wakabayashi and Claire Fu, “China’s Bid to Improve Food Production? Giant Towers of Pigs,” The New York Times, February 8, 2023, .

3

Mindi Schneider, “Feeding China’s Pigs: Implications for the Environment, China’s Smallholder Farmers and Food Security,” Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, May 2011.

4

Achille Mbembe, “Futures of life and Futures of Reason,” Public Culture 33, no. 1 (93) (January 2021): 13.

5

Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) and Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

6

John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review, 2000).

7

Hannah Landecker, “The Food of Our Food,” in Eating Besides Ourselves, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023), 57.

8

Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 5.

9

Les Beldo, “Metabolic Labor: Broiler Chickens and the Exploitation of Vitality,” Environmental Humanities 9, no. 1 (2017): 108-128.

10

Maan Barua, Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

11

Alex Blanchette, Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

12

Radhika Govindrajan, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India’s Central Himalayas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

13

Anna Tsing, Heather Ann Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

14

Margulis, Symbiotic Planet, 33.