As humans and non-humans consume the planet, they are—as a large body of research now demonstrates—transformed by what they consume, just as much as their consumption transforms the planet and its earthly environment. ‘You are what you eat’ might be a banal proverb, but it is proving essential to understanding many of the injustices, insecurities, and vulnerabilities created through alienation from the land and its sustainable consumption. This became abundantly clear to the anthropologist Ira Bashkow, who was named whiteman, spelled as a single word, by the Orokaiva when they witnessed his practice of eating. The whitemen who had traversed their lands in Papua New Guinea came with dried rice—durable and easy to transport. The usage of the ‘whitemen’ denomination by this particular community, who are Indigenous to Papua New Guinea, does not primarily refer to western concepts of race and ethnicity. Rather it describes people who are ‘light’ in a range of ways and behaviours: their hands are soft and uncalloused, their ‘light’ food is store bought, it does not need to be kept and tended to—it has no roots, no obligations. The Orokaiva, in contrast, eat ‘heavy’ food, for example pork. Although the Orokaiva keep pigs, the pork they consume is not taken from their own animals. Instead, pork is only consumed when given as a gift; it is this quality that makes it weighty. The communal practices of consumption in the Orokaivacommunity thus keep alive a tradition of obligations that enable deep communal ties not only between people, but also between animals, the plants that nurture them, and the lands that they inhabit. 

As A Participatory Planet moves into the Consuming phase of the project, we consider and foster practices of food sharing and saving to ask questions about consumption and community. Food and consumption take centre stage while we reflect on our relationships to the earth and how it can be maintained in a more just, collective, and communal way.

For this public iteration, A Participatory Planet joins up with another HKW project, Tongue and Throat Memories, to invite Berlin to an evening focused on food justice and on questioning consumption. The evening takes shape around a conversation on what consumption does with the self, in which consumption is decoupled from its until now close relationship with extraction. The evening ends with a vegan meal curated by chef and food practitioner Njathi Kabui. 

For more information on the dinner at Restaurant Weltwirtschaft on 18 July, click here.


As part of Tongue and Throat Memories and A Participatory Planet