Editor's Note: On Diet and the Apertures of Nourishment

Words by Nkhensani Mkhari

What we ourselves have consumed in a day and considered to be nourishment.

Above all else, we have not touched our food. We have held the fork because to use our hands would reveal us as primitive, and we do not wish to be mistaken for our grandmothers. We have swallowed without tasting because we are afraid of what our tongues might tell us about where we come from. We have eaten alone with our phones because silence with ourselves is unbearable, because we might remember something we were taught to forget.

We have measured calories but not relations. We have counted macros but not the dead who are present in every recipe, who move through our hands when we let them. We have Googled "best restaurants" but not asked our mothers how they learned to cook, fearing the answer might obligate us to something we cannot name. We have accumulated spices we do not know how to use because we want to appear cosmopolitan, which is to say, we want to appear as if we come from nowhere in particular.

We have said "I'm not really hungry" when what we meant was "I am afraid of what I'm hungry for." We have said "it's just food" when what we meant was "if I admit food is more than food, I will have to admit I have been starving in more ways than one." We have called our grandmothers' recipes "comfort food" to avoid saying "ritual," to avoid saying "medicine," to avoid saying "the only thing tethering me to a cosmology the world keeps trying to erase."

We have consumed images of other people's meals but not sat at table with anyone who might ask us difficult questions. We have scrolled through food content engineered to generate craving without satisfaction because we have been trained to desire hunger itself, because capitalism requires us perpetually reaching for the next thing, the next taste, the next meal that promises to fill the emptiness but delivers only the pleasure of promising.

We have avoided eating with our hands because we learned somewhere, from someone, that this was dirty, uncivilized, backward—and we internalized this teaching so thoroughly we forgot it was a teaching, forgot it came from people who needed us to believe our bodies were inferior to their systems of etiquette. We have held the fork like a weapon against our own knowing. We have cut our food into small pieces to prove we are not animals, which is to say, to prove we are not indigenous, which is to say, to prove we have transcended the earth even as we live off its body.

We have said "exotic" when we meant "other," when we meant "not-white," when we meant "something I am attracted to but also want to keep at a distance." We have eaten at restaurants that serve our grandmothers' recipes at triple the price, plated by chefs who do not speak our language, served to people who will never pronounce the names correctly. We have paid for this. We have called it "fusion" and told ourselves this is progress.

We have bought organic because we are afraid of poison but have not asked who is poisoning the land or why. We have gone vegan because we care about suffering but have not asked about the suffering of the people who pick our quinoa, our avocados, our açaí shipped from countries we could not locate on a map. We have constructed elaborate systems of ethical eating that allow us to feel righteous while remaining complicit in every structure that makes eating under empire an act of violence no matter what we choose.

We have not asked what we are feeding our children through their eyes, through their ears, through the frequencies that pulse through their days. We have given them screens to keep them quiet and told ourselves this is neutral, this is just technology, as if every image they consume were not installing an operating system, as if every frequency they absorb were not tuning them to a particular world. We have fed them processed food and processed images and processed sounds and wondered why they seem hungry for something they cannot name.

We have criminalized the plants our ancestors used to speak with the more-than-human world because we are terrified of what they might tell us, terrified of consciousness that cannot be commodified, terrified of experiences that might reveal the constructed nature of everything we have been taught to take as natural. We have called this "drug policy" when it is spiritual warfare. We have called this "public health" when it is epistemological violence. We have accepted this because to question it would require us to admit that our civilization is not the pinnacle of human development but one arrangement among many, and not even a particularly sophisticated one.

We have said "I don't have time to cook" when what we meant was "I have been conscripted into a system that values productivity over relation, that measures my worth in hours sold rather than meals shared." We have microwaved our dinners and told ourselves this is efficiency, told ourselves this is modern life, told ourselves there is no alternative. We have not admitted that we are lonely. We have not admitted that we are hungry. We have not admitted that the hunger in our joints, our chests, our dimming eyes, is not a personal failing but a systemic condition, a feature not a bug of the colonial diet that wants us perpetually consuming but never satisfied.

We have read articles about "mindful eating" written by people who have never had to be mindful because their food systems were never interrupted, never colonized, never replaced with circuits of dependency. We have practiced gratitude as a personal spiritual exercise and not as a relation to the land that feeds us, to the workers who harvested what we eat, to the dead who are present in every bite if we could bear to feel them there.

We have forgotten the songs you sing while cooking. We have forgotten the prayers you speak before eating. We have forgotten that food is a threshold, that the hand is an organ of knowing, that taste is a form of divination. We have forgotten this so thoroughly that when our grandmothers try to teach us, we smile politely and continue holding our forks, continue keeping our hands clean, continue consuming in the manner we have been taught to consider civilized.

We have done this in a day. We have called this living. We have turned out the light without weeping because we have protected ourselves so carefully from the knowledge of what we have lost, what we continue to lose with every meal we eat without touching, without tasting, without remembering that nourishment is a practice of relation to everything—the living, the dead, the land, the futures we are or are not cultivating with every choice about what we allow through our apertures.

We have not loved our food. We have not let our food love us back.