FOOD
text by ELENA REYGADAS
artwork by SOFIA ELIAS
The term “domestication” has always troubled me. Inevitably, it presupposes human superiority over nature, plants, and animals. As if natural forces were neutral: entities that Men — in capital letters and in the masculine — have controlled and shaped. Instead of domestication, I prefer to talk about reciprocal relationships: two-way bonds marked by a sense of interchange. The word “reciprocal” comes from the Latin reciprocus, and it means “back and forth.”
To speak of domestication suggests, in one way or another, that Man — in the upper-case masculine singular — is the major actor or agent of History. I prefer to think about histories — lowercase, plural, taking the feminine in the Spanish historias — in which the central agent isn’t always Man. I like finding narratives in which plants, animals, and stones are also significant actors, narratives in which…