Para/Sitos

Acknowledging the bacterial future through an immersive narrative meal.

So much of human life and society is organized around the idea of Man vs. Nature — that we have to tame or control nature to survive and maintain our humanity. In our efforts to stay on top of the food chain, so to speak, we hide away the undesirable parts of life. Animals are broken down into neatly packaged parts out of sight. Trash is whisked away to distant landfills. And our own bodily waste is transported and processed by plumbing systems that we don’t think twice about until something goes wrong. Through all these interventions, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that we aren’t separate from nature, but rather part of it. For all our efforts to control and modify and fix nature, we still belong to a complex ecosystem of organisms — both tangible and intangible. Vibrio bacteria are part of this ecosystem, and because they don’t directly benefit humanity (usually the opposite), they’re typically framed as the troublemakers and bad guys of the bacterial world. To date, humanity’s efforts to fight and control microbes has had some successes in health outcomes, only to be met with the evolution of increasingly strong multi-drug resistant strains of bacteria and viruses. If we are to survive in a world where bacteria will continue to thrive and be increasingly prevalent, we need to change our understanding of the world and our place in it. We need to recognize that we aren’t and have never been the only organisms at the table.

I’m proposing Para/Sitos, a multi-course narrative meal: the first course will be familiar to the participants with each subsequent course scaling down through different marine lifeforms to pull them deeper into the unseen and unconsidered aspects of marine life. Currently, seafood is an anomaly in our meat consumption. Rather than disguising their forms on the plate, we’re comfortable with and desensitized to eating from their shells and seeing their bodies close to as they are when they’re alive. Instead of serving seafood in familiar vessels —whether in their shells or arranged beautifully on a simple dish — every course will be served on naturally anti-microbial brass tableware to isolate and re-contextualize the food in hopes of inspiring deeper inquiry into what we’re eating. Each piece of tableware will be irregularly shaped with bulbous protrusions and unexpected textures, polished to a high shine so the eater’s face is distorted and reflected in their surfaces. A brief segment of a story will accompany each course to guide eaters through the meal’s story, while projected videos and soundscapes create a sense of atmosphere to fully immerse participants in the narrative. The final course will be luminescent (somehow!) and reminiscent of vibrio fischerii in form and appearance to make attendees acknowledge and ingest knowledge of vibrio bacteria’s existence and place in our ecosystem.

I envision the meal being prepared in the same room as the diners to reveal the mechanics and flow of restaurant and kitchen ecosystems. Through this immersive narrative meal, I hope to inspire people to reckon with their place alongside bacteria and other lifeforms so we’re no longer just “one soft body swallowing up another without understanding, inquiry or investigation”. [1]

[1] Galloway, Vicki (2015). Culture and Sustainability: Lessons from the Oyster and Other Metaphors. Dimension, p94-120. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1080338.pdf