Healthy Harms and Fat-Free Futures

• In Event: The Edible, the Moldy, and the Weedy: Speculative and Materialist Interventions into (Evading) Capitalist Capture

Abstract

This paper lingers in the odor of 1920’s U.S dairy creameries—the stench after-fat. The curdles of putrid waste from the creaming process for butter and whole milk seeped into streams, pits, and soiled patches of the American pastoral. Faced with the conundrum of marketing milk as a wholesome, national, and nutritious food, dairy corporations developed technologies to turn the environmental waste of the creamery into profit. Melanie Dupuis offers that “the perfect whiteness of this food and the white body genetically capable of digesting it” are tied into ways in which powdered milk was disseminated across rural villages in India, Africa, and South America as humanitarian aid and scientific advancement. Though there has been considerable scholarship on how powdered skim milk capitalized on colonial legacies of power differentials to target Global South populations, there has been very little consideration on the matter of fat/ness. This paper connects “fat-free” skim milk and its rise as a diet industry cult favorite to the imperial food production of powdered milk as intersecting across environmental waste management and shifting ideas of health. Skim milk and powdered milk produced new socialities, digestive processes, and perceptions of bodies. “Healthy Harms” intertwines fat and the gut, aesthetics and technology across biological, ecological, and bioethical discourses to interrogate the intersecting registers of corporeal governmentality of human/nonhuman life.

Author

• Athia Choudhury, University of Southern California