Tainted Flesh, Tangled Waters

• In Event: Sensing Beyond Borders

Abstract

Taint. In the world of seafood, this little word marks slippery borders, indexing the edible and adulterated, environments polluted and clean, and beyond. The result of chemical absorption into fish from the surrounding watery environment, taint tangles eaters in complex spatial, temporal, and biopolitical relationships that link together sensing human bodies with the nonhuman populations swimming in anthropogenically polluted transnational waters. Drawing on scholarship attending to the uneven porosity of bodies (Agard-Jones 2013) entangled in chemosocial relationships (Shapiro and Kirksey 2017), this paper examines the development and implementation of sensory “sniff” tests to look for taint in the wake of oil spills in the early 2000s through the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill. Through looking at guidelines developed first by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Marine Fisheries, and Canadian Food Inspection Agency, and later refinements, I ask how these sensory techniques, methodologically rooted in nineteenth-century European psychophysical techniques and culturally rooted in Western conceptions of aesthetic quality have come to unevenly travel through transnational circuits. As taint circulates, it makes perceptible the leaky biogeographical surrounds bounding seafood. In the process, its affective social lives upend straightforward assumptions of inside and out, revealing the uneven ways in which economic power shapes international spaces.

Author

• Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College