A still from the movie "The Banquet of Babet".
Eating, which involves a series of actions: tasting, chewing, swallowing, digesting, and excreting. Eating takes many forms: consuming nutrients, storing calories, quenching hunger, enjoying deliciousness, devouring other living things. Eating, not only related to the existence of the body, is a metabolic activity, but also involves different social behaviors and cultural connotations.
"You are your food."
In The Philosophy of Eating, anthropologist Ann Marie Moore jumps out of the theoretical model of human "hierarchicalization" and re-outlines a philosophical theory of "I am" from the rich and continuous field of experience of "I eat": through the social behavior, sensory experience and metabolic process of eating-eating, to reawaken our philosophical understanding of existence, cognition, action and association.
Instead of a linear approach to writing, Moore uses three textual cross-threaded writing experiments: a theoretical conversation with different thinkers, a personal experience of exploring food cultures around the world, and more ethnographic stories about eating interspersed with sidebars. Thus, in the field of eating, we re-encounter philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and also rediscover "man" in the most ordinary life experience, and discover the close connection between man and everything in the world.
"Eating sheds light on theory, which re-examines the terms, models, and metaphors that make academic writing possible, as well as the substantial material foundations of society. In this sense, theory does not describe the world, but becomes a toolbox that provides multiple descriptions—though it is not infinite.
In the debates that are taking place today, theoretical tools are often used to stubbornly defend very different positions. However, they are not fixed. It is possible to recall them – even if it takes effort. This first requires digging and dissecting the past, carefully re-examining the concerns that have been framed into established theoretical metaphors, and then discarding those metaphors and proposing linguistic outlets that allow other ways of thinking to arise. Moore wrote in the book.
The following is excerpted with permission from Chapter 5 "Correlation" of The Philosophy of Eating. In this chapter, Moore discusses the problem of association in philosophy through the experience of human eating. Space is limited, with deletions from the original text, and the sidebar appears at the end of the text (in the book, consecutive odd or consecutive even pages appear). The sub-headings were prepared by the editors.
Original author | [Netherlands] Ann Marie Moore
The Philosophy of Eating, by Anne Marie Moore, translated by Feng Xiaodan, Minerva | Shanghai People's Publishing House, March 2023.
"To acknowledge the other is to acknowledge hunger,
To acknowledge the other person is to be willing to give. ”
Like other philosophical anthropologists, Levinas was skeptical of sociological schemas that dissolve individuality. The human subject, he writes, "is defined not by its reference to the whole, by its place in a system, but by itself." However, the subject of Levinas' thought did not emerge for no reason. Levinas explicitly focuses on how the "self" arises: "The fact of proceeding from the self is tantamount to separation. "The way a person becomes a subject is by separating himself from his mother. The mother first conceives and gives birth to her baby and then continues to breastfeed the baby.
Thus, all the faces that the subject encounters later in life have a comforting glow, especially those of women, who remind him of the subject that belongs to his mother: "The comfort of the face gives tranquility... The tenderness that originally began with the female face can remind a being that has experienced separation of itself. Until the subject's separation from his mother, their relationship had been a nonverbal nurturing one, or, in Levinas' words, the first "relationship between people, not with the interlocutor, but with the woman of the opposite sex." This otherness of the opposite sex is on another level outside of language, and in no way represents an abridged, stammering, still primary language." When a mother feeds her child, the nutrition provided guarantees the child's growth and at the same time rejoices. "In the case of no utility, in the case of pure loss, enjoy it gratuitously, without involving anything else, purely expendable - this is man."
Stills from the movie "Winter's Tale".
Arendt argues that eating distracts attention from those more valuable endeavors; For Merleau-Ponty, eating is a prerequisite for cognition and is irrelevant; Jonas believed that eating was an activity that guaranteed the survival of life, on which higher pursuits could be pursued. In contrast, Levinas cherished eating. For him, eating is something that humans can enjoy with "no utility" and "nothing else." However, the story does not end there, because the ultimate moral act is to give up this pleasure and offer one's own food to strangers. This is the central scene of Levinas' ethics: I sit at my table and a stranger in need knocks on the door, and I open the door and look the stranger in the eye. In this face-to-face interaction, I realize that the other person is both my other and similar person. This prompts the ethical agent to invite the stranger in and offer him food. "To acknowledge the other is to acknowledge hunger, and to acknowledge the other is to give willingly."
But in the larger context, the harsh reality of the Holocaust resurfaces. The Nazis did not "acknowledge the other" in the slightest, but killed millions of people while treating millions in appalling ways. Those who manage to flee often knock hopelessly on the doors of other nation-states and private homes. These atrocities do not explain Levinas' thoughts, but they affect them and give them urgency. They are the ultimate evil that needs to be avoided. Levinas believed that human beings should not be dehumanized.
He also insisted that the other should not be eliminated and that we should recognize that they are both similar enough to be respected and different enough not to be assimilated. When Levinas talks about how people should not treat their fellow human beings, eating is the paradigm scenario he uses. Eating destroys otherness. "In the satisfaction of my own needs, I find that the world of aliens has lost in me its other sex: in the fullness, the reality into which my teeth cut is assimilated, and the power of the other becomes my strength, becomes me." Here, extermination and eating are equated, and cannibalism is evoked (as it is often evoked in the Western philosophical tradition), marking a worst form of association.
Further reading: From Being to Being by the Being by Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Wu Huiyi, Jiangsu Education Press, October 2006.
"In full food,
The reality into which my teeth cut was assimilated. ”
Next, Levinas contrasts two modes of association: eating, at the expense of the other; And hey, you have to pay for yourself. This is clearly a very short summary of a wealth of intellectual achievements, and my handling here is unfair. Even so, I would venture to ask a few questions here. First, why does ethical association take place within the confines of the family, skipping the question of why some people have a home while others wander around like hungry, wandering strangers? Why is "home" so easily seen as a safe place? Finally, why is the "subject" unthinkingly equated with a grateful son and not a depleted mother? In the next section, I'll return to this family-like imagination. But first, I want to focus on implicit humanism.
Levinas is concerned with "dehumanization." He calls on his egos to feed similar human othernesses, even if it comes at their own cost. He recognized the cost of being eaten by creatures—"in full food, the reality into which my teeth cut was assimilated"—but it was taken for granted. But are the creatures being eaten that different from humans? When a person comes face to face with an animal on their plate, acknowledgment can appear suddenly.
In 2015, I had a great day discussing agriculture and food with a group of colleagues at a conference. After the meeting, we gathered for dinner at a Thai restaurant in Queenstown, New Zealand. When the waiter appeared at our table, we ordered a variety of dishes, intending to share them together. Most of the vegetables we ordered were vegetables, but there was also a dish with shrimp and another as described on the menu as "whole fish". It will be fried and seasoned with red pepper, garlic, ginger, lemon, and coriander. A few minutes later, a second waiter came to our table and asked us, do you want the fish to go to the head? We asked him what he would do in Thailand. He shrugged and said, definitely with his head attached. So why did he ask us this question? At a table that is mostly Westerner (his exact words), at least one guest will be frightened by the head on the plate, he said. Or to paraphrase his next sentence: "In my experience, you people don't like to eat what takes the lead." ”
For some people ("you people"), an animal face has appeal. It will say "don't eat me" and accept me as an otherman who is similar enough not to be assimilated. At our table, those of us who have participated, we agree that such appeals should not be silenced with a kitchen knife. We consider it hypocritical to ask that the head of the fish be cut off before serving it in search of peace of mind. You either don't eat animals (as some of us do) or you are ready to face them (like the rest of us, one warning or another).
Extending Levinas' humanism beyond human beings makes it understandable to abandon the idea of eating all creatures that resemble humans. Respect them and don't eat them, they are all members of the same big family just like us. Now, in addition to recognizable faces, vivid intelligence or extraordinary sensibility are often mentioned as obstacles to eating them. But what creatures can be identified as intelligent and sentient? Monkeys - why not pigs then? Dogs - then why can't octopuses? I don't want to review these debates here, but rather to bring up the conundrum that similarities between species can take many more forms than faces, intelligence, and consciousness.
Stills from the movie "Little Forest, Summer and Autumn".
Here's a story of a field moment that has been around for a long time but I've never forgotten.
In 1976, I was a medical student. In anatomy class, we learn about the structure of the body through anatomy. A corpse that had been soaked in formalin for at least six months was placed on a metal table with holes in it. First, we had to free it from a plastic cover and a huge, damp orange towel. Then, using forceps and scalpels, we find the body parts specified in the instruction manual. I volunteered to operate near my face, on the left side of my neck, with two other students on the right arm and two students on the left leg. The other side is then dissected by another team of five.
It's not easy. We have to pick up the skin with forceps, cut it with a scalpel, and scrape it out of the fat and connective tissue beneath the skin, gradually revealing the arteries, nerves, and muscles we want to see. I accidentally cut off an artery I was looking for. Gradually, the dull muscles become clearly visible. They are very similar to the muscles of any other mammal. They look like meat. Or conversely, the meat becomes like human muscle. After anatomy class, H and I used to eat vegetarian at the Green Aquarius restaurant. There, we didn't talk much, sitting next to each other on the floor mat, using chopsticks to pour vegetables from the bowl: rice, chickpeas, lentils, cabbage, mushrooms. In popular terminology of the time, the atmosphere was countercultural.
As long as human bodies are covered with skin all the time, the similarity between their strip muscles and other mammalian muscles is hidden. For H and me, anatomy exercises made this similarity evident during our student days. But the possibility of recognizing the similarity between the material composition of humans and that of edible organisms does not stop here.
In 2011, the seven of us gathered in an apartment in Amsterdam to conduct an ethnographic experiment. We're going to eat a hot meal with our fingers. Four of us are experts at eating with our fingers, and the other three grew up using cutlery. First we cook, then we eat. Bite-by-bite, our fingers make us feel the food, and the food makes us notice the sensation of the fingers. But what to call these feelings? Are these feelings generated by our sense of touch, or are our fingers tasting our food? As I was feeling and tasting, it occurred to me how similar my fingers were to my food. As the connoisseurs of eating with my fingers just taught me, I press food into small balls, and the food also transmits pressure back to my fingers. This is plant-based food, no meat. But even so, rice with beans, eggplant with sauce, when my hands feel their specific combination of solidity and stickiness, adaptability and fixation, they feel and taste like a part of myself.
The seeds, fruits, and leaves that I pick up from my plate with my fingers and bring to my mouth all contain spices. They were cooked, but that didn't eliminate the similarities between them and me. My food and I are strikingly similar. But this particular similarity didn't resent me. Yes, we are all creatures and belong to the same family. We have many characteristics in common. But why does this have to stop eating? I didn't feel like I had to give up this meal of rice, lentils, and eggplant. Instead, I was on my fingers, on my tongue, realizing my resemblance to the plants I was eating, which allowed me to grasp the life force we shared. I appreciate it.
Stills from the movie "Little Forest, Winter and Spring".
"Eating" off the table:
A generative association
That's what I care about: inspired by Levinas, people might think about what to eat/who, what not to eat/who. But no matter how important this thinking is, it also hides another problem, which is my relationship with the creatures that I end up eating. The problem with this relationship is not that we shared ancestors in the past, but that I destroyed their future. Or, is that the problem?
Levinas asserts that I destroy the other in the process of eating. As long as "eating" is confined indoors and happens at the dinner table, I think so too. I squeezed the rice and lentils into a ball, picked them up and brought them to my mouth, opened my lips, put the food between my lips, chewed, swallowed, and the rice and lentils disappeared, and I lived and told the story. But if "eating" is expanded to include what's happening elsewhere, beyond my home, beyond the time span of a meal, things change. Because, fortunately, at some point in the future, I may be able to eat rice and beans again, because at this moment there is someone I don't know, in a distant field, growing these ingredients for me. My ancestors left descendants because they not only devoured the creatures they ate, but also planted and raised other creatures. There is not only a kinship between me and my food, but also an agri/cultural relationship.
A still from the movie "The Banquet of Babet".
Levinas, like other philosophical anthropologists, sought to separate the individual from the nascent schema of sociological interpretation. However, when it comes to understanding diet, there are good reasons to expand our horizons beyond the individual. Doing so doesn't necessarily lead to conclusions, but it gives another perspective on the relationship between diners and the source organisms of parts such as the fruit they eat. Because when questioning involves going beyond the dinner table, eating doesn't seem to just wipe out my food, it also allows the creatures I eat to continue to grow. Eating and feeding are intertwined.
My friend G has a small garden on the northern edge of the city where she lives. She rides there in late winter to trim trees and clear the ground. She prepares the planting bed in advance, and then waits until spring comes, and then sows the seeds on the planting bed, or transplants the plants she has planted in small seeding pots here. G also grows potatoes (different colors) and sometimes buys small shrubs (such as raspberry vines) from nurseries. Throughout the spring, she spends her Saturday time bundling climbing plants, watering and weeding. Especially weeding. G insists that killing weeds is an important part of growing food. Then, sometime in early summer, she began to harvest. From that moment on, G began to have a large collection of vegetables and fruits that she could eat herself, give to her guests, or save for the coming winter.
Before digging out the potatoes, G plants them on carefully prepared planting beds. She also protects her raspberries from suffocation by other plants. She gave to her garden before taking it from it. In this way, eating is not just destructive. But there is also an inevitable corollary, that is, in the garden, giving itself is not a moral thing. For G, she can take care of her potatoes and raspberries and even devote herself to it. But their edibility is always the purpose. When potatoes are well cared for, they will be a satisfying food. The raspberry bush reciprocates its proper care with delicious raspberries. Then, in G's garden, feeding and eating, giving and taking are intertwined. There is no point in separating the morality from it. It is not so much that feeding is good and eating is bad, but that feeding and eating are premised on each other and implicated in each other.
Stills from the movie "Little Forest, Summer and Autumn".
G only grows plants in her own garden. But feeding and eating animals can also be intertwined in similar ways. This is the case in the pen of Hans Habers. He wrote about the Dutch farm where he grew up in the fifties and sixties of the 20th century.
"I have the impression that the farm is primarily an economic system; It is a source of income in an indirect sense, and in a direct sense the source of our own food supply – our own beef and pork, chicken eggs, fresh milk from cows, and vegetables from our own garden... The economic characteristics of these activities should not be limited to markets in the strict sense of the word, nor to competition and profitability — these are, of course, part of the equation. Above all, it is a way of life – to survive. "To survive, farmers depend on their farms, and therefore on all the creatures that live on them. They also depend on a lot of things, on the environment in which the farm operates. Therefore, there is a lot to take care of.
"Being a reliable farmer is a matter of endless care. There are various modes and degrees of care – care for animals, plants, crops, buildings, tools, drainage, and so on. Care is always associated with caring for a variety of different factors – the health of a cow, the weather the next day (if the harvester is coming in), the price of pig feed, the risks involved in a new critical investment. People are also always concerned about our academic performance and looking forward to a future where we don't have to farm. Care and concern are always realized in the context of self-preservation, the preservation of this network, the preservation of this way of life. ”
Reverse care:
Eating and feeding are intertwined
What we see here is a keen awareness that sustaining one's life, sustaining one's way of life, depends on labor, depends on care. This care may be love, but the love in it is by no means emotional. When farm animals no longer contribute to the collective, they are killed. People's favorite dog, euthanized and buried due to illness. After the horses were replaced by tractors, they were sent to the slaughterhouse. Chickens that no longer lay eggs for the family will be eaten.
Habers said the chickens were fed and watered. Their beaks are cut off so that they cannot peck at each other. However: "Once they no longer lay eggs, this limited care will come to an abrupt end." They're slaughtered and we'll enjoy a whole weekend of chicken soup and drumsticks to see who gets the hearts – it's a delicacy. ”
In this way, on the farm, as in the garden, feeding is not simply generous. Care for chickens because they lay eggs, but also to consider the future to eat their drumsticks. But if eating is merely destructive, agriculture will end quickly. Whether you can eat eggs and drumsticks next year and the year after depends on whether there is a lasting care for the chicken. Agricultural ethics does not lie between giving and taking. Instead, the key question is how care is delivered.
"On hot summer days, we removed a few boards behind the coop to allow the chickens to have more fresh air. That's why stoats can sneak in. She attacks the flock like a purebred vampire, biting their throats and drinking their blood. We couldn't catch, kill or poison her. As long as there are chickens here, none of this is possible. The only solution is to put the board back in place and keep her completely out of the system – even if the chicken will be horribly hot, it's at least better (i.e. not so bad) than being eaten by a stoat. Care is also a long-term consideration of the pros and cons of a situation. ”
Habers doesn't regret sipping chicken soup or enjoying chicken hearts after winning a fight with his siblings. But because a stoat spotted a plank loosened for fresh air, the shed could only get very hot – something he recounted with retrospective apprehension. If he had chickens now, he would come up with a better way to let cool air into their dwellings. However, he did not give a retrospective judgment. Instead, he adhered to the moral style implicit in the care of the food on which people depended. It is a "long-term consideration of the pros and cons of a situation."
A still from the documentary Clarkson's Farm (season 1).
Levinas asks his fellow humans to abandon cannibalism and instead engage in feeding relationships. Once separated from the mother, a moral human subject should feed the other, not eat him; Give to Him, not take from Him. It is possible to expand this humanistic appeal and imagine which other creatures might be included in the taboo of cannibalism. Here, I would like to raise another question. What can we learn about associations by analyzing my relationship with the organisms from which the meat I eat (eggs, milk, leaves, fruits, seeds, roots) comes from? Because physical separation from the mother is not the same as autonomy. When babies are weaned, they may stop drinking breast milk, but that doesn't mean they become independent. Instead, they shift their dependence on their mothers to cow's milk, soy milk, oat milk, and/or other foods.
This raises the question: As a diner, how best to take care of what is our food, in whole or in part? These questions are very important in this world, because in many places and situations, "reverse care" leaves a lot to think about and pursue. This lack of care is unkind and immoral. And since I'm dependent on what I eat, this lack is also dangerous.
Here are the revelations related to association. As an individual human being, I absorbed the bits and pieces of the creatures I ate, while the farming collective choreographed care in two directions. There is an intertwined relationship between eating and feeding. This suggests a model of association in which taking is not necessarily a bad thing, and giving is not necessarily a good thing. What makes a particular feeding/eating relationship good or bad cannot be narrated with rough brushstrokes. It exists in the specificity of the specific situation, time and time again.
A still from the documentary Clarkson's Farm (season 1).
"A partner who eats together is a companion."
Throughout the 20th century, social and cultural anthropologists have studied kinship systems in different human groups. For a long time, they adopted biological backgrounds to understand family relationships. This is reflected in the terminology they use in their work. In English, the word father is given to a person who combines the biological status of the ancestors with the social status of the authority of the parents. If anthropologists encounter a society where children are under the parental authority of their maternal uncle, they do not refer to the person as "father" (prioritizing social relations), but as "mother's brother" (indicating kinship).
At some point, however, anthropologists begin to doubt their own obedience to biology and historicize biological knowledge. They emphasize that the theory of evolution introduces images of ancestral relationships between species from the genealogy of the English gentry class. It was from their work that I learned that the "inheritance" of traits and genes is based on the "inheritance" of money and goods. When anthropologists ask open-ended questions in the field, they find that the "kinship system" is not necessarily consistent with kinship. Even people living in the heart of Britain don't necessarily associate 'kinship' with common traits or common genes: a shared life means more. Their kinship is associated with growing up together, working on the same land, borrowing money from each other, or eating together with each other. In keeping with this view, anthropologists took the term kinship away from genealogy and began to use it to describe those relationships that were most important to people at field points.
Read more: Streisand's Relations: An Anthropological Account, published by Duke University Press.
Kinship between humans and non-human organisms has also been separated from evolutionary proximity in favor of proximity in everyday practice. It was in this way that Haraway proposed to extend the previous humanistic concept of coexistence to other species. "Respect, response, mutual looking, attention, courtesy, respect: all these are associated with polite greetings, with the composition of the city-state, at the time and place when species meet."
Haraway argues that we should recognize the many ways in which animals are involved in human life. She (among many other small animals) calls the oncomouse her relative. The tumor rat lives in a laboratory and its genes have been modified to test experimental cancer treatment options developed for humans. So those who might one day develop cancer — who wouldn't — have been linked to tumor rats. She is our sister, even if we don't know her. Another example of being together is Haraway himself living, working, and playing with two lively dogs. In this context, she refers to dogs as "companion species." With this term, Haravi deliberately based the relationship between man and dog on shared food: "The word companion comes from the Latin cumpanis, meaning 'with bread'. A partner who eats together is a companion. ”
Stills from the movie "The Menu".
When Haraway uses rhetoric such as "respect" and describes shared meals, she plays on Levinas's dreamy humanistic imagination of relationships. She creatively extends these to other species. However, she went one step further. In her book, other creatures aren't just "dinner table buddies," they may also be at the dinner table. They may be eaten by humans as food. Haraway warns that the feeding relationship is brutal. "There is no way for us to eat without killing, no way to eat without facing other mortal beings for whom we are responsible, no way to be innocent and transcendent, or to achieve an ultimate peace." But even though eating always involves killing, there are still good and bad ways to eat. "Just because eating and killing can't be cleanly separated, doesn't mean any way to eat and kill is okay, it's not just a matter of taste and culture." The way humans and non-humans survive and die in multiple species is very important in dietary practices. "That's true.
But here's a catch. Is kinship still the most appropriate term for the co-existence relationship mentioned above? Because when I eat, I do not continue to coexist with the people I eat; I included them. Or at the agricultural, collective level, my eating may allow me to coexist with the species I eat, but even then, the samples that are eaten disappear on the spot. Well, in addition to relatives, we may need other words to describe our relationship with food. After all, they are not our companions, but the bread itself. Eating behaviors turn them into food.
Read more: When Species Meet by Haraway, published by the University of Minnesota Press.
In the context of eating, there is also a problem with treating my relationship with other species as kinship and presence. That is, in the process of eating, I am not only connected with the creatures whose flesh, seeds, roots, etc. I ingest, I am also connected with the creatures that do not constitute my food, but I have snatched it away.
"I eat violently and
Love for food can happen at the same time. ”
When Levinas calls on his readers to confront others and recognize their common humanity, he clearly believes that giving is good and taking is immoral. This makes sense in many cases. However, it is different when it comes to my relationship with the creatures I consume. Here, giving and taking are intertwined, and eating and feeding coexist. Therefore, either of the two is not in itself good or bad. Instead, the quality of the eating/feeding relationship depends on the specific circumstances in which it is composed. When it comes to further evaluation, the specific situation is also crucial. Because, no matter how unequal our relationship is, if I eat what suits me, the violence I eat and the love of food can happen at the same time.
Stills from the movie "Little Forest, Summer and Autumn".
This means that dreams of living purely, without sin, are not helpful. They do not lead to utopia, but hide the negative and dark sides; That is, they deny devouring and depletion. Then, in addition to guiltyly fasting and unscrupulous eating, the conundrum we encounter is to think again and again in the individual or in a group about what specific conditions it is okay or not to eat, and how to properly express gratitude after eating. When it comes to people who can't eat what I eat, gratitude may not be enough. Because if it tempts us to destroy other life forms in times of hunger, it will be counterproductive at the same time. After thousands of cycles and spirals, eliminating competitors means eliminating creatures that could have become food for you and me.
The following are theoretical implications. If we leave aside the genealogy and eat as the model, then generative is not about raising offspring, but about cultivating crops. If we focus not on our companions sitting at the table, but on the food on the table, we will find that our love for them contains violence, and our devouring may be intertwined with gratitude. How the individual and the collective relate in eating is a complicated matter, because although my eating destroys the apple that was eaten, it contributes to the survival of its kind.
Therefore, in eating, taking is not necessarily destructive. But caring for creatures also has a service side to ourselves—they are edible, and giving loses its luster of generosity. In addition, the relationship of eating also extends to those who cannot eat what I eat. But these people are not just my competitors, because we are part of each other's possible conditions, and competing with them and winning ultimately prevents me from killing myself. Therefore, the association model stimulated by eating does not clearly distinguish between good and bad. Rather, it is marked by ambiguity and contradiction, multiple values and incongruity. Reassuring differences give way to specific specificities. Or, as Haraway said, "The devil is in the details, and the gods are in the details."
One of the sidebars: Thinking and eating
In Pleasures That Differentiate: Transformational Bodies among the Tupinambá of Olivena, De Matos Viegas recounts how the Tupinamba people she met during her fieldwork associated their own Tupinamba identity with what they ate, rather than with their perceptions. In order to find out if the other person was a Tupinamba, they did not talk to him about tradition, epistemology, ontology or other abstract things, but offered him giroba, a special tapioca beer. Its taste is bitter, and outsiders who have tasted it usually spit it out. What makes a person a Tupinamba is his ability to drink girogpa and, more importantly, like it.
How to deal with this particular ambiguity? Perhaps this is where language reaches its limits. Because when tasting tapioca beer becomes the most important factor, the association is neither a conversation nor an exchange of stories. There is no ambiguity that can be cultivated, there is no writing, only tasting or spitting out tapioca beer. In the case of the Tupinamba, it doesn't matter if they speak their language or the language of the whites: it is not transformative, it does not destroy the uniqueness of our Tupinamba. Only by forgetting the giruba and eating the white man's food will it be possible to turn one of us American Indians into one of their white men. This idea is a painful response to the idea of the colonizers of the past that "man is what he eats".