ABSTRACT
Everyday language is rich with food metaphors – food for thought, an unsavoury character, half-baked plans, a bitter taste in our mouth. Such examples indicate that food as a signifier is involved in the transmission of meanings far beyond its immediate function of ensuring human survival. This chapter explores how today’s metaphors increasingly compare the human body to a computer, with food as a bug in the system, reflecting a reductionist narrative that views both food preparation and the body to be problematic aspects of life. This development is taken further using the vision of the cyborg – future humans as hybrids of organism and machine – and the possibility that contemporary developments such as smart foods and meal replacement drinks will enable the transcending of bodily limitations altogether. However, such technoutopian metaphors, and the visions they conjure, are in direct tension with a lived experience of food that spans social and cultural domains. This chapter highlights how contemporary food scientists and engineers are manipulating not only matter but also metaphor, thereby endowing themselves with the power to shape future conceptions of food, the body, and the social world.
