ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I draw upon personal experience to explore how fermentation might act as a form of “trans care” by fostering a relational approach to food that challenges reductive and asocial understandings of nutrition and eating. I begin by offering a personal history of my complicated relationship to food and how it is bound up with experiences of fatness and gendered embodiment. I use this account as an entry point to discuss the agency of the gut itself, as well as the foods it ingests. While I suggest that attending to food’s animacy might offer new, caring modes of engagement with our bodies, I juxtapose such an approach with the predominance of the “nutritionism paradigm” in science, which forecloses relationality in its emphasis on the properties of singular nutrients. Using ethnographic examples, I explore particularly how nutritionism is mobilized in the policing of fatness and rendered unworkable amidst the vicissitudes of everyday life. In light of this critique, I turn to fermentation as an alternative set of practices for engaging with food and eating that better adheres to a “logic of care.” I conclude by situating fermentation in dialogue with “trans care,” considering its potentials and limitations as a strategy to make trans life more liveable.
