All Mixed Up: Food, Politics, and Disability

Food and food politics have played a consistently central role in the debates at the core of the environmental movement(s) that span U.S. history. Recently, food has acted as a foil for a variety of debates seen as critical points in current environmental debates: local vs. global; natural vs. un-natural; sustainable vs. unsustainable. These debates, too, carry us through a maze of concepts, materials, and practices: food miles, food packaging, genetic modification, pesticides, organic and ‘conventional’ farming. For all of the diverse nuances within these debates, however, one variable remains relatively constant: these decisions – these politics – are for healthy, ‘normal’ bodies. With the exception of some focus on the role of children as consumers of food, these debates fail to consider those whose bodies and food practices are other than ordinary.

This paper approaches the intersecting topics of food, health, bodies and the environment from the perspective of the so-called ‘blenderized diet’. Users of a blenderized diet are tube fed (either through a nasogastric tube or a gastric tube that sends food directly into the stomach) because of a temporary or permanent inability to eat by mouth. While tube-fed individuals are typically prescribed a synthetic ‘formula’ meal, users of the blenderized diet blend their own meals using non-synthetic table food. Drawing on historical and autoethnographic cases, we explore the ways in which the rise of the blended diet brings to the table the experiences and participation of medicalized bodies not traditionally found in debates surrounding food and environmental politics.