“Metabolic Cages for New World Animals, Small and Large”

Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ph.D., is a sociologist and Associate Professor and Chair of the Science in Society Program at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Blood Sugar: Racial Pharmacology and Food Justice in Black America. Dr. Hatch also serves as the faculty coordinator for the Sustainability & Environmental Justice Pedagogical Initiative and is involved with the Center for Prison Education, Creative Campus Initiative, and the Embodying Antiracism Initiative.

Talk Description: Metabolism cages are key experimental infrastructures in human and animal studies used to capture, control, and isolate the metabolic processes unfolding within a subject’s body. By placing new world animals (rodents, primates) in cages, precisely controlling their food and water intake, and monitoring and analyzing their biowaste, scientists developed a powerful set of knowledges about how bodies and environments interact, specifically food environments. Scientists had to secure bodies inside metabolism cages in order to open the black box of metabolism. Drawing on critical race and feminist STS and animal studies, this talk opens the black box of the metabolism cage to explore the history of metabolism cages as carceral technologies that order bodies, nutrients, and knowledges as part of a broader scheme to establish metabolic dominance over multispecies life.

Food Literacy for All is a community-academic partnership course based at the University of Michigan. Structured as an evening lecture series, Food Literacy for All features different guest speakers each week to address challenges and opportunities of diverse food systems. Food Literacy for All is free and open to the public.

The winter 2022 course begins on Tuesday evening, January 11, 2022. If you have questions, please contact [email protected] or find more information here: https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/sustainablefoodsystems/foodliteracyforall

Speaker schedule:

Apr 12 Fast Food for Thought
10 interdisciplinary UM faculty members will give a series of fast-paced talks (5 min each) related to food and/or agriculture

Apr 19 Final Class

Food Literacy for All is hosted by the UM Sustainable Food Systems Initiative. The 2022 course is supported by the CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund, the Residential College, the School of Public Health’s Department of Nutritional Sciences, the Taubman Institute, the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, the Department of American Culture, and the Department of Anthropology.