In this Food Literacy for All session Anthony Ryan Hatch discussed “Metabolic Cages for New World Animals, Small and Large”.
Anthony Ryan Hatch, Ph.D, discusses metabolism cages and how they 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 opened 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.
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