I first noticed a hole in the shoulder. It was nearly the size of a cherry pit. My skin peeked out, breaking the uniform green that enveloped the rest of my body. Another hole caught my attention, this time just at the edge of the hem. And then another. I counted three, filled the sink with cold water and liquid soap, and gently kneaded the wet fabric as if it were dough. The wool dress I wear each winter had become a host for bodies other than my own.

“The stars we are given,” contends the essayist Rebecca Solnit. “The constellations we make.”11Rebecca Solnit, Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, p. 165. The sky gifts us the stars, and we draw the lines that connect them and populate the spaces between with meanings and stories. Storytelling is about sketching lines and then reading between them. These lines connect the past to the present and weave themselves into the future. As I wrapped my wool dress in a towel, patted it lightly, and rolled it out to dry, I thought about holes and gaps and stories.

“There’s another one,” the seamstress later told me. “Here too.” We counted five, and she calculated the price. Far less could buy me a new dress. But it’s good wool, I justified. And a gift from my aunt in Toronto, my hometown. I handed her a deposit in exchange for a date to return for my moth-eaten dress. A dress that usually clothes me, but that had become a snack for others.

The novelist and playwright Deborah Levy observes that fairy-tale protagonists are rarely stung by insects. How did Little Red Riding Hood make it to her grandmother’s without a trail of mosquito bites creeping up her legs? “And what about the ants, spiders, ticks and horseflies with which she and we share our living?”22Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living. London: Penguin Books, 2018, p. 26. I had been living with moths. They had been eating their way through my closet, and the dress was but one casualty. After rescuing some sweaters and accepting the fate of others, I washed the rest of my wool, hoping the clothing’s freshly clean status would help prevent it becoming food. Some sweaters I trusted my washing machine to care for. It gives me a choice between a delicate “hand-wash” cycle and one designated for wools and silks. It was my responsibility to choose, to navigate the relationship between temperature and the spin cycle’s force.

But some sweaters I did not trust my machine with, so I washed them by hand. As I soaked and rinsed, I thought about what we keep, how we calculate what is worth saving, and what we throw away only to buy something else.

But I also thought about eating. As a food cultural historian, my academic superpower is always finding my way back to food. To see landscapes through the lens of how human appetites transform plants and animals. To think about relationships through the choreography of plates and forks and culinary labor. 

English and gender studies scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls for a shift from food studies to what she calls “critical eating studies.”33Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York: New York University Press, 2012, p. 2. A shift from “the what of food to the how of eating.”44Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, p. 11. She defines this as

the “where” of where we eat and where food comes from; the “when” of historically specific economic conditions and political pressures; the “how” of how food is made; and the “who” of who makes and gets to eat it. Finally, and most important, it is the many “whys” of eating—the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest—that most determine its meaning.55Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, p. 4.

Studying eating moves beyond food as commodity. To study eating is to take account of how eating dissolves boundaries between one’s self and others, between subjects and objects.  

Like food, fabric connects places near and far. And fabric has an intimate connection to bodies, to comfort and discomfort, and to rashes. What are the boundaries, the relationships, between moths and my dress?

* * * * *

“I’m not a moth looking for a flame.” This line popped up in the Q&A session of a lecture I attended. The expression assumes irresistible attraction. It turns a moth’s attraction to bright lights—from harmless flashlights to dangerous candles—into a metaphor for human behavior. An attraction that harbors destruction. One that William Shakespeare rhymed about in his 1596 play The Merchant of Venice.

But as the geographer Matthew Gandy explains, “Moths are not attracted to light in the sense that they might actively seek nectar or sugar, but are effectively compelled towards light by their neural networks.”66Matthew Gandy, Moth. London: Reaktion Books, 2017, p. 93. Yet the expression sticks.

My sweaters had become banquets for moths, and their holes were proof, at least to me, that they had outstayed their welcome. And although some moths “destroy” fabrics, others, like the silk moth—or more correctly, its larva—create them.

We are connected to each other’s appetites. “The appeal of writing, as I understood it, was an invitation to climb in between the apparent reality of things,” writes Levy, “to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.”77Levy, The Cost of Living, pp. 51–52. We are connected to each other’s hunger. The artist Jenny Holzer also makes this point. In 1977, she began creating her Truisms works. A series of one-liners, she has exhibited these text works on billboards and in storefronts, across public squares and in museums and galleries. All Things Are Delicately Interconnected (1977–79), one reminds us. 

I am writing about moths, mess, and eating. About how, on the one hand, moths have made a mess of my dress, a mess I try to mediate with cold water, soap, and a seamstress’s bill. About how, on the other, moths have also made a meal, a home. But between the lines I am also writing about stories and scale, about change and catastrophe, about how cultures tell stories and how stories tell cultures. Once upon a moth. Once upon a sweater. Once upon a climate. The time that we were once upon. Eating delicately interconnects all things. Eating ties us to the past, as we transform plants and animals into food, into energy, into culture. And our eating practices draw new lines into the future.