I don’t like doing dishes. Maybe that’s why I became, first, a good cook and, now, a food cultural historian? At the dinner parties I rehearsed in my youth, I learned that those who cook need not clean. But when dinner is without the party, you have to do both. 

To be honest, I don’t really like cleaning at all. Maybe that’s because my first teenage job was as a janitor at a tennis tournament? Here, cleaning was a transaction: an exchange wherein I donned rubber gloves to unclog toilets and pick up popsicle sticks in order to receive an hourly wage. 

Or is this just a story I tell myself? 

Growing up, my mom cleaned our home, for free, and she cleaned other people’s homes, for a fee. Her cleaning paid for me to play softball and compete in hockey tournaments. Cleaning as labor, but also cleaning as care. 

In describing cleaning as a form of care, I don’t want it to come off as precious. Nor do I want to reenforce gendered—not to mention racialized—labor. Instead, I want to promote cleaning as a practice of care. As a pathway: a means to navigate ideas and concepts, a means to materially navigate this mess we’re in. A mess that also goes by the name of the Anthropocene. And in the Anthropocene, some things are easier to clean up than others. 

Cooking and cleaning as practices of care recall the etymological link between domesticity and ecology. The word “ecology” comes from the Greek word for “house,” for “living relations.” How do the acts of making dinner and doing the dishes reach beyond the walls of an individual house and relate to planetary domesticity? How does tidying up a home relate to restoring an ecosystem? 

This pathway stays close to the body to highlight different practices of care. It meditates on material legacies and the binary between what is perceived as temporary versus that seen as permanent. Thinking through stories, thinking with “throughlines,” it surveys some of the Anthropocene’s material and social legacies. Taking inventory of how stories connect the past and the future, the possible and the unimaginable, it considers care as a form of maintenance. Care for people and plants and animals. Care for stories and narratives. Because we all depend on stories. 

“The truth about stories,” points out fiction writer and scholar Thomas King, “is that’s all we are.” Stories control our lives. Stories are, therefore, as dangerous as they are wonderous. King explains: “For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told it is loose in the world. So, you have to be careful about the stories you tell, and you have to watch out for the stories you’re told.”6.1.1

What are the politics of telling stories, of imagining, of connecting the past to the present, of forecasting? What does speculation about the future reveal about the throughlines with which we weave together the “what has been” and the “what will be”? Do fiction writers have, as novelist Briohny Doyle suggests, “an ethical responsibility to ‘get it right’”? And what does it mean for a novel or poem to “get it right”?6.1.2

I’m not always sure what “right” means, but Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact” is as close to right as I know.6.1.3 Plants feed us. They turn sunlight into food. Plants take care of us. 

But how do we care for plants? When the world responded to COVID-19 by imposing lockdowns, houseplant sales soared. Newspapers and magazines celebrated how plants improve mental health, but, as artist and researcher Darya Tsymbalyuk reveals, very few considered the lockdown’s effects on the houseplants themselves. What role do multispecies relations play in a moment of crisis?6.1.4

Every crisis has a before and an after. Narrative connects the two. If every time has a before and an after, then “when are we”? What signals the conclusion of the “before” and the beginning of the “after”?6.1.5 What is the before and after of the Anthropocene? How might different answers to this question shape different futures? 

Recipes, too, promise a before and an after.6.1.6 A list of ingredients portrays the before. The name of a dish—and often a glamour shot of what the recipe writer or food stylist promises it will look like if you obediently follow the instructions—represents the after. 

But a recipe, as the artist Suzanne Treister proves, can also work backward. Assembly requires disassembly. A recipe disassembles plants from where they grow and reassembles them in bowls and on plates. In the video series Rosalind Brodsky’s Time Travelling Cookery TV Show (1998), the host does something similar. Her “Pierogi with Chocolate and Cherry Filling” recipe calls for two ingredients: one Black Forest cake and a “modicum of cultural and historical transgression or call it what you will.”6.1.7

Recipes that turn environments into sites of resource extraction have produced the Anthropocene. How might a “modicum of cultural and historical transgression” regain an equilibrium within which humans live with the planet as opposed to off of it? What are the acts of care than ensure habitability for future generations of humans and nonhumans? 

Restoration tries to repair the after by returning to the before.6.1.8 And restoration is entangled with care—with cleaning, too. Christina Gruber, an artist and freshwater ecologist, records efforts to reestablish a strong sturgeon population in the Danube river. To return what once was there. A confident black Sharpie rehearses exercises and equations. The promise of permanent ink. Fertilized sturgeon eggs dance in a jar at a hatchery. The recipe for replenishing sturgeon requires daily cleaning: “Every day, until the young sturgeons are released, the tanks have to be cleaned by wiping all inundated surfaces. This act of care demands time, but it also gives the opportunity to connect and let thoughts drift.” Cleaning as nurture. Cleaning as restoration. Cleaning as a means of remaking the future. 

Once restored, the question is: Where to fish? How do you know? What knowledge is sacrificed for other knowledge? What areas are sacrificed for other areas?6.1.9

That a healthy sturgeon population must be reintroduced to the Danube doubles as an archive of the practices that reduced its stock. Of pollution and contamination, of industrialization and overfishing. Artist Nico Angiuli has also compiled an archive, one of how the body bends and reaches to pick olives and grapes, to harvest rice and tobacco. The knowledge the body stores and stories.6.1.10 

Whether it’s harvested by hand or by a machine, “we live in a world shaped by food.”6.1.11 Food connects kitchens in one region to fields and waters in another. However: “Our quest for cheap food has turned us against nature, with disastrous consequences for the natural ecosystems without which we couldn’t exist.” 

Food consumes. Eating endangers. In Los Angeles, how does the human body connect to the bodies of mussels, to Muscle Beach, to the city’s body?6.1.12  

Can our quest for food be reimagined to turn us toward nature? What happens if the focus shifts from food to eating? And can eating be a form of care? The slow food movement answers yes: “You’ve got to eat it to save it.” But not too much of it.6.1.13 Every edible encounter has an ecology.

Maybe these texts and seminars, these artworks and poems, can preview the Anthropocene’s many aftertastes, the flavors that linger, the stories that last, and what carries on into the future.