Intervention Symposium—“Metabolic Injustice”

Introduction

Sophie Chao (University of Sydney), Jessica Hardin (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Emily Yates-Doerr (Oregon State University)

What would it mean to take metabolism seriously as a question of justice? Not metabolism as a narrow biomedical metric, nor as a technocratic idiom of calories, nutrients, efficiency, or optimization, but rather metabolism as a spatial, political, historical, social, and more-than-human relation (Choudhury 2022; MacVeagh 2025)—one through which life in all its diverse guises is fed and exhausted, nourished and depleted, sustained and sacrificed. To speak of the metabolic through the conjoined lens of justice and injustice, as the essays in this collection compel us to do, is to ask how bodies and environments are made to work for one another, how harm travels across sites, subjects, species, and scales, how some lives are protected while others are rendered absorbable, disposable, ungrievable, or edible.

It is to ask, too, how struggles over nourishment are never only about food, but about land, labor, toxicity, care, dispossession, expertise, and the unequal terms on which life itself is made to endure. These unequal terms are profoundly gendered. Women and other people marginalized by cisheteropatriarchal orders are disproportionately tasked with the labours of social reproduction—from feeding families and caring for the sick, to absorbing ecological and economic shocks, and having to improvise strategies of survival amid infrastructures of decay and abandonment (Valdez and Deomampo 2019). Metabolic injustice thus sustains, and is sustained by, racialized and settler-colonial patriarchy: it works through sexism, through the devaluation of reproductive labour, and through forms of stratified reproduction in which some people’s capacities to nourish, bear, and sustain life are protected while others’ are exhausted, surveilled, or sacrificed.

In the field of geography, metabolism has offered a way of tracing how bodies, environments, infrastructures, and labor are folded into uneven circuits of value and disposability (see Davies 2025; Rey-Araújo 2024; Slater and Flaherty 2023). While these accounts have significantly expanded Marx’s concept of metabolic rift, they continue to center the organization of socioecological reproduction under capitalism. Our framing of metabolic injustice extends this conversation by foregrounding metabolism as a structural relation of production and ecological rupture, but also and importantly, as an embodied, affective, and more-than-human process through which toxicity, porosity, and transformation are lived, negotiated, and potentially reworked. The essays in this collection render visible how metabolism is not just an analytic for understanding socio-ecological transformation. It is also an ethical and political terrain on which struggles over extraction, survival, and repair have and are being fought. From soils to guts, from clinics to data centres, from dairy farms to waste incinerators, metabolism emerges as a contested field of relations. It is precisely in, through, and at times against metabolic processes that power materializes, that violence sediments, and that alternative futures tentatively emerge.

The urgency of such a framing is difficult to overstate. We are living amid converging crises of food insecurity, ecological breakdown, biodiversity loss, chronic pollution, algorithmic expansion, and intensifying geopolitical instability. At the same time, dominant responses to these crises increasingly arrive in the language of “solutionism”—climate-smart agriculture, fortified foods, digital farming platforms, risk metrics, precision nutrition, circular economies, and AI-enabled efficiencies. Such interventions so often promise repair while deepening dependency. They claim to nourish while simplifying life. They measure damage while obscuring the infrastructures that produce it. They distribute care upward and burden downward. In other words, the solutions offered to the converging metabolic crises of our moment reproduce the very colonial-capitalist logics they claim to transcend (Carver 2022). Metabolic injustice, in this sense, conjures not only the unequal distribution of hunger, toxicity, and disease, but the way that calls for transformation so often prevent transformation from taking place. Indeed, actions that claim to be offering solutions—change for the better—often ultimately serve to hold the system in place (Guthman 2024). The injustice here is that metabolism (understood as change across systems) is promised without actually taking place— over, and over again. Metabolic injustice, as such, names the material/discursive/ideological mechanisms through which systems of accumulation and exploitation are fashioned and fuelled.

To foreground metabolism is to insist on connection and to refuse the partitioning of body from environment, nutrition from political economy, science from power, or health from history (Landecker 2013; Solomon 2016). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in China, Kenya, the United States, Bhutan, Guatemala, Samoa, Peru, and the Netherlands, the essays in this collection move across archives, Indigenous territories, postcolonial states, agrarian frontiers, urban foodscapes, extractive landscapes, industrial farms, microbial worlds, and digital infrastructures. They are united less by a single theoretical school than by a shared refusal of reductionism (Yates-Doerr 2026)—the refusal to treat nourishment as a technical matter of supply, or disease as an individualized failure, or toxicity as an unfortunate side effect, or science as an innocent instrument of improvement. Instead, the essays approach metabolism as distributed across bodies and worlds, across humans and nonhumans, archive and ethnography, and across scales that are at once intimate and planetary (Chao 2023; Gálvez et al. 2020; Hinchliffe et al. 2025).

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This collection is organized around three interrelated themes—1) racial capitalism, gender, and metabolic hierarchies; 2) science, technology, and the governance of socio-ecological metabolism; and 3) more-than-human metabolisms and extractive food systems. These themes are not intended to be neat or self-contained but rather to serve as productive entry points into the blurriness of spatial, epistemic, and ontological boundaries. For instance, many of the essays contained herein show that bodily vulnerability cannot be disentangled from epistemic violence; that technocratic governance depends on racialized and gendered hierarchies; and that any adequate account of nourishment must exceed the human without losing sight of the unequal worlds in which more-than-human life and matter are made to matter.

The first theme considers how race, class, gender, and colonial power shape uneven metabolic geographies. Here, metabolic injustice appears as a lived and embodied sorting of populations—some protected, optimized, and fed; others made to absorb hunger, precarity, toxicity, and blame. Hanna Garth’s essay, for instance, shows how food justice initiatives in South Central Los Angeles can reproduce racialized moralities of eating by isolating “healthy choice” from the structural violence of poverty, environmental racism, and abandonment. Fabiana Li and Rossio Motta-Ochoa’s essay on anemia in Peru, meanwhile, demonstrates how extraction extends into blood, maternal responsibility, and developmentalist fantasies of productivity and futurity. Under metabolic extractivism, Andean women and children become targets of surveillance, supplementation, and correction, while structural dispossession and ecological degradation are obscured. Megan Carney’s essay on data centers in the US Southwest reveals the metabolic appetites of contemporary techno-capitalism’s immense demands on water, land, and energy in desert landscapes already marked by drought and settler colonial dispossession. Jessica Hardin’s essay on Nauru highlights how metabolic hierarchy can also be produced through narrative and scientific spectacle, as colonial histories of extraction and ruination are severed from contemporary accounts of bodily crisis. Amanda Logan’s essay about food insecurity in Ghana confronts the theme of colonial histories directly, examining how food histories defy linear chronology. She shows how attending to the complexity of lived experiences of timescales effectively decenters the linear, evolutionary divides of modern and non-modern that so often contribute to metabolically “othering.”

The second theme running through this collection pertains to science, technology, and the governance of socio-ecological metabolism. If the first set of essays foregrounds who is rendered metabolically vulnerable, this theme asks how metabolic relations are rendered legible, measurable, governable, and optimizable. Matthew Canfield’s essay on digital agriculture in Kenya, for instance, shows how soil mapping, subsidy platforms, and AI advisory tools remake soil as an object of intervention, calculation, and commercial value, while sidelining microbial relations, local knowledges, and ecological plurality. Shivani Kaul’s essay on micronutrient powders and kabchi in Bhutan, meanwhile, extends this critique into the intestinal and microbial domains, contrasting standardized biochemical fixes with a relational metabolic world grounded in more-than-human diversity and reciprocity. Sarah Elton’s essay on azo dyes and gut microbes similarly insists on the microbiome as a site of metabolic politics, linking biochemical harm to industrial food systems, corporate lobbying, and unequal exposure. Finally, Amy Zhang’s essay on waste in post-industrial Chinese cities adds an urban and infrastructural inflection, showing how waste animates unstable and politically charged circulations that exceed technocratic fantasies of seamless management or circular closure.

The third thematic cluster brings metabolic injustice into conversation with more-than-human and multispecies geographies. Essays engaging with this theme underscore that metabolism is never solely human, and that justice cannot be meaningfully theorized without attending to the plants, animals, microbes, soils, waters, and ecologies through which life is made possible. At the same time, these interventions do not celebrate relationality in the abstract. Instead, they remain attentive to asymmetry, extraction, and violences through which multispecies worlds are organized. Else Vogel’s essay on Dutch dairy farming, for instance, thinks with cows, veterinarians, microbes, and processed feed to ask what counts as healthy food for the animals making milk for humans possible and nutritional. The answers she offers are entangled with breeding regimes, environmental regulation, global supply chains, and the displacement of ecological harm to distant “shadow places” (Plumwood 2008). Vogel’s focus on digestive limits shows how some bodies are pushed to metabolize more, and how ecological protection in one place may intensify extraction elsewhere. Emily Yates-Doerr examines how toxicities in oceanic tuna “biomagnify” across trophic levels, space, and time, extending into human relations of trust and structures of governance. From this, she argues that rethinking scale – turning its familiar logic inside out – opens new possibilities for political action. Alyshia Gálvez examines the movement of a global weed to unfurl the eurocentric categories of native/settler, good/bad, helpful/harmful. Her descriptions of how people come to know what is commonly called “knotweed” illustrate how multispecies violence happens through epistemological frames.Kaul, Elton, Zhang, and Canfield all resonate strongly within this more-than-human terrain, as does Li and Motta-Ochoa’s insistence on nourishing relations among land, rain, crops, and kin and Carney’s concern for water in desert landscapes. Across these essays, more-than-human life is not a backdrop but an active participant in processes of metabolic relating.

We offer this collection as a set of empirical, conceptual, and ethical provocations for thinking with metabolism at a time when the infrastructures of life are being re-engineered with extraordinary speed, and at extraordinary scale. The essays within it reveal that metabolic injustice is not accidental to the present conjuncture, but rather and in different ways, constitutive of it. Metabolic injustice is present in the racialized moralization of eating, in the settler infrastructures of AI, in the governmental life of hemoglobin, in the simplifications of nutrition science, in the industrialization of bovine digestion, in the gut ecologies transformed by colourful additives, and in the waste regimes that reorder urban worlds. At the same time, the collection also shows that metabolic politics are never total or totalizing. Against extraction and simplification, people continue to unearth and fashion practices of refusal, reciprocity, repair, and alternative world-making—from the revitalization of agroecological knowledges and the pursuit of alternative healing traditions, to the nourishing of more-than-human relations and the embrace of microbial plurality, to the insistence on spiritual feeding and the embodied enactment of political critique.

For radical geography, then, metabolic (in)justice offers a language for thinking across intimate bodily processes and planetary transformations without sacrificing the textures of granular, lived worlds and of local acts of interpretation (Hardin 2016). It allows us to connect digestion, illness, hunger, and satiety to extraction, dispossession, urbanization, environmental racism, settler colonialism, and more-than-human dependency. But it also asks that we remain attentive to the uneven burdens of relation itself—to who is fed and who is eaten, who is sustained and who is sacrificed, whose suffering is measured and whose is naturalized, whose worlds are treated as collateral to someone else’s flourishing. These burdens are not borne equally across gendered lives. Again and again, metabolic injustice is routed through the feminized labours of care and social reproduction, and through stratified reproductive regimes in which women and other non-cis men are expected to metabolize crisis on behalf of households, states, and markets while remaining subject to sexist, racialized, and settler-colonial forms of blame and control. The essays gathered here sharpen our understanding of these injustices by inviting readers into a conversation that is as urgent as it is unfinished—a conversation about how metabolic relations are governed, contested, and reimagined, and about what more just forms of feeding and being fed, caring and being cared for, and producing and reproducing, might yet (be)come.

References

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The Essays

Introduction by Sophie Chao, Jessica Hardin, and Emily Yates-Doerr

The Misuses of Metabolic Injustice by Hanna Garth

Anemia and Metabolic Extractivism in Peru by Fabiana Li and Rossio Motta-Ochoa

“No One Drop for Data”: Restoring Metabolic Relations amidst Parasitic Settler Colonialism by Megan A. Carney

Metabolic Spectacle by Jessica Hardin

Reclaiming Histories of Nutritional Violence through Metabolic Time by Amanda L. Logan

“Dead soil does not give us nutrition”: The Metabolic Politics of Digital Agriculture by Matthew Canfield

From Metabolic Rift to Microbial Shift: How Do Plantations Get Under the Skin? by Shivani Kaul

Microbes and Metabolic Justice by Sarah Elton

Waste and the Metabolic Shift by Amy Zhang