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cultural geographies 18(2) 209–229

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Corresponding author: Nicholas Bauch, Introduction to the Humanities Program, Stanford University, 590 Escondido Mall, Stanford, CA 94305, USA Email: [email protected]

The extensible digestive system: biotechnology at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, 1890–1900

Nicholas Bauch Stanford University, USA

Abstract In the closing decade of the 19th century the Battle Creek Sanitarium, located in southern Michigan, operated as a health resort for invalids. Best known as the place where breakfast cereal was first packaged and mass- marketed, its most famous product – Corn Flakes – was the result of ceaseless experimentation to find a concoction that would serve the pharmacological purpose of healing patients. Through the course of healing at the sanitarium, digestion was paramount. This article demonstrates how digestion and the body were linked with technological implements housed in the sanitarium, creating a spatialized network of bodies at the sanitarium, and highlighting the material impacts of an early form of biotechnology. I ask not what does digestion look like – as a strictly anatomical process – but what does the geography of digestion look like – as a mapping of the digestive organs with the technologies that make it possible? This rendering demonstrates that the boundary between body and environment is not so strict, as witnessed in this earlier formation of biotechnologies. This point is made in a narrative account of the significance of eating and digestion at the sanitarium in the 1890s.

Keywords body, digestion, food consumption, health, hybrid body, machine, relational space

Introduction

The Battle Creek Sanitarium was a place in southern Michigan – in the town of Battle Creek – that between 1876–1927 operated as a health resort and surgical hospital (see Figure 1). Its director John Kellogg, brother of the cereal magnate William Kellogg, fashioned a type of place where guests would come and ‘learn to stay well’ at what he nicknamed the university of health.1 As a mixture of spa, hotel, restaurant, university, and hospital, the sanitarium was frequented mostly by the wealthy, who traveled from around the northern United States and beyond to visit ‘the san,’ though throughout its existence an almshouse for the poor was also maintained on the campus. Modes of healing at the sanitarium included hydrotherapy, calisthenics, surgery, and work with mechanized implements such as massagers and light baths. But above all health at the sanitarium revolved around strict attention to diet and the process of digestion. This article demonstrates how

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the ‘proper’ functioning of patients’ digestive systems depended on technological implements housed in the sanitarium. By focusing on two machines – vents and rollers – the article offers a spatial view of digestion, highlighting the material impacts of an early form of biotechnology by tracing how the vents and the rollers operated as extensions of the digestive process. Since Kellogg’s method of digestion would not have been possible without these machines, the article challenges us to consider where digestion was actually happening. A network of machines, bodies, and food emerges, demonstrating how the digestive system is a spatialized hybrid object.

The empirics of this article work to clarify two geographical puzzles. First, it is shown how exactly nature-society hybrids can function, and in this case, have functioned in late-19th-century southern Michigan. Second, by virtue of this demonstration a type of ‘relational space’ emerges as the best way to visualize the connections between the digestive system and the machines that co- constitute it. Combined, these two points offer a new way to frame the relationship between bodies and environments. Through the narrative of food and health at the Battle Creek Sanitarium – what is essentially the back story of the Kellogg cereal corporation – it is shown that the geographical concept of hybrid objects can be useful for analyzing historical cases in biotechnology, and that when put into an explicitly spatial context, helps answer the question ‘where does the body end and the environment begin?’

Figure 1. The Battle Creek Sanitarium campus, 1895. (Reproduced from ‘About Battle Creek’, Headlight: A periodical devoted to the interests of railroads and railroad centers (1895), courtesy of the Willard Library, Battle Creek, Mich.)

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Latour has pointed out that the ‘social’ is a shorthand for a set of processes that we can never talk about all at once because the word signifies too much.2 Opening the ‘black box’ of society forces us to uncover a range of particular stories. Analogously, there is usually common agreement as to what the digestive system is, yet when we peer inside the black box of the digestive system, we discover an entire mapping of machines that are not normally thought of when we say ‘diges- tive system.’ I offer an interpretation of what was actually going on inside the ‘black box’ of diges- tion in this context.

John Kellogg was known as an accomplished gastroenterological surgeon, said to have per- formed hundreds of abdominal surgeries without a death. The number of those surgeries that we would now consider necessary is certainly questionable, yet for the late 19th century this remains a rare feat.3 Care for the digestive organs was immensely important for Kellogg’s philosophy of heal- ing, and indeed, he defined the human body as ‘a stomach with various organs appended.’4 Since he considered the stomach as the center for the nutritive processes of the body, ‘any derangement of its functions must therefore result in disorder of the entire organism.’ Additionally, he thought that ‘the great majority of diseases are primarily due to derangement of the digestive process.’5 This diges- tive reductionism at the sanitarium exemplifies an aspect of food consumption that has largely been overlooked by scholarship in food studies and geography: digestion. Looking at digestion offers a new connotation to the term consumption, emphasizing the ingestion of, rather than the acquisition of food. Nicolaas Mink, for example, has recently (re) called for work in food studies to begin research ‘in the belly.’6 To accomplish this he suggests a focus on the places of and reasons for food consumption. Here I add to this by examining – in a more literal interpretation of Mink’s observation – how the form of the digestive system is co-constituted with extra corporeal objects, interrogating the body-environment relationship by questioning how we perceive the boundaries of bodies. I ask not what does digestion look like – as a strictly anatomical process – but what does the geography of digestion look like – as a mapping of the digestive organs with the technologies that make ‘healthy’ digestion possible? This spatialized, biotechnological rendering of digestion is one way to conceive and write the elusive boundary between body and environment.

Theoretically this project contributes to literature in ‘nature-society’ geography, a subfield devoted to understanding how the material world is perceived and subsequently engaged with in different times and places. I build from the work of Latour and other ‘object-oriented’ philosophers that see the objects of the world not as discrete entities, but as necessarily constituted by a collec- tion, or network, of other objects and political practices.7 In practice geographers have applied this to the analysis of everything from water to wilderness parks, to animals, and to fire.8 Conceptually geographers have used this to formulate notions of hybridity.9 I contribute to this discussion by adding a corporeal, biological component. I use this type of hybrid analysis to investigate the object of the human digestive system in a particular time and place, in order to lay out how it is more accurately described as a set of machines, or early biotechnologies, rather than a single organ inside of bodies. Therefore machines – in this case grain rollers and building air vents – contributed to making possible the type of digestion that was considered ‘healthy’ at the Kellogg sanitarium in the 1890s. Without these technological implements the digestive system could not have done what it did in that time and place.

Recent work in geography has interrogated the concept of biotechnologies, using critical spatial analyses to show the broader ramifications of development in the life sciences. In a recent ‘Geographies of Biotechnology’ theme issue, researchers were concerned with ‘the question of how we are incorporated into a world alongside biotechnological outcomes even as our own bodies are transformed by, treated with, and consume biotechnological products.’10 Understanding how the very nature of our bodies is changing alongside a variety of technological changes is the critical

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question of the theme issue. To realize this, bodies are conceived ‘not just in terms of the human body, but also in terms of other vital nonhuman bodies … The conceptualization of the body in this work is one that has the capacity to be affected, to be part of a network of associations and/or a network of material connections.’11 Writing about material bodies in a way that includes the far- reaching sources of biotechnologies, like the genetic manipulation of seeds or the organ transplant industry offers a more accurate way, I believe, to understand where exactly we exist. Geographies of biotechnology have not yet, however, systematically applied this lens to the past. Here I am ask- ing how a mapping of digestive systems worked in the past.

The question ‘where is the body?’ is really a question of where we draw the line between our bodies and the environment around us. If we consider that environmental toxins affect cancer rates, or that food quality affects diabetes rates, for example, then it becomes clear that we cannot simply think of bodies as ending at the skin. Instead, if we take these connections seriously, viewing a landscape as that which is us, or will become us, then we need to develop a language to read the body from the landscape, to enable us to decipher landscapes of health and landscapes of poison.

Human geographers ‘have explored novel ways of accounting for the physicality and copres- ence of the non-human – both animate “nature” and inanimate “things” – within conventional human worlds.’12 One of the spatial implications of investigating this copresence of subjects and objects is inquiring about the fluidity, or porosity, of their borders. If we are willing to question how subject-object relations are constituted, then certainly part of this must also be to question – physically – where one ends and the other begins. With regards to the body, there is perhaps no better example than Emily Martin’s work on the history of the immune system, and how it has been portrayed, to understand the space that emerges when red blood cells, T-cells and B cells are put into the context of objects that belong to a body or not.13 Borders, in her narrative, become indefi- nite in the sense that all the cells, whether coded as good or bad, equally ‘belong’ to the body. In another instance Martin uses mucous to question the boundary of the body. She observes that

these slimy substances, of and not of the body, dramatically blur self-non-self lines. With respect to HIV transmission, there is a hint of a shift in science from the current focus on the body as citadel, vulnerable only when its defenses are penetrated through a wound, sore, puncture, or thrust, to the body as blurrily linked to others through its many surface secretions. This shift hints at a change in the previously common perception that the body is an autonomous, bounded entity that ends at the skin.14

The question ‘where does the body end’ is the overarching question this article asks. If blood cells and secretions – things that seem so human – demonstrate the profound indefiniteness of the body’s border, it is not a large leap to wonder how non-human things, including machines, may also con- found conceptions of a bordered body. It is at this point that current work in environmental geog- raphy becomes so helpful. As Braun points out, understanding the ‘constitutive force of things in social and political life … has meant placing non-humans in our stories from the start, as part of the collectivities within which human life is constituted.’15 Placing machines in the story of the digestive system at the Battle Creek Sanitarium from the start allows us to interpret human life more accurately and more spatially.

In 1906 John Kellogg’s brother, William Kellogg, successfully wrested away the corporate arm of the health food company that was associated with the Battle Creek Sanitarium and began the mass marketing and sale of pre-packaged breakfast cereal, revolutionizing the morning meal.16 Flaked cereal did not emerge as a planned marketing gimmick, though. Rather it was the result of ceaseless efforts throughout the 1890s to develop a variety of foods that would serve pharmaco- logical purposes for patients at the sanitarium, cures for ailments as diverse as headaches,

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depression, and epilepsy. It is in these efforts during the years prior to the explosion of Kellogg’s most famous product, Corn Flakes, that I identify two implements of healing – rollers and vents. To understand the significance of these machines, however, we first need to understand Kellogg’s version of the ‘modern stomach.’

The modern stomach, or, proper digestion

As in the 1890s, there is general consensus today that five main organs comprise the digestive system: mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and large intestine. When put together this is an enclosed system, sealed off from contact with any other part of the body, a conceptualization that Kellogg often represented in image (see Figure 2).17 The tube – which averages about 10 meters in length – meanders through the body, and hides the rather disgusting process of mixing food with digestive juices in preparation for absorption into the bloodstream, or excretion of the waste products. The anatomical fact of a self-contained system – with two gates to the outside

Figure 2. The digestive system, separated from the rest of the body save the head. (Reproduced from John H. Kellogg, Constipation: how to fight it (1913), courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.)

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world – meant that for Kellogg the digestive system was, along with the skin, the part of the body that touched the world most – and therefore must be cared for with great attention. One of Kellogg’s colleagues at the University of Michigan medical school who studied absorption even went so far as to categorize digestion as an ‘external’ process as compared to the ‘internal’ processes that take place even further out of sight.18

The successes and failures of health care at the sanitarium ultimately rested on Kellogg’s vision of a ‘modern stomach’ that was 1) sanitary, 2) efficient, and 3) calculated. Each of these three compo- nents of the modern stomach is now investigated and placed in a history of science context.

Sanitary

It was just the preceding decade, in 1882, when the pioneering German bacteriologist Robert Koch published his famous article ‘The Etiology of Tuberculosis,’ identifying in human bodies the bacilli responsible for this prevalent disease.19 A major boon to the burgeoning germ theory of disease, his publication reinforced the vision that bacteria were everywhere, and they were dangerous. Kellogg picked up on this, and through the 1890s practiced an aesthetic of cleanliness vis-a-vis the outside environment, inside buildings, and not least, in the interior of the body. In many ways eating was an inconvenient necessity for Kellogg. To keep the digestive system as clean as possible meant not eating at all – and fasting, an ‘alternative’ cleansing cure still in use today – was in fact something he occasionally endorsed. But for most patients at the sanitarium, keeping the guts clean meant eating bland, grain- and fruit-based diets, foods that were frequently produced in-house. In one of his daily lectures to sanitarium patients, Kellogg showed with the aid of a microscope how on a piece of raw beef there were infinitely more bacteria than on a piece of baked wheat. This was proof to Kellogg that eating meat was dangerous, ‘scientific’ evidence for the already-established religion-based vegetarian regime at the sanitarium.20 In another example, Kellogg considered excessive bacteria in the mouth to be a sure sign of poor health further inside the body. This over generalization of germ theory meant that to introduce the wrong foods into the body was equivalent to introducing poisons, hastening the decay of human life. Creating, possessing, and then selling a knowledge of which foods were the right ones, and which ones were poisons, was one of the bed- rocks of the sanitarium’s business success in the 1890s.

Efficient

Eat slowly, chew thoroughly. ‘The longer the food remains in the mouth, the less time it will spend in the stomach.’21 This is one of Kellogg’s ‘dietetic rules’ for his patients. Moving food quickly through the body was the second way in which he reduced the risk of being poisoned by food con- sumption. Kellogg thought that too little food weakened the functions of the organs, and too much food overwhelmed the body’s tissues with toxic substances. The process by which food became toxic inside the body was called fermentation. If food was not evacuated from the intestines fre- quently, then the process of absorption stopped, and fermentation began, changing potentially healthy food into still, stale, toxic matter. This fear of what was called auto-intoxication under- girded the extreme, regimented defecation schedule for patients at the sanitarium. Constant circula- tion of material in and out of the body – the body’s economy, so to speak – was Kellogg’s way of guaranteeing that food consumption maximized the necessary, beneficial aspects of nutrient absorption, but minimized the time bodies were actually in contact with food, something from the dirty, bacteria ridden, outside world. The notion of auto-intoxication – the idea that food quickly becomes poisonous once inside the body – stemmed from the late 19th century French nutritional scientist Charles Bouchard. For Bouchard, refinement of the human body meant that the body must

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be seen as always on the verge of deterioration, and avoiding that deterioration required that one cared for the digestive system.22

Calculated

Using food cautiously, then, would be a key component of healing. Unlike other 19th century diet proselytizers, Kellogg did not promote a universal cure.23 Instead, patients were diagnosed indi- vidually upon their arrival so that a precise dietary treatment could be assigned. An early 20th- century journalist described the intake procedure at the sanitarium:

Physical examination is carried as far as rational medicine … will allow, and includes microscopical and bacteriological investigations … a chemical examination of the stomach fluid obtained after a test breakfast, which … determin[es] the exact amount and quality of the digestive work done by the stomach … and thereby obtaining data which may form the basis of … a rational prescription.24

Reading the contents of the stomach to formulate the diet plan was accomplished by feeding the patient a concoction of Granose (wheat flakes), salt, and water. Then the contents would be pumped through a tube, and the mush brought into a sanitarium laboratory for chemical analysis (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Battle Creek Sanitarium main laboratory, ca. 1900. (Image courtesy of Loma Linda University, Department of Archives and Special Collections.)

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After filtering, the remaining fluid determined what dietary action was required. The technicians pictured in Figure 3 were most likely measuring the acid content of someone’s stomach. Kellogg was convinced that the hydrochloric acid present in the gastric juices naturally sanitized food. The power of the hydrochloric acid could only go so far, though. Meats, cheeses, and spices, for example, were too dirty for even the hydrochloric acid to clean them.25 Figure 4 is a diet list that was prescribed for patients whose stomachs were dilatated. The foods in this list are representative of the most prevalent ingredients used at the sanitarium throughout the 1890s.

The impulse of modernization at the sanitarium is captured by Kellogg’s treatment of the body as a place over which he laid a quantitative gastronomy. He claimed that the average individual required 2.8 ounces of proteids, 1.2 ounces of fats, and 16 ounces of carbohydrates on a daily basis.26 Since the average individual had access to neither the equipment nor the knowledge required to concoct meals that would fulfill such measurements, Kellogg devised a plethora of diet lists, booklets, and prescriptions that would guide one’s eating habits (see Figure 5).

What happened in the four-year period between these two diet lists (Figures 4 and 5)? The 1896 ‘Diet List No. 7’ is a list of foods without quantification or measurement, while the 1899 list includes the constituent parts of foods along with how much of each should be eaten. This change reflects the introduction of human nutritional science to the United States, an endeavor that had previously been reserved mostly for the care of livestock.27 The practice of quantifying and categorizing the constituent elements of different foods was undertaken first in the United States by Wilbur Atwater, who implemented the agricultural experiment stations for the US Department of Agriculture during the 1880s and 90s. Atwater was the first American to bring the insights of agricultural chemistry to nutritional science, practically inventing the discipline in the USA.

Figure 4. The 1896 ‘Diet List No. 7’ was for cases of dilatation of the stomach. (Reproduced from Kellogg, The Stomach, p. 232.)

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When Atwater was appointed director of the federal office of the experiment stations in 1888, he would use his position to explore what was in the US the new field of human nutritional science. Previous scientific forays into the relations of food consumption and human physiology were undertaken by the Germans Justus von Liebig and Carl Voit. To secure funding for his new research, Atwater framed the application of scientific methodology and technology to human food consumption as necessary to solve the problem of industrial wages.28 Due to rising labor unrest, policy makers and social observers realized that wages in the industrial sector were too low. Rather than suggest a raise in wages, or admit to a broken economic system, Atwater claimed that he could utilize science to formulate the most efficient dietary regime for the American worker.29 His plan would obliterate differences not only in individual body type and eating patterns, but in entire culinary traditions that were varied and widespread in the industrial US at the time. The plan was based on the logic of separating food products into the now well known categories of proteins,

Figure 5. Nutritional categories of proteids, fats, carbohydrates, and calories were established in the United States largely through the work of Wilbur Atwater, and borrowed by Kellogg in this 1899 chart. (Reproduced from John H. Kellogg, Balanced Bills of Fare: Arranged with reference to the normal daily ration; and the needs of special classes of invalids (Battle Creek, Good Health Pub. Co., 1899), courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.)

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fats, carbohydrates, and calories. By 1896 he published an entire volume that listed ‘the chemical composition of American food materials’ so that the working class could be properly instructed by the federal government on what foods would provide their machine-bodies with the exact mini- mum amount of energy to get through the day without ruining the family budget.30 The instrument that achieved this flattening, numerical food consumption was the respiration calorimeter. The calorimeter was

a room-sized chamber in which the subject lived for several days. The chamber was equipped with an air-tight door, a ventilation system, electricity, telephones, and tubes to pass food into the chamber and excretory products out. A complicated arrangement of pumps, motors, fans, and freezers maintained the system.31

Atwater’s research direction in nutritional science was of great interest to John Kellogg. He bor- rowed the principles of the government-funded research and twisted it to his own needs at the sani- tarium, the presentation of data in his 1899 diet list mirroring Atwater’s publication from 1896. It is from Atwater’s work that Kellogg was able to implement such a robust system of quantitative nutritional analysis, and from which Kellogg increased the role of ‘stock,’ or universal cures over the individualized prescriptions in the pre-Atwater era.

Figure 6. Advertisement for Granose wheat flakes, 1896. (Reproduced from Kellogg, The Stomach.)

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Technologies of digestion

In order for Kellogg to shape the guts of his thousands of guests over the decades, a mass production of healing had to be implemented. This required a vast infrastructure that connected the molding of the ‘modern stomach’ to the implements of the sanitarium – connecting inside organs with outside world – creating a geography of digestion. Now I will describe two such implements – the rollers and the vents.

The rollers

By the 1890s experimentation in food production at the sanitarium was at its apogee. Recipe notes circulated constantly between the Kellogg brothers and the managers of the experimental kitchens in the basement.32 Granose was the name for what were essentially wheat flakes, and was among the best selling of the health food products. Far from a static product, Granose was being continu- ally refined in efforts to concoct a palatable and clean food that would heal the deleterious effects of wrongful eating. The experimental kitchen housed the machinery required for conducting the food improvements handed down by the Kellogg brothers. Rollers, pans, ovens, roaster, gas burn- ers, mills, kilns, blanchers, steam kettles, and presses were some of the implements in the kitchen, all required for the production of Granose.

In this advertisement (see Figure 6) the worlds of outside and inside collide. Wheat is made ready for prompt assimilation into the body by ‘the use of special machinery.’ The special

Figure 7. The Rollers used to make flaked wheat, 1894. (Image reproduced from Horace B. Powell, The Original Has This Signature - W.K. Kellogg: The story of a pioneer in industry and philanthropy (Battle Creek, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 1956.)

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machinery to which the advert refers is two eight-inch steel rollers between which dough is dried, flattened, then flaked (see Figure 7). It was 1894 when John Kellogg and his brother discovered the secret to flaking mashed wheat. What up until then had been a messy process of rolling up the cooked mash, then chiseling it off the rollers with a printer’s knife, became much more efficient when they found that a batch of cooked wheat would ‘flake’ more easily if moisture were allowed to penetrate the entire batch prior to rolling it flat. This realization, immediately patented by the business-savvy brothers,33 would benefit and flourish from an agricultural economy that was becoming ever-more equipped to bring wheat by the train-car load to the Battle Creek mills for the mass-production of the locally made health foods.

Here, wheat is fragmented into smaller bits and pre cooked so that the stomach does not have to work as hard, therefore relieving the body from indigestion and its related illnesses. The roll- ers were pre-digesters – an integral part of the digestive process – right there in the basement of the sanitarium’s food company. What we might now term a networked body, Kellogg believed that what was happening at the roller machine would have a direct material impact on the guts of his patients.

If we can assume that there are two market limits to industrial agriculture – the productiveness of the land, and the amount that can be eaten by consumers – then in this case study we are witness- ing both limits simultaneously. The productive limits of the land, and the incessant pushing of those limits by industrial agriculture, have described as ‘appropriationism.’ This refers to the pro- cess of transforming aspects of agricultural production (e.g. fertilizer inputs) into specific sectors of industrial activity, thereby removing particular activities from farms that had previously been relatively closed economic and ecological systems. The rise of guano importers, or agricultural machinery factories, for example, took material circulation off the farm and put it in a global economic circulation. Goodman et al. say that ‘this discontinuous but persistent undermining of discrete elements of the agricultural production process, their transformation into industrial activities, and their re-incorporation into agriculture as inputs we designate as appropriationism.’34 This type of economic activity began in earnest in the mid 19th century, and was in full stride by 1890. I argue that through the digestive systems of patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium the same pro- cess was occurring at the other limit to industrial agriculture: in the body. By isolating a part of digestion and assigning it to the rollers – as pre digestors – Kellogg was ‘appropriating’ and indus- trializing digestion, increasing the limits of the agro-industrial complex in the late 19th century.35

The vents

The decade of the 1890s was a critical period in the transition of prevailing thought about how bodies related to the outside world. For much of the 19th century bodies were viewed by the medi- cal profession as malleable and porous, in constant interaction with the environment. Etiology of disease was not traced to a single pathogen, but instead was found in the landscape itself; the envi- ronment was an actor in shaping how disease was created and cured. It was in the 1890s when germ theory began to take hold as a viable alternative to this vision, and the technology and methods used to propel germ theory (namely microscopic and chemical analysis) were mirrored in the sani- tarium laboratory, where the contents of patients’ stomachs were examined. Environmental histo- rian Linda Nash points out how striking it is that medicine in this period melded an ecological perspective of health with a bacteriological perspective.36 In the bacteriological perspective, the epidermal borders of the body were seen as protectors from microscopic outside pathogens, whereas in the ecological perspective the borders of the body were seen as more interactive with the environment.

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We have seen how health care at the sanitarium was influenced by the science-based bacterio- logical vision of sanitation, or making clean, modern digestive systems. But digestion at the sani- tarium was also still shaped by the role of the local climate and topography. Kellogg was clearly taken with the power of science to ‘cure’ his patients, but at the same time it was the characteristics of the landscape that aided in the healing process. An early 20th century writer reports that

Pure air, pure water, and a porous, well drained soil are among the most essential features of a first class location for a sanitarium. A happy combination of these essential elements [is] found at Battle Creek … The soil is a sandy loam overlying a bed of clean gravel sixty feet in depth. The surface is rolling, and slopes toward the Kalamazoo river.37

Figure 8. View looking southeast from the fifth floor of the sanitarium, ca. 1897. (Image courtesy of Loma Linda University, Department of Archives and Special Collections.)

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In the 19th century, many Americans were ‘preoccupied with trying to find surroundings that would keep them healthy, and avoid places that would make them sick.’38 The elevated topographi- cal situation of the sanitarium building reflected widespread beliefs about the relationship between environment and health in the 1890s. In 1890 a Lansing physician and later secretary of the Michigan state board of health wrote that a ‘residence on low, moist ground tends toward the occurrence of consumption.’39 Indeed, buildings with a ‘high, healthful position, situated near but above rivers, were considered ideal.’40 The problem with low-lying lands was their wetness and stillness of air. Dry soil with ventilating winds were thought of as the most cleansing environmen- tal properties, a belief that Kellogg promoted equally alongside his scientific prosylytizations. He says, ‘the climate of elevated regions is superior to all others for persons suffering from certain grave pulmonary disorders ... Go a mile up in the air, if you wish to find health.’41 In the search to translate this long held belief into the language of science, Kellogg uses the compound carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is ‘heavier than air, and consequently it collects in such low places as deep wells, old cellars, and deep valleys.’42 To avoid the deleterious effects that CO

2 can have on the

body, and on digestion, patients at the sanitarium were ordered to spend time outside, and – commensurate with the degree of sickness and pocketbooks – were given balcony rooms on the

Figure 9. The ‘Porte-air’ vent, ca. 1900. (Image reproduced from Patsy Gerstner, ‘The temple of health: a pictorial history of the Battle Creek Sanitarium’, Caduceus 9 (1996), p. 30.)

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fifth and sixth floors, far away from the low points in the landscape (see Figure 8). Kellogg believed that ‘thousands of patients die in hospitals for want of fresh air.’43

Circulation was meant to prevent the health problems associated with stale, still air. That the atmosphere itself could cause infections, especially in confined, shared hospital wards, was consid- ered common knowledge among medical practitioners throughout the 19th century.44 Inadequate ventilation set up an environmental condition whereby any disease could become infectious. Indeed, the ‘effective placement of windows, doors, fireplaces, and the siting of the building itself so as to maximize the circulation of fresh air were all established principles of hospital architecture by midcentury.’45

In the same way that the maintenance of health relied on a clean, efficient metabolic process in the guts, it relied on the circulation of clean air through the environment. Proper digestion could not be achieved without the proper air. ‘A man who should deprive himself of ordinary food, would be pronounced a suicide. Is he any less a transgressor who deprives himself … of a still greater necessity, pure air?’46

So, we arrive at the vents. The striking image in Figure 9 represents the material extension of the body into the outside environment. In order for patients to maintain a constant supply of cura- tive fresh air, this accordion-like tube connected the outside directly to the head of the patient. The 10-meter internal tube that we think of as beginning at the mouth and ending at the anus was extended for patients at the sanitarium – in very tube-like fashion – to the world: here is the exten- sible body. By giving patients a direct connection to pure, elevated, oxygenated air, the body’s systems – including that of digestion – could function properly.

Beginning in the 1890s ‘Americans saw their lives invaded by a new aesthetic of mechanized space’ that was brought on by the profusion of engineering in society.47 Measuring the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century as a point of dramatic increase in steam power that replaced human labor, engineering became an occupation with great moral importance. If the teleological optimism advanced by supporters of the American and French revolutions was to hold, nations needed the art of engineering to make prosperous societies. Throughout the century engineering grew, as de la Peña suggests, to be synonymous with an aesthetic of authority and progress. The practice of engineering suggests the use of mechanical implements. The use of such implements was so pervasive that we can find this impulse even in relation to the bodily process of digestion. Here I have outlined how two mechanical implements in the Battle Creek Sanitarium, wheat rollers and air vents, served as mechanical extensions of the digestive system, conceptual- izing a very material geography of food consumption.

Theoretical considerations

This narrative about spatially extensible bodies at the sanitarium contributes to discussions in envi- ronmental history and health geography that have sought ways of describing body-environment relations, elucidating how health is not confined to the inside of the body. Environmental historian Gregg Mitman points out that

health is a relational concept … health acquires meaning only by virtue of the relationships between and among living organisms – be they the cells of the human body or the species of a biotic community – and their environments … in cutting across the categories of human and non-human, health offers a useful means for rethinking nature and how we come to know the natural world.48

The relational concept of health that Mitman describes must necessarily have two components: 1) it must consider the relationships between organisms and other objects, and 2) it must consider

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the type of space created by that relationship. While Mitman’s statement moves us towards the first component, it does not direct us how to achieve the second component. For the second component it is beneficial to look how geographers have approached the body-environment issue.

Theoretical work in the subdiscipline of ‘nature-society,’ or ‘environmental’ geography comple- ments the work in environmental history that deals with bodies and environment.49 Anderson and Braun frame the enduring theme of environmental geography over the past 30 years as

the effort to move – in manifestly variable ways – beyond a binary conception of human and environment … in order to come to terms with a world of environmental degradation, climate change and genetically modified organisms … environmental geographers have given us a variety of ‘onto-stories’ that provide ways of thinking about the very nature of nature.50

This broad framing of the nature-society literature in geography encapsulates many diverse efforts to understand how we categorize objects and phenomena as ‘natural,’ ‘human,’ or ‘artificial.’ This article contributes to two such related efforts in nature-society geography that when joined help critically evaluate how we distinguish between the categories of body and environment, and shed light on the significance of arriving at an extensible digestive system. The two efforts are analo- gous to the necessary components of Mitman’s statement; they are: 1) hybrid entities, and 2) rela- tional space. In an earlier geographical statement about biotechnology, Katz and Kirby say that ‘biotechnology offers a vehicle for understanding the construction of universal nature, and offers too a particular challenge to realign nature and the individual.’51 For them the ‘construction of universal nature’ is a world in which objects are stripped of their classificatory labels and become something neither from biology nor technology – they become ontologically flattened. Additionally in this statement we see that objects become something neither from natural (outside) nor indi- vidual (inside) spaces – they become spatially extended. These two binaries captured by Katz and Kirby – what I call biology/technology and body/environment – define the two efforts in nature- society geography: hybrid entities and relational space.

Hybrid entities – biology/technology

Biology/technology is about objects, specifically the materials with which objects are constituted. Redefining objects as ongoing processes that are always constituted by both biological components and technological components is at the root of the first discussion, hybrid entities.52 Here the diges- tive system is a hybrid entity, a melding of the body’s organs and the implements – the rollers and the vents – that without which the organs would not be possible in the configuration prescribed by Kellogg.

Seeing technological implements as part of the digestive system in the 1890s is a form of bio- technology. Geographers have used advances in biotechnology (e.g. genetically modified seeds) as a lens through which to question how we categorize all of the objects in our lives.53 Certainly if something as ‘natural’ as a seed can be more accurately described as a mixture of human intention, technology, and institution, then so too can we question other objects that seemingly fall so neatly into the categories of natural and artificial.54 This line of thinking has led geographers to think of every object as neither natural nor artificial, replacing the importance of the categories themselves with the ways in which objects are imagined and made.55 Indeed, as Anderson and Braun point out, non-essentialist materialists such as Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour each ‘understands all of “being” to exist on the same ontological plane.’56

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This flattening of categorical claims that we have on objects has led geographers to question the spatial outcomes of such a vision.57 If objects (organic or not) do not exist alone, but rather are the outcomes of their relationships with other objects, then it is imperative to explore the space that is produced by such relations. Metaphors of association within science and technology studies have given rise to the utility of networks in describing what and where objects actually are.58 Showing that the digestive system is not only inside the bounds of the skin, but is instead part of a biotech- nological network, this article brings together the environmental historical insight (that health is relational) with the STS insight (that objects are relational) with the geographical insight (that these relations are spatial in nature).

Relational space – body/environment

Body/environment is about space, specifically the drawing or dissolving of the territorial boundar- ies between body and environment. Asking how people interact with the environment is one way of asking where the body ends and the ‘world out there’ begins. One way to answer this is by creat- ing a ‘geography of heterogeneous associations’ in which the researcher traces how ‘actions are embedded in materials and then extended through time and space.’59 By doing so the notion of the hybrid entity becomes also a geographical entity. When the heterogeneous associations are dis- played, the boundary between body and environment dissolves, or is redrawn. The resulting car- tography has been termed ‘relational space,’ the second of the two discussions noted above.60 Mapping the digestive systems of sanitarium patients outside the epidermal borders of the body is a way by which we can understand organs as extensible and spatial. The mapping, or space, is relational because it defines a world in which the objects mapped are co-constitutional, unable to exist alone. Whatmore benchmarks a return to materiality in cultural geography, in which ‘the world shifts the register of materiality from the indifferent stuff of a world “out there”, articulated through notions of “land”, “nature” or “environment”, to the intimate fabric of corporeality that includes and redistributes the “in here” of human being.’61 In other words, the materiality of the ‘in here’ of humans is representative, and constitutive, of the world ‘out there.’ In this, we see how the object of a bodily organ is legitimate for the application of hybrid entity and for relational space.

The idea that bodies and their environments are co-constitutive has also been explored by femi- nist scholars.62 Grosz uses the idea of a ‘sociocultural’ environment to explain how our perceptions of sexed bodies are produced in urban places. She says the body and its environment

have overtaken and transformed whatever reality each may have had into the image of the other: the city is made and made over into the simulacrum of the body, and the body, in its turn, is transformed, ‘citified,’ urbanized as a distinctively metropolitan body.63

Grosz represents here a larger project stemming from Foucault, and from which the argument of this section takes a cue.64 Namely, the form of human bodies is contingent upon context, and it attempts to describe the process by which bodies are made differently in different times and places. The impli- cations for Grosz and many others is that when the forms of bodies are seen as an historical process, then the assumptions we make about gender and sexuality can be denaturalized, thereby confronting an oppression that has no foundation.65 The story of digestion at the Battle Creek Sanitarium describes specifically how a set of organs in the body – the digestive system – were produced in a particular way by virtue of their association with the technological implements outside the body. The resulting hybrid entity was very time- and place-contingent, and reinforces the position that the very beliefs about how the digestive system works contribute to shaping its material form.

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The birth of the hybrid entity in geography helped frame one answer to geography’s long- standing nature/society ‘problematic.’66 The birth of relational space in geography offered a meth- odology for describing the new cartography that emerged from seeing objects in the world as neither natural nor artificial. Studying a single object as a hybrid entity – in this case the digestive system – and the spatial connections it makes with the world solves two geographical puzzles at once: it is a way to recognize the spatiality of our lives, and it is a way to demonstrate the inconsis- tencies of a metaphysics based in the separation of environments and bodies.

Conclusion

Understanding the geography of digestion in this case study connects with the formation of American nutritional science, and with one of the most poignant moments in the development of the nagging question still with us today: what we should eat to be healthy? We have been shown over the past three decades or so – most recently and popularly by writers such as Alice Waters and Michael Pollan – that answering this question means answering questions about how agri- cultural landscapes are made as well. If our health depends on our bodies’ connections with agricultural landscapes, then what about health being connected to other types of places and objects as well? This research has shown that the geographical concepts of hybrid objects and relational space can be applied to human organs, as well as to cases in the past. Here this frame- work has contributed to a longer-standing conversation in the social sciences about how to talk about where we exist as people. If we are to take seriously the critiques of – for example – poi- soned landscapes or inadequate industrial farms as deleterious to our health, then we need to continue developing a language to talk about how those places and, in this case, objects, should also be considered part of us.

If you were to remember something from this article – tomorrow as you’re eating your corn flakes – I would hope it might be this. If we start at the gastrointestinal tract and trace outward, following the pathways of the objects and institutions related to this place – a place that histori- cal sociologist Melanie DuPuis has called ‘Enteria’ – we can map the boundaries of the body, showing us that it is actually a range of places, practices, and beliefs.67 Our bodies are tied with the outside world in often unrevealed ways, and paying attention to those connections gives us a clearer sense of where our bodies end and the environment begins. With the intensification of scholarship in food studies, I contribute a methodology that offers us a way to spatialize our bodies so as to create a deeper understanding of the geographical consequences of human health and eating.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Karen Jania from the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library, Anita Ezzo and Cynthia Ghering from the Michigan State University library system, and George Livingston from the Willard Library in Battle Creek. Financial assistance was provided by the Association of American Geographers Cultural Geography Specialty Group, as well as the Mark C. Stevens Researcher Travel Fellowship from the University of Michigan. Finally, members of the University of California Food and the Body Research Group offered invaluable advice on the finishing drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 R. Schwarz, ‘John Harvey Kellogg: American Health Reformer’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, PhD Dissertation, Department of History, 1965), p. 176.

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2 B. Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2005).

3 L. Jackson, S. Dudrick and B. Sumpio, ‘John Harvey Kellogg: Surgeon, Inventor, Nutritionist (1852– 1943)’, Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 199, 2004, pp. 817–21.

4 J.H. Kellogg, The Stomach: Its Disorders and How to Cure Them (Battle Creek, MI: Modern Medicine Publishing Co., 1896), p. 3.

5 Kellogg, The Stomach, p. 3. 6 N. Mink, ‘It Begins in the Belly’, Environmental History, 14, 2009, pp. 312–22. 7 Latour, Reassembling the Social; G. Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry

of Things (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005). 8 E. Swyngedouw, ‘Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Span-

ish Waterscape, 1890-1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89, 1999, pp. 443–65; W. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996); J. Wolch, ‘Anima Urbis’, Progress in Human Geography, 26, 2002, pp. 721–42; S. Pyne, Fire In America: A Cul- tural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

9 S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies (London: Sage, 2002). 10 B. Greenhough and E. Roe, ‘Guest Editorial: Towards a Geography of Bodily Biotechnologies’, Envi-

ronment and Planning A, 38, 2006, p. 417. 11 Greenhough and Roe, ‘Bodily Biotechnologies’, p. 418. 12 K. Bakker and G. Bridge, ‘Material Worlds? Resource Geographies and the “Matter of Nature”’, Prog-

ress in Human Geography, 30, 2006, pp. 5–27. 13 E. Martin, Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture from the Days of Polio to the Age of

AIDS (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994). 14 E. Martin, ‘Fluid Bodies, Managed Nature’, in B. Braun and N. Castree (eds) Remaking Reality: Nature

at the Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 71. 15 B. Braun, ‘Environmental Issues: Inventive Life’, Progress in Human Geography, 32, 2008, p. 670. 16 G. Carson, Cornflake Crusade (New York: Rinhart & Co., 1957). 17 R. Armstrong, ‘The Body as an Architectural Space: From Lips to Anus (The Gastrointestinal Tract as a

Site for Redesigning And Development)’, Architectural Design, 66, 1996, pp. 86–91. 18 F. Inman, ‘Absorption’ (Ann Arbor, MI: Thesis in Medicine, University of Michigan, 1864). 19 R. Koch, Essays of Robert Koch, translated by C. Carter (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 83. 20 D.E. Robinson, The Story of our Health Message, 3rd ed. (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing

Association, 1965). 21 Kellogg, The Stomach, p. 225. 22 C. Bouchard, Lectures on Auto-Intoxication in Disease; Or, Self-Poisoning of the Individual (Philadelphia,

PA: F.A. Davis, 1894). 23 J. Whorton, Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2000). 24 Calhoun County Souvenir: Commemorating the Battle Creek Journal’s Fiftieth Anniversary: Calhoun

County, her Industries and Sketches of her Representative Citizens (Battle Creek, MI: Battle Creek Journal, 1901).

25 J.H. Kellogg, ‘The Treatment of Hyperpepsia’, Modern Medicine and Bacteriological Review, 3, 1894, pp. 94–5.

26 J.H. Kellogg, Balanced Bills of Fare: Arranged with Reference to the Normal Daily Ration; and the Needs of Special Classes of Invalids (Battle Creek, MI: Good Health Publishing Co., 1899).

27 A.C. True, A History of Agricultural Experimentation and Research in the United States, 1607–1925 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1937).

28 N. Aronson, ‘Nutrition as a Social Problem: A Case Study of Entrepreneurial Strategy in Science’, Social Problems, 29, 1982, pp. 474–87.

228 cultural geographies 18(2)

29 K. Carpenter, ‘The Life and Times of W.O. Atwater (1844–1907)’, Journal of Nutrition, 124, 1994, pp. 1707S–14S.

30 W.O. Atwater and C.D. Woods, The Chemical Composition of American Food Materials: Bulletin No. 28 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896). See also A. Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

31 Aronson, ‘Nutrition as a Social Problem’, p. 476. 32 John H. Kellogg Papers. Box 5; Business Papers; Food Experiments; folders 1–3. Michigan State Uni-

versity Archives and Historical Collections. This collection contains hundreds of original typed notes among the food experimenters at the sanitarium.

33 J.H. Kellogg, Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same (United States Patent Office, 1896). 34 D. Goodman, B. Sorj and J. Wilkinson, From Farming to Biotechnology: A Theory of Agro-Industrial

Development (New York: Blackwell, 1987), p. 1. 35 I am indebted to Melanie DuPuis for making this point. 36 L. Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley: Univer-

sity of California Press, 2006). 37 Calhoun County Souvenir, p. 76. 38 C. Valencius, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and their Land

(New York: Perseus Books, 2002), p. 86. 39 H. Baker, ‘The Climatic Causation of Consumption’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 14,

1890, p. 73. 40 Valencius, The Health of the Country, p. 88. 41 J.H. Kellogg, ‘The Climate of Mexico in Relation to Health’, Good Health (January, 1895). 42 J.H. Kellogg, ‘Practical Suggestions Respecting the Ventilation of Buildings’, Nineteenth Annual Report

of the Secretary of the State Board of Health of the State of Michigan (Lansing, MI: Robert Smith & Co., State Printers and Binders, 1891).

43 Kellogg, ‘Practical Suggestions’, 1891. 44 C. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System (New York: Basic Books,

1987), p. 124. 45 Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers, p. 127. 46 Kellogg, ‘Practical Suggestions’, 1891. 47 C. de la Pena, ‘Recharging at the Fordyce: Confronting the Machine and Nature in the Modern Bath’,

Technology and Culture, 40, 1999, p. 756. 48 G. Mitman, ‘In Search of Health: Landscape and Disease in American Environmental History’, Environ-

mental History, 10, 2005, pp. 184–210. 49 Recent works within the subdiscipline of environmental history that discuss the relationship between

bodies and environment include the following: N. Langston, ‘The Retreat from Precaution: Regulating Diethylstilbestrol (DES), Endocrine Disruptors, and Environmental Health’, Environmental History, 13, 2008, pp. 41–65. J. Roberts and N. Langston, ‘Toxic Bodies/Toxic Environments: An Interdisciplin- ary Forum’, Environmental History, 13, 2008, pp. 629–35. Mitman, ‘In Search of Health’; G. Mitman, M. Murphy and C. Sellers, ‘A Cloud Over History’, in G. Mitman, M. Murphy and C. Sellers (eds) Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (Osiris, the History of Science Society; volume 19, 2004), pp. 1–17.

50 K. Anderson and B. Braun, ‘Introduction’, in K. Anderson and B. Braun (eds) Environment: Critical Essays in Human Geography (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), p. xiii.

51 C. Katz and A. Kirby, ‘In the Nature of Things: The Environment and Everyday Life’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 16, 1991, p. 264.

52 S. Whatmore, Hybrid Geographies (London: Sage, 2002). 53 Greenhough and Roe, ‘Bodily Biotechnologies’; T. van Dooren, ‘Inventing Seed: The Nature(s) of Intel-

lectual Property in Plants’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 26, 2008, pp. 676–97. 54 E. Swyngedouw, ‘Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Span-

ish Waterscape, 1890–1930’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89, 1999, pp. 443–65.

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55 W. Cronon (ed.) Uncommon Ground: Rethinking The Human Place in Nature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).

56 Anderson and Braun, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv. 57 N. Thrift, ‘Steps to an Ecology of Place’, in D. Massey, J. Allen and P. Sarre (eds) Human Geography

Today (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 295–322. J. Murdoch, ‘The Spaces of Actor-Network Theory’, Geoforum, 29, 1998, pp. 357–74.

58 B. Latour, Reassembling the Social; M. Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domes- tication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay’, in J. Law (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (Boston, MA: Routledge, 1986), pp. 196–223.

59 J. Murdoch, ‘Towards a Geography of Heterogeneous Associations’, Progress in Human Geography, 21, 1997, pp. 321–37.

60 J. Murdoch, Post-Structuralist Geography: A Guide to Relational Space (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006).

61 S. Whatmore, ‘Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography In and For a More-than-Human World’, cultural geographies, 13, 2006, p. 602.

62 E. Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, in H. Nast and S. Pile (eds) Places Through the Body (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 42–51.

63 Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, p. 43. 64 M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 65 J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993). 66 R. Sack, Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness, and Moral Concern (Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 67 M. DuPuis, ‘A Place called Enteria: The Gastro-Geopolitics of the Colon’ (Paper read at the Association

of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, 24 March 2009).

Biographical note

Nicholas Bauch is a post-doctoral fellow in the Introduction to the Humanities program at Stanford University. In 2010 he completed his doctoral degree from the Department of Geography at UCLA. Complementing his interest in bodies and machines, he has developed a lecture course about Los Angeles with the theme of ‘nature in the city’.