Food, Frankensteins & the Business of the Body

Food fuels the human body, but it also greatly influenced early human relationships and community development. The need to hunt and gather food created the cooperation needed for survival. However, agriculture, animal domestication, food surpluses and enclosures changed these relationships in ways that established patterns of social divisions and political arrangements that are still prevalent today. The human body as a site for the consumption of food gave way to its becoming a site of labor exchange for profit and protection and later a site for medical experimentation and exploitation. This Matrix Map will provide opportunities for you to explore how food, health and life turn into mathematics. Also, it reveals how special interests in agriculture and medicine make it increasingly difficult to determine where government policies begin and corporate goals end.