Here’s a complete list of all mentions of Mexican food in my book Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like To Be A Thing:

They cover plates of enchiladas as shrubs cover the hundreds of square miles of their high desert home. (3)

Tumbling in vented steel cylinders, chiles crackle over the open flame of roasting. (3)

Reality is reaffirmed, and humans are allowed to live within it alongside the sea urchins, kudzu, enchiladas, quasars, and Tesla coils. (5)

The scoria cone and the green chile remain, even as they partake of systems of plate tectonics, enchiladas, tourism, or digestion. (7)

Instead, they are related to purposes, a circumstance that makes speaking of harmonicas or tacos as things problematic (15)

In a flat ontology, the bubbling skin of the capsaicin pepper holds just as much interest as the culinary history of the enchilada it is destined to top. (17)

The scale of such operation is varied: the cell feeds and divides to repopulate the organ that circulates blood to the limb of the body that lifts the burrito. (27)

How do we understand the green chile or the integrated circuit both as things left to themselves and as things interacting with others, us among them? (29)

Mountain summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters and buckshot, microprocessors and ROM chips can no more communicate with us and one another than can Rescher’s extraterrestrial. (34)

Floodlight, screen print, Mastercard, rubber, asphalt, taco, Karmann Ghia, waste bin, oil stain. (49)

But there’s a problem: if objects recede from one another, forever enclosed in the vacuum of their individual existences, how do they ever interact? Smoke and mouth, collar and gear, cartilage and water, bat and branch, roaster and green chile, button and input bus: all seem to do things to one another. (65-66)

Perhaps this is one signal for the future: instead of roboticists and anthropologists, instead of biomedical engineers and medievalists, we will find alloyers and philopescetes and tacologists. (131)

published December 5, 2013