Examining the racial underpinnings of food microbial medicine and disgust in America American
Disgust shows how perceptions of disgust and fears of contamination are rooted in the country's
history of colonialism and racism. Drawing on colonial corporate and medical archives
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer argues that microbial medicine is closely entwined with changing cultural
experiences of digestion excrement and disgust that are inextricably tied to the creation of
whiteness. Ranging from nineteenth-century colonial encounters with Native people to John
Harvey Kellogg's ideas around civilization and bowel movements to mid-twentieth-century diet
and parenting advice books Wolf-Meyer analyzes how embedded racist histories of digestion and
disgust permeate contemporary debates around fecal microbial transplants and other
bacteriotherapeutic treatments for gastrointestinal disease. At its core American Disgust
wrestles with how changing cultural notions of digestion-what goes into the body and what comes
out of it-create and impose racial categories motivated by feelings of disgust rooted in
American settler-colonial racism. It shows how disgust is a changing yet fundamental aspect
of American subjectivity and that engaging with it-personally politically and
theoretically-opens up possibilities for conceptualizing health at the individual societal
and planetary levels. --
