Covid-19 has shown how fears of Otherness impinge on our experience of food. The metaphors of infection and contagion become particularly powerful and effective when they are connected to food, which we know penetrates the depths of our body and which can therefore be the source of profound anxieties.

Covid-19 is undoubtedly connected to food issues: the first cases in the pandemic have been linked to bats or pangolins sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where wild animals were apparently kept in close proximity and in poor hygienic conditions, allowing the virus to jump on to humans.

Debates on the origin and spread of an infection often go beyond scientific issues to acquire political value, so that they can be used as ideological tools of considerable impact. It is easy to blame pandemics on others, externalizing the sense of danger and focusing it on foreign food traditions and customs that are perceived as incomprehensible and sometimes backward, if not barbaric. It is even easier to point the finger at countries that may constitute a political, economic, or cultural threat. Not for nothing, Donald Trump referred to Coronavirus as the “Chinese virus” and the “foreign virus,” a sneaky “invisible enemy” that attacks and must be fought and repelled. What follows it an excerpt from an essay I wrote some time ago on the journal Social Research. I believe some of those reflections are still valid.

“The attention paid to how food is produced, distributed, bought, cooked, and disposed of has reached new heights, causing unprecedented anxiety at all levels, from the personal to the international. Wherever there is a body, be it physical or political, and such body is conceptualized and experienced as an autonomous and self-contained reality, the fear of dangerous intrusions caused by the inevitable necessity of ingestion is often palpable. Food and eating thus become fields in which the Other—over which we inevitably feel we have limited control—is resisted and at times fought against. The possibility of food-borne diseases and pests makes food imports a delicate and controversial aspect of international trade. Overall, individual citizens and societies fear contamination and illnesses that may come through what we ingest, both physically and metaphorically.

Food literally becomes us, sustaining us and allowing us to thrive. At the same time, it remains an extraneous matter that we necessarily incorporate, with all the risks that such a dynamic entails. Anxiety and ambivalence are inevitable. Food is often used as a metaphor for otherness and, quite often, to affirm cultural superiority. For lack of information or because of deeply encroached identifications, the food of strangers can be looked upon as barbarian, uncouth, dirty, even disgusting. An analysis of these phenomena can allow individuals to acknowledge their specific location within a cultural formation and in relation to other cultural backgrounds.

However, even the most cursory reflection on the relationship between food and the body should quickly discount any fantasy about self-containment. As philosophers Raymond Boisvert and Lisa Heldke observe in Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human, “appetite re-emphasizes our continuity with the natural world. It makes us aware of our multiple connections and interdependencies: with the sun, soil, ants, bacteria, earth-worms, plants as well as with other humans that grow, harvest, deliver and distribute food- stuffs.” Bodies are porous and embedded in complex ecologies, from the micro to the macro level. Impressive research is being conducted on the intestinal microbiome, defined by Lederberg and McCray as the “ecological community of commensal, symbiotic, and pathogenic microorganisms” that share our body space and is now indicated as both the possible cause and the solution of many health problems. At the macro level, our food choices are entangled in food systems that connect soils with plants and animals, producers, distributors, consumers, and all the living creatures that contribute to turn leftovers and waste into compost.

Many delicious foods are produced by the action of bacteria: it is enough to mention cheese and yogurt. The ongoing debate between those who defend traditional and artisanal cheese-making methods and those who support more hygienic—and more industrial—standards embodies this tension between two conceptions of infection. The French philosopher Michel Serres tackled this theme when he pointed out that the word “parasite” literally means something that eats next to or beside something else. This means that the word refers not only to a presence that consumes food and drink without giving anything back but also to neutral neighbor eaters and to symbiotic partners who live in continuous, productive exchange with their hosts.

The same ambivalence can be found in the Latin word hostis, which means both stranger and enemy, and in the Greek word xénos, which refers to strangers and guests. It seems that when- ever a group finds itself facing elements coming from outside, blur- ring the barriers and the boundaries that define its identity, its attitude oscillates between hospitality and hostility. Yet against any logic based on dualities and oppositions, parasites introduce dynamics that favor pluralities and transformations, interdependence and innovation, reciprocity and mutuality. Parasitic behaviors would then point to a community not based on what unites in a single identity—ethnic, territorial, and spiritual—but rather on a common bond, a mutual gift. As political philosopher Roberto Esposito illustrated, here lies the etymological origin of the very word “community”: con munus, where munus in Latin means obligation, service, and the given gift, not the received one.

If we do not accept and embrace the inherent porosity of our bodies and our embeddedness in larger ecological systems, decisions about eating may end up being experienced as an uninterrupted battle against the always pressing and invasive Others. Newcomers are often perceived as an incumbent threat to the normal functioning of the social body, even depicted as viruses or parasites by a rhetoric that literally interprets all these phenomena in terms of infection and immunization. Groups of foreign settlers are at times compared to wounds that may cause sickness to the whole body.

These rhetorical arguments have cropped up in many different fields, revealing a stubborn pervasiveness and cultural relevance. The same metaphor—centered on invasive elements—is also found in a totally different domain: computer science. The whole world is obsessed with the perceived danger coming from hackers and viruses that can infect hard disks and devastate entire networks. It is enough to remember the year 2000 computer scare (Y2K) that shook the world at the threshold of the new millennium. The same fear of infection dominates discourses about public and individual health, with diseases such as Ebola and the Zika virus, raising the bar for hygiene and prevention and causing widespread concerns about approaching stranger bodies. It would appear that the risk society, evoked by sociologist Ulrich Beck as resulting from lack of control and certainties, simultaneously expresses its deeper fears and finds them constantly confirmed through metaphors of penetration, infection, and other subtle forms of intrusion.