Regain Your Touch: Tech, Food & Care with Madelaine Ley

The talk I gave to the Life Itself community group came to me whole and in full sentences. My job was simply to write it down and share it. Below you’ll find what came to me, which you can also watch in the video. 

I might just add an invitation to reflect on how you’re in touch with the world. Humans use touch to communicate non-verbally, often unconsciously, and I wonder what you say to others, to the more-than-human, and to yourself.

I have spent years picking and prodding at my own body, saying “be small and smooth” instead of “thank you for holding me on this beautiful planet”.

The messages I give to my own body are the same ones I communicate to the life around me. I admit that my hands have often tried to fix and change rather than meet others with curiosity and thanks. 

So, for myself and for you, I pose two additional questions to the ones in the video:

1. How might we touch with reverence for life itself, rather than life’s utility?

2.  How might we touch in a dynamic of gracious attunement, rather than transaction? 

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The Presentation

I’m surprised by the threads I’m weaving together— philosophy of touch, relational ontology, grocery technology, the attention economy, and tactile practices of gratitude. But I heard a clear voice in my head saying, “Trust the path I sent you on.” I am trusting. 

The combination of the subjects is new to me, but the threads themselves are not. I’ve been long nourished by these ideas, starting at my parents’ dinner table. It was a place of rosemary and thyme, of perfect and irreplicable soups. A place of heated debate, where one side saw the “health food store” as a safe haven and the other side saw it as the headquarters for the local elite (this was not a good thing). 

And touch? This thread is as old as my time here. As the first sense to develop in the womb, I felt in my earliest days that I was held utterly and completely by the world. Now on the outside, I’m still held utterly and completely though it feels different. 

Touch, surprisingly sitting in the middle on my list of love languages, is what I’ve studied for years. I learned that my culture ranks the senses in a hierarchy. Seeing and hearing sit at the top and are associated with the intellect, the mind, and men. Taste, smell, and touch are base, and of the body, associated with emotion and women. They are to be avoided in serious circles. 

But touch, as I’m sure is the same with smell and taste, is so beautiful in its base fleshiness, emotion, and possibly its femininity. Our very embodiment means that we’re connected with the world, a truth we cannot shirk though some might try with dreams of a “disembodied” metaverse. Touch—the thing we cannot not do—is both an example and metaphor of our primordial interconnectedness. 

But let’s get real. Hold your own hand. Try to find the precise boundary between one and the other. Try to discern which hand is touching and which hand is touched. 

You’ll find that the sense eludes the binaries clever minds try to uphold. Our skin, just like our place in the world, is porous. Touching is never a mere connection between two things, one and two, but always is an infusion that darts a sly smile at individualism. 

Research shows that humans are remarkably good at communicating nonverbally through touch. Nurses, for example, explained that prejudices and biases that don’t make it out of the mouth will find their way out in the hands. Some people are told, without words, that they deserve to be handled with kindness and others are told they are worthy of neglect and harshness.

This goes beyond the hospital walls. Some are led carefully and some are choked. Some boundaries are respected and some are transgressed. And as I wait for my son to be born, I wonder if I will handle him differently than I did my daughter.

What, I wonder, do you and I say to the more-than-human world with our feet, hands and flesh of our cheeks? Years ago I wandered a meadow and felt paralyzed by my inability not to destroy the plants. Wherever I stood, however I sat, I squashed. I was horrified. Perhaps, then, touch has something to teach me about how my culture separates life and death. 

We may turn to the more-than-human world we each touch in varying degrees each day. Food. That which nourishes us. We pick and squeeze, peel and chop, lift to our noses and place on our tongues. How often are these moments ones where thanks is communicated? How often is it that food is tossed, shoved, and treated without care? 

In the last years so much of this initial relationship building with food has been traded for scrolling and clicking on a smooth screen. Online grocery shopping was sometimes necessary under pandemic restrictions and has become ingrained in many of our weekly habits. Though we have personal relationships with our screens, it’s a surface without the particularity of a lemon rind or the skin of a unique tomato. Under the insidious guise of efficiency and the cultural obsession with optimizing every minute of daily life, we have lost so many opportunities to connect with our food.  

I’m experimenting with reconnecting. My weekly shopping is now spread over several small shops and I feel what comes home with me. With my hands, I ask the lemons who would like to join the basket. This attentive and caring kind of touch magically transforms the very metaphysics of my kitchen. With a toddler the hours between 5-7pm require dinner, bath and bedtime. Until recently these two hours were fraught with urgency and felt constricting. Every time I turned around I would bump into something. 

Then I started touching with intention, sweetly saying with my hands, “thank you cauliflower” and “much gratitude onion!”. Suddenly the hours between 5-7pm became infused with spaciousness. Now there’s enough time and more than enough space—even with a little girl at my feet playing with pots. My shoulders unclench and there’s more ease. 

I’m always already in touch with the world. But by adding some attention, I’m able to connect with more care.

And so, I ask: If touch is such a powerful communicator, what do you say to your food? Do you speak words of domination and extraction? Or ones of thanks? Might you try out the latter a little more?

Madelaine is a philosopher and explorer of care, politics, feminism, ecology and our relationship with technology. She is studying a PhD in Philosophy of tech and applied ethics and is currently writing a paper on care, food politics and tech. You can learn more about Madelaine on her website https://www.madelaineley.com/ and read her writings her Substack, "Beauty in the Mire"