The Ivan Illich Learning Web

In his essay, Brave New Biocracy: Health Care from Womb to Tomb, Ivan Illich wrote “To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity. Then to impose on them responsibility for their own health is to add baseness to the insult.”

To what degree today might we analogously say that to demand that our children eat well in the world which we feed them is an insult to their dignity and that to then impose upon them the responsibility for doing so is an insulting crime? The word “food” itself derives etymologically from ideas of good stewardship and benign shepherding of a well-cared for herd or flock at pasture. Yet today the global idea of food creates symbolic and material scarcities, as it comes ever-more to represent a commodity driven factory-farmed form of inhumane profit and a technocratic/bureaucratic form of nutritional requirements or dietary best practices to be constantly managed and evaluated.

What are we to make then of Hospitalis — a new hospital themed restaurant in Latvia? Is this the ultimate medicalization of food? Or is it a wry comment on such medicalization?

If more postmodern pastiche than brave new world, however, how would Illich respond to this? Isn’t this little more than a different form of the image that he conjures in the final chapter of Deschooling Society of a toy in the form of a coffin that, when opened, reveals a mechanical hand that reaches up to reshut the coffin from inside?