183 know who or what has done it. Has omega-3 acted, or, since you absorbed it, have you? Eating interferes with ‘doing’ in a fascinating way not just by relating the creatures and substances that ‘do’, but also, crucially, irrevers- ibly, by transforming them—and their agential abilities. (Abrahamsson et al. 2015, p. 15)
Note that adjudicating who has done what to whom (or what) gives way to observing and carefully documenting the “transformations” that occur in situated encounters between bodies of all kinds.
By way of summary, Mol’s contention is that objects of inquiry are not only affected by perception (epistemology) but enacted through practice (ontology). That is to say, the substance of the world and its bringing- into- being through contextually contingent knowledge-making practices and technological devices are entwined. It would not be controversial to state that there exist different perspectives on bodies, diseases, and so on.
Indeed, kinesiology departments are comprised of precisely this multidis- ciplinary model, where biomechanists, sociologists, psychologists, physi- ologists, historians, and others bring their disparate disciplinary expertise to bear on a common object of study: the moving body. As Mol points out, though, such “perspectivalism” implies a stable object to which dif- ferent lenses can be applied (and, accordingly, a stable concept of objec- tivity at its centre). Mol’s contention is more radical and more consequential. To say that objects are situated is to say that they emerge differently depending on the knowledge-making apparatus to which they are tethered.
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that predominates in kinesiology and sport and exercise science. But to what would we be referring when we spoke of “whey protein powder” in such an analysis? A sequence of amino acids? A dehydrated milk product?
A bovine bodily substance? A solution to dairy industry waste? A scoop of nutritional powder? A component of the recommended daily allow- ance? A hegemonic “health” food? Foregrounding this question might lay us open to the accusation that we remain stuck in the register of represen- tation. Yet probing what whey protein is, identifying the profusion of signifieds to which it alludes, can begin to nudge us away from a focus on
“gathering knowledge—whether objective or subjective” about a stable object and towards a focus on multiplicity and the variety of contexts in which whey protein is done (Mol and Law 2004, p. 45).
To illustrate whey protein’s multiplicity, we might begin by consider- ing whey at the scene where it materializes at the dairy processing plant.
Here, whey is made—and makes itself known—as the liquid that remains from milk and cheese production. Whey has always been part of the cheese-making process, but the industrialization of agriculture through the twentieth century led to unprecedented dairy production capacities and, in turn, an unprecedented surplus of whey waste. About 90.5 bil- lion pounds of whey effluent are generated by the U.S. cheese-making industry alone each year (United States Department of Agriculture 2014). This protein- and acid-rich substance manifests as an environ- mentally devastating toxin if leached into groundwater or discarded in waterways, which was its fate in many North American contexts through the last century (Lougheed 2013). While intentional dumping has declined in the face of greater regulation, whey spills, which result in aquatic algae blooms and oxygen depletion, continue to occur (Bergquist 2008; Environmental Protection Agency 2011; James 2015). Thus, this version of whey, a toxic byproduct of dairy production, is enacted in ways that pose problems to the plants and fish that become starved of the oxygen they need to survive, and subsequently to the dairy researchers, manufacturers, and engineers tasked with mitigating toxicity at its point of co-production.
Like all versions, though, this iteration of whey is situated. In this instance, it is the commodification of whey protein in North American dairy farms that warrants our scrutiny. Geoffrey Smithers, who declares
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funding from dairy industry sources, has extolled the 50 years of innova- tion in whey protein manufacture. In a celebratory storying of whey pro- tein’s commodification, he notes that “increases in the value of [whey]
products in an increasingly sophisticated marketplace have resulted in enhanced wealth to dairy manufacturers and the communities that rely on them” (2008, p. 702). Notwithstanding an ominously undefined notion of dependent “communities,” Smithers is correct. Working with the version of whey protein that is co-produced in industrialized dairy farms, the commodification of whey “from gutter to good” and “good to gold” (Smithers 2008, p. 695) is a triumph for industry: a harmonious joining of technoscientific innovation and economic imperatives that convert a toxic waste byproduct into a healthy, popular consumer prod- uct that is fed to both human and nonhuman animals. The enactment of this reality is premised on a series of technoscientific practices—concen- tration, separation, and drying of whey to make it more versatile and palatable for consumption—that bring into being the desiccated powder that presently lines store shelves and is infused into all manner of products.
Our analysis might end here, or we might thicken the story by elabo- rating on legislation designed to deter Big Dairy from whey dumping, or the plight of incarcerated cows whose lives are organized in the service of producing milk, or the implications for the more-than-human commu- nities still exposed to the pungent toxicity of whey waste because of lack of oversight or accidental spills, but the version in question and the scene of enactment would stay essentially the same.
Many readers will know that this version of whey protein, focused as it is on the moments and consequences of its materialization as a toxin, is by no means the most prevalent in kinesiological, nutritional, or sport and exercise circles. If we centre these circles instead, whey is enacted through its purchase in ready-to-eat items like protein bars or as a sup- plement to be incorporated, by the consumer, into smoothies, baked goods, or other snacks and meals. The quantity and timing of its inges- tion is the subject of both countless physiological studies and inexhaust- ible “protein talk” among buyers seeking to extract optimal value from this nutritional resource valued for its untold health promises and fit- ness-enhancing capacities. Its processing and repurposing for consumer use—that is, its enactment first as poison and then as panacea—are not
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part of this version of whey protein. For the dairy industry, in other words, whey protein has become an economic solution to the environ- mental hazards and species threats presented by the dumping of untreated waste, its status as a versatile and popular commodity helping to offset the costs associated with its technoscientific transformation. But for kinesiologists and their ilk, whey protein is a solution for a very different set of problems, most often those related to building and sustaining musculature, but also, and increasingly, to a broader variety of issues ranging from sluggish cognition to problem pregnancies.
The complexity and specificity of this picture are further heightened when we consider how the bodies implied by the different versions of whey protein vary. In the agricultural and food engineering version of whey, when protein is enacted as a waste stream that must be disposed of, or an edible repurposed from a toxin, the bodies of the humans and agri- cultural animals to whom it is fed manifest as consumer-processors whose finicky tastes and digestive systems must be accommodated through innovations in processing that make whey transportable, preservable, and safe and palatable to eat. An exercise physiology version of protein, in contrast, brings into being a body made of components and dimensions that shift in accordance with variables such as diet and exercise. Protein intake can affect this body’s size, shape, and mass and the job of the exer- cise physiologist is to determine optimal protein intake. A daily life ver- sion of whey protein, where whey is enacted as muscle (through the efficacious constellation of exercise, sleep, broader nutrition, lactose tol- erance, and more), materializes the body as an ongoing project, a valuable investment that requires constant maintenance.
Critically minded readers might imagine that the multiplicity of whey protein and its corporealities exist in a paradoxical state that can be revealed to the initiated and enlightened eye. For example, and as we have already suggested, there is an apparent contradiction in the contem- porary uptick in protein consumption in regions where protein defi- ciency is extremely rare. Why produce and consume unprecedented amounts of something our bodies are not lacking? We might also envis- age that the versions of protein enacted through particular practices—
production, consumption, ingestion, filtration—are at odds with each other, at least in the eyes of scientists trained to help bring particular,
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disciplinary, versions into view. Where the exercise physiologist sees mus- cle mass increases and subsequent health benefits, the sociologist might see the cultural pressures to build and sustain muscle, control weight, or mitigate ageing. The ecologist, on the other hand, might find greenhouse gas emissions and contaminated air, soil and water stemming from the ongoing overproduction of milk, to which whey protein powder offers only a band- aid solution.
Just as Mol’s approach dissuades us from asking whether one of these versions is true, and from presuming that social context is “layered” on top of the natural matter of the body, it also guards against the a priori suspicion that different realities will necessarily conflict with one another.
To give one example, the dairy industry version of whey powder does not necessarily undermine or run counter to the exercise physiology version of whey powder. Indeed, the industry has been a major sponsor of physi- ological research on protein supplementation, such that these versions are, at certain moments—though not infinitely or predictably—coordi- nated. Whereas the clash of dialectical forces or competing ideologies often implies a single, contested reality over which different parties strug- gle, the premise here is that reality itself is multiple, and crucially, no less real for being enacted. This means taking seriously the versions of reality which one might be tempted to discard as false, partial, or limited, and to understand them as coterminous, coordinated, and only possibly con- tested. As Mol (2002, p. 5) puts it, “[t]he driving question no longer is
‘how to find the truth?’ but ‘how are objects handled in practice?’”
Of course, guarding against suppositions of conflicting realities does not mean that such engagements will be tension free, or that the bodies or versions of protein that emerge from such an approach will harmonize in a kind of multidisciplinary nirvana free of politics or power. As Mol herself writes, “[R]ather than a whole, the body is a list. The entries on the list are not necessarily coherent. They may have linkages between them, but also tensions. They do not fit within a single set of coordinates”
(Mol 2012, p. 539). But moving away from a model in which physical scientists explain the substance and activities of whey protein up to a certain level (their truth), at which point the social scientists take over (our truth), allows different question to emerge. To paraphrase Mol’s list of such questions: How do different versions of protein happen to relate
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in practice? What kind of frictions are there between them? And where and how do they depend on one another? What is linked up with differ- ent versions of protein and how might specific configurations be valued?
In this approach, “explanation is no longer the horizon of our inquiries.
Articulation is” (p. 11). “Rather than a quest for mechanisms,” Mol con- tinues, “research comes to resemble a cartographic exploration. A differ- ent model of intervention ensues” (p. 11). For Mol, this model entails not the adjustment of physical or social variables to produce a different out- come, but reflection on the version of the body, or protein, we wish to value or fortify, “where, when and how” (p. 11).