Multispecies Commensality: Sharing a Meal with Fungi, Chickpeas, and Seaweed

Eating, digesting, and metabolizing are shared by humans and more-than-humans alike, even if performed in often manifestly different ways. When we eat, we eat with others. What or who we eat, and who we eat with, speaks to our ethical tendencies and cultural contexts, and can demonstrate how we may care for ourselves and others through the labours of preparing and sharing a meal. Taking the protein-rich chickpea as a starting point, this chapter explores the aesthetic and culinary possibilities of chickpeas for fungal and human palates. How might a politics of multispecies digestion be reconceived when we break bread with those often overlooked as non-charismatic, passive others, or simply as matter to be consumed? Critical and experimental bio-design practices can work to expand our conceptions of commensality beyond the human through an exploration of multispecies gustatory mutualisms, where eating bodies begin to overlap and commune. The reader is invited to partake in multispecies meal sharing with a recipe calling for aquafaba, agar-agar, whole roasted chickpeas, and seaweed, which animates human and more-than-human commensality.