Quarterly Theme No. 1

Outbreak & Amnesia: How the Pandemic Helped Us Recover Embodied Living

The global pandemic revealed a more infectious disease was plaguing us long before the first case of COVID-19 was ever reported: a widespread amnesia of the body. Somewhere between the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution and our absolute tech dependence in 2020, the contours of human life became quietly and gradually disfigured. Today, rapidly increasing rates of gender dysphoria among youth, plummeting mental health scores and birth rates, the casual dominance of pornography, and the standardization of virtual communities on social media are amongst the many symptoms of this blight. And the lockdowns only exacerbated it. In such an age, the embodied nature of human existence has become obscured. It took months of mandatory screen time and social distancing to remind us that we are more than inner selves detached from physical bodies and that life is more than what gets mediated through a screen. However we coped—whether we baked, gardened, or ran—we set aside our tech and engaged our bodies not so much to escape boredom as to remind ourselves that we were still human. Despite all the suffering the pandemic has caused, it reawakened us to the vulnerability, dependency, and necessity of our bodies.  In our first issue of Perishable Goods, we want to reflect on the ways in which quarantine helped us recover uniquely embodied ways of life. What did the tech-saturated quarantine teach you about your body? How did the pandemic bring into focus what we had already lost before the lockdowns began? How did new routines reveal the errors or graces of old routines?

Submissions are due to pg@perishable-goods.com by Friday, December 3.

(Photo Credit: Caroline Greb.)