Beyond the issues of race and unevenly distributed power, however, there is a more profound question: the confused and contradictory relationship we have with the animal kingdom. Claude Lévi-Strauss famously proposed ‘the raw and the cooked’ as symbolic equivalents to nature and culture, noting that of all the animal species only humans cook food. But Yolaçan reminds us of a simpler truth: we are what we eat.

Text by William A Ewing