The Open Source Body project commenced in early 2022 as a toolkit for bodily exploration and experimentation, an open source cookbook and a multisensory DIY biolab experience. The project has taken a new direction towards the making of edible [meta]fluidic gems, crystals, and sculptural forms from bodily fluids like tears and saliva. The bodily fluids go through a [meta]fluidic process, a molecular gastronomical way of inducing, collecting, processing and preserving that transforms them into precious sculptural edible gems. Would you collect your tears of pain and transform them into an edible painkiller in the form of tear salt candies so you can offer them to your suffering loved ones? Would you donate your saliva in the form of hydrating pearls of caviar to the ones that need it the most?

In microbiology, bodily fluids are being collected and studied for the study of pathologies, as they are considered excellent indicators of health. As bodies of water and flesh, humans depend on the production and excretion of bodily fluids like tears, saliva and sweat as these are essential for lubrication and keeping pathogens away.

The [meta]fluidic process allows the open sourcing and commoning of bodily fluids and transforms the donor and their body into an active site of production of valuable molecules such as hormones and proteins that when isolated and processed can become medicine. Through the process of internalising the liquid body of each other, new systems of care and intimacy are being generated between donors and recipients.

Through this process we can reconstruct technoscientific narratives that are concerned with the genesis, excretion, life cycle, donation, and the exchange of bodily fluids and to amplify their value in a technoscientific, gastronomical and material science context. By reevaluating bodily fluids such as tears and saliva as precious, the challenges and invisible labour of the donor to stay healthy, to induce, to excrete, to harvest and transform the fluids into medicine are also revealed.
The project reveals the relationships between the inside and the outside of the body (secretion-excretion) and aims to repair the tensions and taboos around narratives about bodily experimentation and the donation and exchange of bodily fluids. It unravels the potential of collecting and utilising bodily materials as raw natural materials for the making of medicines and for the nurturing and caring of fellow humans and more than human living systems. It demonstrates how biotinkering and molecular gastronomy aim to investigate the ways in which we create new forms of care through autonomously crafting, cultivating, and fabricating our own biotechnologies.