Anticipation holds that imaginaries of future situations can provide orientation in decision making, despite the incalculability of outcomes. The Shit! project turns this premise towards the rift between humans and ‘the rest of our nature’. The project uses experimental means to examine how anticipation—performed through moving, making and doing with food—might assist people to envision and then perform healthier relationships with their gut microbiome. The imaginary is human|microbiome harmony, pleasurably negotiated through what goes into our bodies, materially, sensorially, nutritionally, and emotionally, and what comes out—our shit. To anticipate from and towards this imaginary, we use autoethnographic inquiry to estrange researcher thinking, a ‘kitchen research lab in the wild’ to expose early ideas to public scrutiny, and a four-part workshop to estrange participant thinking. The workshop was conducted with people who struggle with serious gut disease, and close family members with ostensibly healthy guts. The activities reconfigure embodied design methods around, with and through food to engender a fertile space in which participants may address vulnerability and taboo, and embody anticipation of alternative relationships with their gut microbiome. The work introduces food and eating as anticipative actions for world-making, to support participant engagement with challenging subjects.