I thoroughly enjoyed reading through the narratives on the why hunger website, but the piece on the Youth Farm Market Project (YFMP) in particular got me thinking:

“Princess continues, asking what the women do to find healthy, affordable food at grocery stores. Someone mentions dried mangos. Another mother wonders where you can get those. Someone says Wal-Mart sells them cheap. Another woman says you can dry them yourself for cheaper. One mother says she grew up in Brazil and they ate all their meat and veggies fresh. Her daughter is big, she says. Really big and she has asthma. She’s worried she might get diabetes. But they have a garden in the backyard and they work together in it. She makes it fun for them.”

YFMP is a non-profit that works with children and parents in some of Minneapolis’ poorest districts to teach them about farming, eating, and overall health. This excerpt struck me because of the interplay and exchange of ideas and opinions between mothers that took place over the course of less than 15min. These women were all gathered together in a room to talk about issues plaguing their families and communities using food as the starting point. They were able to talk about what challenges they’re facing and get others’ feedback. This Youth Farm and Market Project (YFMP) provides mothers and daughters (often times the most neglected and underserved demographics) a place for problem sharing and solving. What stood out to me is that YFMP is a collaboration rather than an accusation. It promotes unity and camaraderie over than blaming and anger and focuses on the solutions.

In this space that YFMP has created, women and children come together to be agents of their own change. Unlike governmental policies which can be too rigid and not responsive enough, this form of problem solving and community action is incredibly dynamic and reacts to the unique challenge of individuals. In the exchange quoted above a question was raised and then answered in various ways by various community members so that now the questioner has all of this new information given to her by the people in similar situations to her so that now she can take all this knowledge and go out and try it for herself. Instead of having to start from the bottom, she now has a jumping off point as well as support along the way.

There is also something really powerful in having multi-generational female space available to talk about these deeply personal issues. Based off of the information in the grassroots why hunger article, YFMP has done an incredible job of creating a space where people want to be and where they feel comfortable sharing very intimate details of their lives. They are making real change starting from a place of openness and honesty. This is the way forward. Community engagement has a huge role in moving towards a more sustainable food future.

 

link to article: http://grassroots.whyhunger.org/clp-profiles/item/37-youth-farm-and-market-project#.VaWBL3hHNUQ

 

I was struck by Dr. Vandana Shiva’s talk on “Solutions to the food and ecological crisis facing us today” because of her emphasis on the interconnectedness of bodies and soil. She talks about how nature is not “out there”, how environmentalism does not interfere with growth and how everything is interconnected. I think this emphasis on the interconnectivity is incredibly important. In our modern world of globalization (and with it specialization), too often we find ourselves thinking so narrowly that we end up treating the symptoms rather than causes (if we are lucky).

Dr. Shiva’s point about “if only we could think about circles and cycles” is incredibly powerful. What if instead of creating fish farms because the wild populations are so overfished we took a pause and examined the root cause of the depletion of fisheries? Would we not be better served thinking critically about how we got here to begin with rather than about what bandaid we are going to slap over our problems to mask them for today?

We need to take a step back and reflect. In our constant whir of information and cash flow pausing is becoming incredibly difficult. We are pressured to constantly be thinking two steps ahead. This pressure is very problematic and something that Dr. Shiva touches on: “Environmentalism cannot be considered the enemy of “progress.”” Viewing nature as something to be overcome is never going to work and feeling like we don’t have time to think about the systemic, underlying problems of our problems will never lead us to lasting, meaningful solutions as it ignores the cycles that will only keep on repeating if we do not examine the cause. There should always be a place in the conversation for food issues as “food is life.”

We think of ourselves as separate from the food movement or environmentalism if we are not out on the streets rallying or in the dirt planting; however, every single one of us partakes in this system through the simple act of eating. And it really is simple, to change these systems, to change our course, for those of us who are privileged enough to have a choice, all we need to do is take it one meal at a time.

 

I took a winter course on “Food, Culture, and Communication” co-taught by the lovely Sohpie Esser-Calvi and her husband Ben. We spent a lot of time sharing our own food stories and listening and reading those of others. It was incredibly powerful to hear students’ experiences with food; everything from diving for clams in Cape Cod to trading traditional Jewish foods in middle school during lunch time for the highly coveted Gushers. I could connect with every story and it wasn’t like we were all great storytellers. Reading Wendell Berry’s piece about Andy Catlett made me realize that the reason I found these food stories so fascinating and relatable was that they were all about food. Even though I hadn’t eaten spam musubi nor had I eaten the mangos in Costa Rica, Berry’s story made me realize that I could relate because I know what it is like to eat.

Andy Catlett’s experience with his grandmother really struck a cord with me. His writing is incredibly accessible as even though not all are familiar with rural farm life, grandmothers, or even pies, we all know food. There is something about sharing food stories that is palpable in a way no other fiction is.

I think this is because food is the ultimate sensory experience. It provides us with an endless array of smells, tastes, textures, and sounds. Often times food sticks around long after it was first consumed in our bodies, providing a friendly reminder of the experience we have had. Eating is the most physically-holistic experience out there. Food forms our bodies and our experiences affecting everything from energy levels, sleep habits, and overall health and is something that we engage with everyday. Stories like Berry’s connect us in ways that other literature can’t as they play on this common experience and joy of eating.

Going back to Sophie’s comment during the video panel with Bill McKibben, Helen Young, Dara Scott, and Kirk Webster, the way to connect with people and create meaningful change is by taping into the pleasure and love for and from food. Sharing food stories, while seemingly not much more than an entertaining ice-breaker has the ability to connect and unite people prompting greater systemic change. If someone were to tell me now, after having read Berry’s story, that wild black raspberries were becoming endangered I am much more likely to stand up and do something about it as now I better understand the significance it has to real people if they were to become extinct.

I feel that there is a fair amount of rhetoric in food-centered debates about trying to seamlessly incorporate healthy, fair, sustainable foods into people’s everyday lives so that they don’t even realize they’re there. In the way that you trick a toddler into taking a nap or kids into eating vegetables, we seem to be trying to slip better food into people’s hands without them even realizing it.

Why?

Why bother trying to create “healthy” fast food? Just like the diet industry with their low-calorie high-chemical food and beverages, I am convinced that by taking this deceit-based approach to improving our food system we are only creating different issues, not solving the initial problem (e.g. “organic” coming to mean different pesticides, not no pesticides). We need to change the way we look at food altogether instead of trying to work within the drive-thru, microwavable-meal framework. Our current mindset does not work so why do we think that making small substitutions within the larger framework will have any more long-term success?

Food should be distinct. Not to de-legitimize the very real offences of other industries (e.g. textiles, technology, etc.) but food is more important. Food sustains life. Food fuels us. It shouldn’t be subjected to the same pressures as other industries. Food needs to have a special place and not be lumped into the same category as commodities.

In his article “Why Hunger is Still With Us”, Raj Patel aptly illustrates the current situation: “the fate of food prices is becoming tethered to the moods of the broader world of commodities. The question of what, if anything, sits in the bowls of the poorest people has less to do with the availability of food than with the price of oil.” This is a huge problem. How can we leave the health of people’s bodies up to the whims of the free market? That may be fine and good for the nail polish industry, a luxury good product, but the food industry fulfills a vastly different role. The health of human bodies is more important than the corruption and superficialities that the food system is plagued with today.

We need to set about changing people’s attitudes towards food. We need to get people connected with their food, bodies, and minds and help them realize the interconnectivity. Like Sophie Esser-Calvi pointed out in our last videoconference, this change comes from a place of love. A place where health is prioritized and exempt from the fluctuations of capitalism.

I found reading the excerpt from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation very illuminating. Schlosser brings up an issue that we are all somewhat aware of—American’s astounding consumption of fast food—but does so in a way that really frames the problem for what it is. Schlosser uses statistics in ways that are meaningful and helpful in assisting the reader to understand the scale we are talking about:

“The McDonald’s corporation has become a powerful symbol of America’s service economy, which is now responsible for 90 percent of the country’s new jobs… The company annually hires one million people, more than any other American organization, public or private. McDonalds is the nation’s largest purchaser of beef, pork, and potatoes” (4).

I think this excerpt aptly shows just how influential fast food companies, like McDonald’s, are in our day-to-day lives whether we realize it or not. What strikes me most about this realization of the incredible power these corporations have is the potential for enacting real change that lies in their hands. As a company of this size, there isn’t an area of the economy McDonald’s couldn’t affect. What if instead of pushing for rapid growth (e.g. 2,000 additional restaurants every year), McDonald’s started to focus on making choices that were more socially and environmentally sound? Even just changing a small thing like putting a calorie count next to each item on the menu board has the potential to facilitate widespread reform and set a precedent for other businesses to follow. In the same way that having McDonald’s be the largest employer in the U.S. is deeply frightening, it is equally exciting as, if so desired, they could create real, meaningful changes to the food system, health care, education system, you name it!

Stemming off of our video conversation, I feel like a lot of time the responsibility of the current food system gets placed on people (e.g. “People need to make healthier choices”) and while I think there is a certain amount of responsibility that should go to citizens, corporations have the actual power right now to change things for the better if they wanted. I believe that people are creatures of habit and that when it comes to it, we will chose the easy path 9/10 times. What if we could create a system where eating sustainably was the “easy path”? I think things would look a lot different.

Getting large corporations to change their habits will not be easy, and may be impossible, but still, the room for real, positive impact still remains.

 

Carlo Petrini, in his essay “Slow Food Nation: why our food should be good, clean, and fair,” mentions this idea of the importance of pleasure derived from food. For Petrini, one of his main grievances with the current industrial food system is that it strips away the pleasure of eating by substituting the highly artificial for the natural. He maintains that, because of the tendency to eat what is quick, cheap, and readily available, we deprive ourselves of the pleasure that comes from food. Petrini goes on to say that in order to fight this consumption-based-on-convenience-culture we must equip everybody with the tools to recognize pleasure: “Since pleasure is a human right, it must be guaranteed for everyone, so we must teach people to recognize it, to create the conditions whereby ‘naturally’ good products are producible everywhere” (105). He also notes that “good” is culturally dependent: “it is not easy to arrive at a definition that is “good” for everyone… the study of what is good, therefore, necessarily restricts the field to a single culture and a single social group” (100). This idea of cultural variability and its link to pleasure intrigues me…

If we are saying that “good” varies culture to culture then pleasure necessarily changes with it. Can one not derive the same pleasure from what is “good” in a culture other than their own? Petrini argues no…

Using the example of the larvae eaten in Burkina Faso, Petrini says that “objectively speaking, I did not find anything that corresponded to my categories of “good”… To my personal taste, those insects are bad, but since they are important for that culture… I must say that they are good… This is the absolute relativity of the good: according to culture, according to “naturalness,” according to sensory characteristics” (107-108).

While I do think there is importance in expanding our concepts of good in a way that recognizes preferences outside of the dominant, Euro-centric culture, I find Petrini’s arguments about tastes and pleasures as distinct, mutually-exclusive categories troubling. These claims seem to be making clear statements about inherent differences between cultures which becomes a little worrying for me as it promotes separation and isolates those living in areas where they are not surrounded by people of the same cultural background. Petini argues that we should “gain respect for other cultures by learning to understand other people’s categories” which is troublesome for me as people are not always allowed to define their own categories and in this situation falsely assigning someone a category they do not identify with makes clear statements about what they do and do not enjoy and sets who they can relate and identify with (108). Petrini’s use of categorization of people also seems to assume that there is little to no overlap between cultures and peoples. It makes blanket statements and puts parameters around people’s abilities to enjoy and derive pleasure.

 

 

 

Carlo Petrini, in his essay “Slow Food Nation: why our food should be good, clean, and fair,” mentions this idea of the importance of pleasure derived from food. For Petrini, one of his main grievances with the current industrial food system is that it strips away the pleasure of eating by substituting the highly artificial for the natural. He maintains that, because of the tendency to eat what is quick, cheap, and readily available, we deprive ourselves of the pleasure that comes from food. Petrini goes on to say that in order to fight this consumption-based-on-convenience-culture we must equip everybody with the tools to recognize pleasure: “Since pleasure is a human right, it must be guaranteed for everyone, so we must teach people to recognize it, to create the conditions whereby ‘naturally’ good products are producible everywhere” (105). He also notes that “good” is culturally dependent: “it is not easy to arrive at a definition that is “good” for everyone… the study of what is good, therefore, necessarily restricts the field to a single culture and a single social group” (100). This idea of cultural variability and its link to pleasure intrigues me…

If we are saying that “good” varies culture to culture then pleasure necessarily changes with it. Can one not derive the same pleasure from what is “good” in a culture other than their own? Petrini argues no…

Using the example of the larvae eaten in Burkina Faso, Petrini says that “objectively speaking, I did not find anything that corresponded to my categories of “good”… To my personal taste, those insects are bad, but since they are important for that culture… I must say that they are good… This is the absolute relativity of the good: according to culture, according to “naturalness,” according to sensory characteristics” (107-108).

While I do think there is importance in expanding our concepts of good in a way that recognizes preferences outside of the dominant, Euro-centric culture, I find Petrini’s arguments about tastes and pleasures as distinct, mutually-exclusive categories troubling. These claims seem to be making clear statements about inherent differences between cultures which becomes a little worrying for me as it promotes separation and isolates those living in areas where they are not surrounded by people of the same cultural background. Petini argues that we should “gain respect for other cultures by learning to understand other people’s categories” which is troublesome for me as people are not always allowed to define their own categories and in this situation falsely assigning someone a category they do not identify with makes clear statements about what they do and do not enjoy and sets who they can relate and identify with (108). Petrini’s use of categorization of people also seems to assume that there is little to no overlap between cultures and peoples. It makes blanket statements and puts parameters around people’s abilities to enjoy and derive pleasure.