Author: Anna Flinchbaugh

About a month and a half ago, I attended a three day punk festival in Montreal. Late one night, exhausted and hungry after spending the previous hours crashing and clashing with the crowd at Dillinger Four, I and a couple of the folks that had been spending the weekend with went in search of sustenance. Given the hour and our budgets, we ended up at a greasy pizza joint, trying to figure out what exactly the alarmingly orange pellets on the “Montreal” were. Our confidence in the place was increased somewhat, though, by the presence of one of the bands that we had seen earlier, munching quietly at one of the formica tables. 

As we waited for our slices (including a piece of the mysterious Montreal) to be revived from their heat lamp stasis, a belligerent drunk stumbled in and began hassling the woman working the register. Things were escalating in a bad way – he threw his drink across the floor, she threatened to call the cops, he responded with volume – until the bassist from the other band stepped up and diffused the situation. A gaunt, angular dude dressed all in black with the exception of red Keds, he convinced the drunk to leave, placated the hostess, then came to shoot the breeze with us for a bit. Language barriers placed some pretty severe limitations on our conversation, but we stumbled along long enough to lick the grease from our fingers and part ways. 

In many ways, it was a disgusting meal. The pizza had been made hours ago – at the very earliest – from ingredients chosen far more for their resilience and ability to deliver on fat and salt content than health, freshness, or nuanced flavor (not to mention any sort of ethical or sustainability concerns). However, at 2 am, it was the perfect meal for a bunch of grubby punks. Even better, it provided the space for an impromptu community to temporarily spin itself into existence. I’ll likely never see any of the people from that night ever again, but, in that place, in that moment, we were all responsible for each other. However briefly, we took care of each other. It was pretty beautiful.

Which is all a very longwinded way of saying that I’m deeply suspicious of the tendency within the food movement to focus on intimately shared, tender moments like individual meals. This shared pizza met many of the criteria of that someone like Berry or Pollan might revel in. It brought people together. It founded community. It was pretty damn delicious. It also had absolutely no connection to a just, sustainable food system. It’s a terrible paradox of the food movement: while it’s crucial (and really easy when dealing with food) to foster personal connection, it’s also really easy to get stuck at that place and fail to connect our individual experiences to the leviathan that we are tied up in.

I find community organizer Marshall Ganz’s “Story of Self, Story of Us, Story of Now” model to be really useful. Within this framework (which I’m probably grossly oversimplifying – sorry), you first articulate a personal link to the issue at hand, then find systemic connections, then finally determine an immediate action forward. My pizza story didn’t really follow that arc at all. However, it did meet the goals of this prompt. What should we do with that?

Last summer, I had an experience that I would describe as life changing. That sounds overly grand, particularly given that the setting was a fundraiser wrapped up in a dance party for the bicycle advocacy non-profit that I had been interning with, but bear with me. I had been supervising the merch table for most of the night, but a friend took over for me as things were winding down, and I got a chance to join in the festivities. I ended up jamming with a group of folks who, as I had guessed from their slightly bizarre dress and lack of familiarity with the other guests, were not affiliated with the cyclists’ union, but were instead Swedes on a one-week visit to the United States. Between songs, one guy and I ended up discussing, of all things, labor movements and collective organization. When his friend called us out for discussing politics at a party, we  responded vehemently that such a line was artificial. The very act of dancing, of flailing and hopping and swaying, was political. We decided, in our moment of giddy weightlessness, that there could be no better way to thwart a system that at times seems hell bent on inciting despair and division than to refuse to be overwhelmed by its negativity and to instead dance. I think The Trucks capture this pretty well in the lyrics to their song “Zombie”:

You hate yourself so you try and hate me/But you can’t hate a girl who looks good dancing./It looks to me like your barely breathing/You’re half alive and your pulse is leaving/If this was the end would you die not dancing?

However, if flash in the pan girl groups aren’t your gig, Maya Angelou also speaks to the theme of joy-as-resistance in her poem “Still I Rise.” Addressing the expectations of an unnamed reader that all of the forces working against her will break her, she writes:

Did you want to see me broken?/Bowed head and lowered eyes?/Shoulders falling down like teardrops./Weakened by my soulful cries.//Does my haughtiness offend you?/Don’t you take it awful hard/’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines/Diggin’ in my own back yard.

This is not to suggest that we can laugh away subsidies programs that lock our agricultural system into toxic relationships with corporations and industrial practices. I do not mean to say that we can dance our way out of climate change. However, I do absolutely believe that both of those joyous elements – laughter and dance and communion – are critical to both sustaining and justifying activism. It is very difficult to keep tilting at windmills without bearing in mind a vision of the world that we are working towards. This is part of the reason that I am so excited about both living in Weybridge and the Fifth Day components of our curriculum; these shared spaces and times provide opportunities for those accidental moments that, while perhaps not as directly related to improving the food system as our day to day efforts, help to clarify why we are making such efforts.

TL;DR: I think that “Be joyful/though you have considered all the facts,” may be one point in which I am in complete agreement on with Berry.