DEFINING FOOD JUSTICE: I

IN SEARCH OF LOCAL/SLOW, DEMOCRATIC, AND RESILIENT FOOD SYSTEMS

El Rito and Viejo San Acacio, CO. The Culebra River watershed of south-central Colorado, a high alpine valley that is my home during the May through October acequia irrigation cycle, is home to some 500 native farming families.

Through their productive labors, derived from multigenerational place-based agroecological knowledge, the Hispano-Mexicano acequia farming families of this watershed embody a rare instance of a relatively intact local food system. There are not too many places like this left in the USA - places where local native people still control and organize land and water rights on a sufficient scale to construct self-reliant and resilient systems for the production of heritage foods and pathways to more healthy and autonomous livelihoods.

This is the first year that I participate fully as a fellow landowner and parciante (a farmer with water rights on a community irrigation ditch or acequia). It is my first year as producer in which I am able to partake of the acequia farm community's cycle of production: From the communal labor of our annual limpieza de acequias on April 19th; through the May 15th Feast Day of San Isidro Labrador; and on through the looming September harvest and roasting of our maiz de concho to make chicos (adobe oven-roasted corn).

I am deeply impressed still, even after 25 years of working in this community, and encouraged by my direct experiences this season in the acequiahood. These experiences derive from daily neighborly interactions and patterns of social cooperation, collaboration, and mutual aid.

Needless to say, I have also experienced conflicts with one or two individuals but even there I have always found immediate channels to mediate and resolve these, or perhaps better I managed to follow fellow parciantes' advice to ignore the conflicts that amount to shiftless "cage-rattling" by those with more selfish utilitarian aims. We also have our share of walking battlefields, riddled with contradictions born of the capitalist milieu we all must confront, or not.

Nevertheless, despite these unconsciously neoliberal defections, the social wealth and practical knowledge developed through this intense daily face-to-face participation arises in response to the challenge of using our water rights without harming each other or the environment. This is the normative basis of the mutual reliance interests that serve us well as a resilient foundation for our increasingly threatened and somewhat "worn" local food system.

I say "worn" because of the ravages of decades of enclosure and exploitation by speculators of our bioregional homeland commons; the resultant loss of many families' multigenerational land holdings (through forced displacement and partitioned inheritance); and the resulting limited resource conditions that denied people access to natural assets and independent livelihoods. All these have produced a set of contradictions plaguing even this too rare instance of a place where the ideal conditions that can nurture environmental and economic justice through local food sovereignty are still intact.

The cruelest irony in the Culebra watershed is that too many of our own families, especially those lacking access to acequia farm lands, do not or cannot utilize the production of the local food system. Often, even those with access to land and water appear to squander this heritage by reducing their, albeit often profitable, ventures to alfalfa-hay monocultures. They grow livestock feed but cannot feed themselves through their own means of production. Nothing is more tragic than this self-induced dependency on fast food and global food systems dominated by the corporations that marginalize the cattle and produce farmers at near every step.

Another factor is the "modernization" of local diets and food ways involving the adoption of a "Super-Sized" and "Big Gulp" eating lifestyle. This means that many people in our agriculturally-rich community are ignoring the availability of the diverse array of local foods including locally-produced raw milk, cheese, yogurt, and cream.

Too many locals are opting out and instead choose to engage in the consumption of fast foods or to rely on the shopping convenience of Walmart, City Market, or Safeway in Alamosa, 45 miles away. Why bother with the eight hour cycle of preparing chicos del horno and other heritage meals when you can instead grab a Big-Bite Hot Dog or a Gourmet Panini forty miles away?

This means that the transition toward (re)building resilient local food systems cannot be solely predicated on the availability of land, water, seed, knowledge, skills, social networks, implement and tools, labor, and so on. Local food systems require not just the social wealth all this represents, as these are shared in mutual reliance networks, but a clear cultural shift away from fast food diets and convenience shopping. This cultural shift must begin with youthful generations and must encourage their direct participation in the local food system.

Also, local food systems must involve more than the production of culturally-appropriate vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk, meats, and so on. There is an irreducible social dimension to the resilience of local food systems: La comida, the shared meal, is an important part of the acequiahood's local food system and it supports the penchant for a creative, seasonally-adapted, heritage cuisine. "Del alberjon a la haba," as my neighbors often say in reference to the cycle from early spring peas through late season fava beans. Eating seasonally means eating within the limits of the "foodshed."

This also means that much of our food production of necessity involves preparing and processing the food storages for the long haul between deep winter and a very reluctant spring, qualities of living at one mile and a half above sea level. The roasting of chicos; the freezing of elk, deer, and antelope meat; the canning of vegetable and fruit preserves; the storage of potatoes, onions, and dried habas in our root cellars; all these are activities that portend of the stews, soups, and preserves that sustain a simple but flavorful cuisine from November through the following May, when the first radishes and peas make their smartly sudden appearance (thanks to old-time farmers like Adelmo Kaber).

Resilient local food systems produce slow food, sure: A typical chicos (roasted corn, onion, garlic, and chile caribe stew) meal takes at least eight hours to prepare. Thats the cooking part: It takes three to four months of work to plant, irrigate, cultivate, and harvest the white floury flint corn we use for chicos, including the week-long ritual of roasting the crop in adobe ovens.

Resilient local food systems, however, must produce more than slow food. They must engage all inhabitants of a place in the process - if not of producing the food then of sharing it in the shared space of endless selfless acts of conviviality.