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.

Dumpster Diving: From Homeless Food to Haute Cuisine?

FORAGING FOR THROWAWAY FOOD BECOMES 'FREEGAN' ACTIVISM

Seattle, WA. I grew up in the South Texas border town of Laredo in a working-class and semi-rural barrio known as "El Three Points." I say "semi-rural" because the neighborhood was located on the eastern periphery of Laredo in a mesquite and prickly pear cactus lifezone filled with wildlife; the streets were unpaved; we all still had septic tanks (a.k.a. cesspools); and every one had chickens, goats, or horses, with one neighbor even pasturing a dairy cow. We lived on the "wrong" side of the tracks, as it is said, a few blocks from the region's only cotton gin by the old Tex-Mex Railway tracks.

I was a teen in the sixties, and I remember once going with the next door neighbors, a mom and her kids who were our friends, on a special "scavenging" trip. Everyone in our neighborhood did this; as a survival strategy recycling and scavenging were endemic. For example, my uncles and I would scavenge for construction materials in abandoned lots and home ruins. My brother Jose Eduardo and I built our first horse corral from such recycled materials. We did this because we were poor and not because we were environmentalists interested in recycling (the term didn't even exist yet).

This scavenging trip involved a search for food. About two miles from our barrio, off the Hebronville Highway, was the Frontier Meat-Packing Plant. In the back of the plant was an area for garbage including a dozen large metal barrels filled with heaps of discarded detritus from the meat-packing operation: This included what is sometimes called "offal," the entrails and organs like the intestines (tripas), heart, lung, stomach, and the strips of fatty beef gleaned from the ribcage along the entire length of the carcass (these eventually became the famous fajitas or strip steaks). Back then, most of this offal was considered trash; it was not sold in the grocery stores or most butcher shops.

La plebe, however, had a different take on this. This was subaltern gourmet food, the delicacies that make for a good Sunday afternoon carne asada with tripas roasted in the disks discarded from broken farm implements and heated over mesquite wood fires.

Ninfa, our neighbor, would glean the best entrails from the trash heap, especially the intestines; She would take them home, wash and clean them, and then grill the delicacy over hot mesquite embers. The crispy and crunchy tripas were served with homemade corn tortillas, cilantro, and pico de gallo. So, I grew up eating so-called "trash" or "dumpster" food, we just never thought to call it that. It was just carne para el asado; meat for the barbeque grill.

From trash food to food trend?

Eventually, the meat-packers caught on and they stopped throwing the "offal" away: The stomach and sweetbreads, tongue, and intestines started showing up in the grocer meat counters for sale at seemingly cut-rate prices.

By the late 1960s, the offal had been commodified and the "free gleaning" period ended. By the late 1970s, when I was still a student at the University of Texas in Austin, a new food craze hit the hippie college town: Fajitas! The now legendary strip steaks - even Taco Bell and KFC sell "fajitas" - were just becoming fashionable "good eats" at the local taquerias and even some of the higher end Texas-styled barbeque restaurants.

How does offal become the hottest food trend? We, meaning Mexican working-class folks, were a bit concerned about this newfound popularity of our "trash foods." All of a sudden, the demand for strip steak rocketed and so did the price. A growing number of working-class raza found they could no longer afford the one cut of meat, other than ground beef, that had remained affordable.

Indeed, the commodification of food is embodied by the transformation of offal into high-end gourmet delicacy. This process has profound consequences for people's foodways, nutrition, health, and cultural heritage. It also says a lot about our wastefulness as a consumerist society with rather antiquated and perverse notions of food purity, food safety, and "freedom."

Researchers at the Contemporary Archaeology Project at the University of Arizona have found that American consumers trash a lot of food. The average family discards 1.28 pounds of food a day, about 470 pounds per household per year, or 14 percent of all food brought into the house.

Nationwide, household food waste represents about $43 billion in lost value to say nothing of the expanded ecological footprint underlying such waste. Consumers need to know that the over-abundance of food that we waste has the additional downside of having been produced in the first place by means that "produce" environmental waste for those who had to suffer the transformation of their homeland for the sake of our "right" to have the winter kiwi fruit that went moldy in our refrigerators.

Tony Bourdain, the chain-smoking NYC celebrity chef and TV's naughtiest traveling foodie, says as much when he admits knowing that when he picks up the phone to order supplies for his restaurant in New York City, mostly likely something or someone on the other end is dying to satisfy the order; and we are not talking motivation here by means of metaphor. In this manner, exotic food trends - kiwis or fajitas - increase hunger by increasing prices, wastefulness, and extractive degradation throughout the global commodity food chain.

Dumpster diving: from subsistence foraging to political activism

According to the Wikipedia, dumpster diving is defined as "the practice of sifting through commercial or residential trash to find items that have been discarded by their owners, but which may be useful to the Dumpster diver. The practice of Dumpster diving is also known variously as urban foraging, binning, alley surfing, Curbing, D-mart, Dumpstering, garbaging, garbage picking, garbage gleaning, skip-raiding, skip diving, skipping, skip-weaseling, tatting, skally-wagging or trashing."

The most common item Dumpster divers seek is edible food. While most people that dumpster dive for food are apparently homeless and hungry, there is an emerging social movement for voluntary simplicity and frugality that is promoting dumpster diving as a practice to reduce our grotesque wastefulness as a society of consumers. This movement even has a name, "Freeganism" and one can find numerous websites touting the philosophy, practice, and etiquette of dumpster diving.

At the same time, dumpster diving is also presented as a profitable business venture. For example, one website (thelivingweb.net) declares:

Contrary to popular opinion, dumpster diving is not just a means of survival for the homeless or the "down and out." For some, dumpsters and garbage piles are sources of priceless treasures (some very eBay-able). For others, they are a stash of wonderful "raw materials" waiting to be made into objects of art. For yet others, a source of food, clothing, decorative and useful items for the home.

It is intriguing indeed that in our capitalist society the dumpster has become the object of subsistence foragers, lifestyle activists, anarchists, urban nomads, and eBay enthusiasts - our society's "trash" is tied up with human reproduction and the production of commodities and political ideologies.

In part, this means that our traditional environmental concept of recycling as a post-consumption activity designed to reduce our ecological or carbon footprint is badly dated and out-of-sync with the reality of people on the ground living off trash by eating or transforming it into merchantable goods.

Freegan activists have an important message that often gets lost in the debates over hunger relief, poverty reduction, and environmental injustices: The USA is a perverse society of hyper-consumers that remains blind to its wastefulness and the violence that our wastefulness is based on and perpetuates. We are urged by our leaders, and we eagerly obey the call, to shop our way to freedom in the aftermath of traumatic events like 9/11.

Freegans are opposed to this logic. They tend to be vegetarians; they are likely to espouse the values of voluntary simplicity and reject consumer-oriented definitions of freedom and progress; they exhibit a creative propensity for guerrilla street theater and believe in grassroots direct action; they favor radical visions of a future that is more just and sustainable.

What strikes me as most important idea underlying freegan philosophy is something many of them seem to overlook. When people are reduced to foraging, no matter how creative and subversive this may seem, this indicates a serious pathological breakdown of local food systems. No one should be reduced to dumpster diving in a society that is just, sustainable, and resilient. This requires a cultural revolution, without the Maoist trappings. People must stop wasting food; sure. But people also have to be able to gain access to safe, nutritious, organic, and culturally appropriate food sources.

In a just and sustainable society, there will no need for dumpster diving because people will stop being wasteful. We can't get there unless we end hunger and we can't end hunger until we put a stop to the commodification and globalization of our food systems.