Food Justice, II: El tiempo de cambio

A time for hunger in the fast food deserts of disaster capitalism?

Seattle, WA. The new year brings no particular turning point for me other than the opportunity to take brief mental note of the funny obsession scientists demonstrated over the past week by debating a proposed shift from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) to the "infinitely more accurate" count kept by the French "atomic clock" time keepers who have admittedly and purposefully "lost" a second due to the slowing of the Earth's rotation. Uh-Hum....Perhaps the Earth is slowing down in preparation for 2012?

"Time is money," the financiers are fond of saying, so it must be important for science to figure out a way to count every damn nanosecond.

But really: Time is a different matter for those without money, including "illegible" native peoples who do not want to adopt the "universal equivalent" to define the measure of their exchange relations with others, and who refuse to turn their bodies over to working to create imaginary paper value for someone else, no matter how it is proposed that we take "measure of time." Besides, we just learned that a second was lost in the Earth's now not so inevitable or eternal turning. Let's just not give any of our time over to the shock and awe capitalist privateers.

Speaking of time, or at least "historical time," many observers and pundits say that terrorism has become the iconic problem of our latest fin de siècle, the end of an era and the beginning of a new one to be known as the "Post 9/11 World."

But what do we call the era that, presumably, just ended? The end of the "innocence of democracy"? I have said before that democracy is still an unattained and perhaps dystopian dream. The end of the "post-modern"? I have said before that the pre-modern [sic] were already post-modern before Foucault and Derrida decided Europe needed to get into discourse and identity politics or the critique of governmentality.

Do we focus on what is emerging? Perhaps a new New Modernity? The Age of Post-Empire? Or, to borrow a phrase coined by Naomi Klein, the Era of "Disaster Capitalism"?

The "changes" upon us are not so easily characterized in any of these ways. For indigenous peoples, nothing has really ended: For Native Americans and Xicana/os there certainly is no "post-colonial," "post-modern," or "post-empire" time upon us. The Age of (colonializing) Empire remains extant and the post-modern is largely a tragic philosophical distraction.

Speaking of time. I have been trying to squeeze-in some reading before the start of Winter Quarter classes next week. I am reading Naomi Klein's fascinating book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

There is for me, as a native person, something deeply ironic about this book. Klein describes an essentially post-1950s development in the spread of the neoliberal form of "catastrophy capitalism," which she sees is playing havoc with the world's poor, working classes, and nature. Equating it with the effects of ECT (Electro-Convulsive Therapy), the shock and awe opportunism of disaster capitalism seeks to create a "pure and blank state" to construct free market nirvanas.

The irony for me is that this is exactly what also defines the historical trauma unleashed by colonialist violence visited on native peoples starting some five hundred years ago. Our experience with "disaster capitalism" has deeper roots than the post-1970 neoliberal policies of economic shock and awe, which Klein correctly notes start with the Chicago School boys in Chile after the CIA-backed assassination of President Allende. Indeed, we are the living ghosts of the original primitive accumulation.

So when we say "Xicana time" or "Indian time," we are not really referring to being late for our appointed rounds. We are alluding to the deep time of historical trauma, the five centuries of displacement and alienation from our own cultures and livelihoods that have been wrought of the systemic structural violence that has confronted our peoples for so long.

Time, speed, and fast-food zombies

Nothing seems more unlikely than the connection between time, speed, and hunger. Think for example of "fast food." The idea of very quickly mass producing and consuming "cheater" food within 2-3 minutes of the placement of an order is a direct manifestation of the time is money ideology.

We don't have time it seems to cook for ourselves and so we become dependent on fast food to save time and money. Or so we think.

Of course, space plays games with time every where. Think of the so-called "food deserts" that surround the inner city neighborhoods inhabited by people of color and the poor and working-poor. In South Los Angeles, for example, there are no full-service grocery stores within 5 to 10 miles of some residential neighborhoods. People must "commute" a dozen miles to purchase fresh fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuffs. Many of the food desert inhabitants have no cars or often cannot pay to commute to far off grocery stores. Instead they flock to the ubiquitous fast food retailers that dot the landscape with promises of dollar for two napalmed fries and carcinogenic processed-cheese burgers.

The urban policies that create food deserts are elements of sustained structural violence against the poor and communities of color.

Here speed comes into play since the food deserts are also results of the policies that were designed to benefit suburban commuters. The construction of freeways and other infrastructure displaced and impoverished the urban ecology of the barrio and ghetto and this included the loss of open space for urban farms and the decline of the inner city with the resulting exodus of grocers and other small retail and service businesses that fulfill local neighborhood needs. Freeways and the exodus of grocers are handmaids in this legacy of structural violence that has produced malnourished and spiritless fast-food zombies.

The movement for food justice seeks to end policies that favor speed and its time-is-money spatial arrangements. We need to get the world to slow down and get deep: Slow food needs slow jobs and slow living, deeply rooted in place.

This is more than anti-globalization. From the grassroots, the world already sings in hybrid chimeras as Zapotecs in Oaxacalifornia and Vancouver illustrate.

This has to do with the abstraction by capital, through the imposition of the mystical niceties of the commodity form, of our "labor time." So, we need to consider following the old Mexican campesino adage by working to live, not living to work.

Slow food needs slow farms regrown over uprooted freeways. Instead of a world without us, slow food brings a world transformed into sustainable and just practices and communities that follow place-based original instructions. Now that is a type of post-modern deconstruction I would enthusiastically embrace.