Sodbusters and the 'native gaze' - Part III

Anthropology grounded: a double entendre I am using the idea of anthropology “grounded” in the sense of two distinct meanings: The first meaning is similar to the commonsense notion that a teenager gets “grounded” for breaking parental rules designed to maintain safety, well-being, and the collective interests of the family. Why would the anthropology of food get grounded in this sense? Anthropology might at least be admonished for marginal treatment of indigenous agroecological epistemologies and long silence on the violence of the Green Revolution and its protégé, the Agro-Genomics Revolution. It might even be grounded for lapses into postmodern arrogance and disinterest in the threats facing traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and resilient local food systems in sovereign place-based communities. Where is the anthropology of food that can simultaneously demonstrate a useful interest and understanding of a given locality’s struggles for food sovereignty or agrarian reform? But let us go back first to the problem of the epistemological politics of “soil knowledge” and “soiled knowledge.” It was not until the 1980s, that anthropologists began to more openly acknowledge that the science of soil, edaphology (from the Greek, edaphos), was likely first developed by Mesoamerican ancestral civilizations. This occurred as early as the Classic Maya (250-900) and as recently as the Colhua Mexica at Chapultepec-Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco (1248-1521). The Mexica (Aztecs) classified soil into more than sixty varieties that they understood in terms of variations in the volume of organic material, depth of topsoil, recognition of strata, permeability, erosive properties, compaction ratios, and other principles that prefigure the methods of 20th century American soil conservation science (Peña 2005). Mexica ethnoedaphology (qua ethnopedology) is certainly striking because the scholar-farmers in the calmecacs (higher education institutions) appear to have classified soil types in a manner that anticipated by more than 400 years the science of soil conservation developed in Great Depression USA. Even more striking to me than deep antecedent status as a precursor science is that both Maya and Mexica edaphology provided that the measurement of the resilience of soils should always include reference to human actions that can provoke unintended consequences, i.e., chaos or uncertainty; stochastic effects in modern parlance. There is a deeper sense of respect for original instructions (a place-based epistemology) evident in the use of particular soils and these were codified in the manner of biophysical concepts like tepetate, a compacted clay strata that results from greedy over-tillage of the wrong soil profile and also refers to a naturally-occurring property of certain soil compositions characterized by dense clay lens in shallow topsoil. These codes were as much empirical observations of biophysical indicators as they were socio-cultural instructions that recognized and transmitted awareness of anthropogenic disturbance of soil quality. The Aztecs bridged C. P. Snow’s great divide between the natural and social sciences; too bad this has not happened in the American universities. Recognition of this accomplishment has not been readily forthcoming. It was well into the 1990s and even more recently, that anthropologists in Mexico and the USA were still among those peddling the myth that the Maya were victims of their own making, of an ecological catastrophe provoked by their rampant, reckless, and ignorant “slash-and-burn” agriculture that resulted in massive deforestation and demographic collapse (see Fedick 1996 and Peña 2005). Evidence to the contrary is ignored, including compelling work on the “Maya managed mosaic” (Fedick 1996). One recent, almost apologetic, study co-authored by a Mexican anthropologist notes how:

Soil knowledge in the pre-Colombian era was a noticeable attribute of indigenous people in Mexico. A Mayan soil classification for the Yucatan peninsula has been used by local people. The Aztecs and Toltecs in the Central Valleys classified soils by land use and textures. Some names still persist today. In spite of this, the “modern” era of soil science in Mexico started in 1926 when the Mexican National Commission of Irrigation (NCI) brought American soil scientists to train the first agronomists on soil surveys required for the implementation of irrigation of lands. In 1929, the first Mexican scientific meeting, known as “The First Agrological College,” was held in Meoqui, Chihuahua. This meeting is considered as the first formal activity in the field of soil science in Mexico…One of the major problems in the development of soil science in Mexico has been the lack of communication between the farmers and scientists. To alleviate this problem, some researchers have suggested that the ethnopedological knowledge should be incorporated into soil maps, since, in many cases, a map generated from ethnopedological knowledge is more precise and accurate than similar technical maps for management purposes…(Gonzalez, Ventura, and Castellanos 2006: 1)

These authors repeat the obvious slip of Eurocentric historical periodization, “pre-Columbian.” The notion that Maya soil knowledge was just a “noticeable attribute” is more insidious because it trivializes the extent to which it is now recognized that these ancestral civilizations invested major institutional efforts, intellectual resources, and communal labor toward matters of soil conservation and watershed protection. This was serious enough to involve the mobilization of many hundreds of farmers, mathematicians, “diviners” [sic], and other specialists in the collective work (tequio) required to design, construct, repair, and maintain structures like terraces, check dams, dikes, canals, ponds, viaducts, rejolladas, bajadas, xinampas, and agroforestry mosaics on a rather large spatial scale (Beach et al 2006; Fedick 1996; Peña 2005). It would seem difficult to engage in communication over soil matters when the exclusion or inadvertent belittling of local knowledge of soils is lamented as the mere “lack of communication between farmers and scientists,” as if these two could readily understand and respect one another in such an environment of presumed intellectual and managerial superiority on the part of the academics or the neoliberals that hunger for the Native commonwealth. Absent in this seemingly more embracing and celebratory account of “folk soil taxonomy” is the bedrock Mexica ontological presupposition that soil is a dynamic and living organism in itself. While directly unaware of microbes, nematodes, and other micro flora, the Mexica clearly understood the importance of human respect for the health of soils. The Mexica, like other Mesoamerican peoples, practiced regenerative agriculture – their cultural practices regenerated the natural conditions of the soil organism that defined the capacities and limits of the agroecosystem. Recycling human, animal, and plant wastes and debris, and fiercely dedicated to protecting drinking and irrigation water quality, the Mexica produced an essentially urban-based agroecological revolution by redeploying ancient Maya xinampa agricultural techniques and recasting them within the massive hydraulic system of the Lake Texcoco District. The productivity in corn, bean, and squash accomplished by the “floating gardens” of Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco would not be exceeded until many decades after the 1910 Revolution (Simon 1997; Peña 2005). Of course, the real tragedy in all this is that Mexico has not been self-sufficient in corn production since the early 1970s, a history charting the loss of “food sovereignty” that remains beyond the scope of this paper. I believe all this indicates that much of the anthropology that has been practiced in or about Mexico and Mesoamerican civilizations around the issue of soil classification and conservation should be “grounded.” It perpetuates epistemological violence, especially perhaps by subjecting the ethnopoetic “cognitive mapping” of local place-makers to scrutiny and comparison and integration into a top-down, managerially-driven GIS remote sensing technological apparatus that may very well in the end not serve local communities’ well-being and autonomy. Anthropology of this sort needs to get confined to its own ivory tower playroom, so it can quiet down a bit, cool its heels out, get past reflexivity and all that self-serving nonsense, and perhaps gain a more respectful understanding and attitude toward Others. This is already being decided for the sodbuster anthropologists. In an increasing number of Native communities, which are the typical subjects of anthropological studies, the tribal and other communal authorities are more likely to refuse ethnographers and other researchers easy unrestricted access to their localities. This is the response dealt anthropologists when they violate the trust and respect we have come to expect of each other in our own origin communities. Whether it violates that trust by mismanaging sacred information or using deep knowledge of a peoples’ sense of place and history to betray community objectives or to justify attacks on indigenous epistemologies does not matter. If it simply remains silent, or worse pretends that deconstructing the meaning, the floating signification, of the global bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich so that we can critique the ecological footprint of the average American is somehow a more important task than agrarian reform and indigenous sovereignty, then it too will be dismissed and grounded. Honestly? We are dying from hunger and malnutrition while a new generation of postmodern intellectuals helps Americans “deconstruct” their Big Macs and Happy Meals to reduce their “ecological footprints” and develop more individually responsible and healthy lifestyles. The second meaning of the phrase, “anthropology grounded,” involves a methodology of recognition and collaborative iteration with alterNative epistemologies of place. This is not the same as sociological “grounded theory.” Grounded theory is an inductive technique developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967); their use of the term means that the theory develops out of the field research process and is “grounded in the data” from which it is derived. At a meta-theoretical level, what I am proposing is not the same because I do not embrace any kind of correspondence theory of objective observable reality as something we can safely assume constitutes neutral and unmediated data. I am inclined to state that there is a difference between data as corresponding to unmediated objective and observable reality and place-based experience attached to sets of socio-cultural “original instructions.” These constitute very different epistemological practices. One is observed, categorized, memorandum-ized, and theorized; the other is lived, shared, experienced, and “storied.” This means in part that one of the only ways I can envision myself practicing an alterNative anthropology of food systems is to address questions extant in my own place, in this case on the lands of my family’s acequia farm in Colorado. I turn to this next and hope it will indicate some possibilities for grounding the alterNative anthropology of food systems in a framework emerging from a place-based epistemology. This is Part 3 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8. This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

Milk and the 'price' of a human life

$29,000 is the value of a migrant worker's life in China Shoreline, Wa. Last year, the dangers posed to food safety by the globalization of the food system came to a heated climax around September. There were reports of thousands of deaths and illnesses in China, the United States, Canada, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and other countries caused by contamination of a variety of Chinese industrial products ranging from dog food and toothpaste to milk and medicine. Melamine, a poisonous ingredient that was added to provide false enhanced readings of the protein content of milk, dog food, and other foodstuffs, was one of the contaminants found in China's food supply chain. Hundreds of persons and pets died and thousands were taken ill or left with impaired liver functions and other chronic health problems. Apparently, in China, like the USA, this type of structural violence must be given a "price" so the "free" market can reckon its "value." Overlooked in most recent accounts of the further decline of food safety as a result of globalization is a settlement reached in a case in China's Gansu province. The case involved a settlement with the family of a six-month old infant who died in September 2008. The death was directly traced to one of the incidents of Melamine contamination of milk formulas. Left unsaid in mainstream media accounts is the notion that these deaths are the "cost" that China seems willing to pay in pursuit of its strategy of becoming the world's principal industrial capitalist mass producer. China is poised as the world's largest manufacturer of absolutely everything from toys and computers to cars and tractor parts as well as the ingredients for mass produced food, medicine, and animal feed products. The death of the young infant is eloquently reported by Edward Wong in the New York Times of Saturday 17 January 2009. Wong reports that the milk producer, Sanlu Group, just settled the death for $29,200. Neoliberal death in China? What does it mean for the communist [sic] one-party corporatist state in China to allow the unregulated law of the anarchic market to determine the money-value of a human life? The area is "poor," we are told. The money is more than the family has ever imagined possible. Indeed, the family did not expect to win the case. Everything works out and everyone gets to go back to their lot in life and death. The female plant manager faces serious criminal charges and must deal directly with the possibility of a death penalty punishment. It makes me wonder how many times American capitalists and managers have gotten away with similar acts of murder through industrial fraud and neglect with nothing but a limited liability penalty to pay for it? Is "monetary" compensation really equal to the "value" of a lost life? The Chinese courts have agreed in this case that the value of the "extirpated life" of the migrant family's infant son is $29,200. This, of course, assumes that his life would have remained subordinated to the regime of abstract labor; that the infant's life would have inevitably involved the subordination of his body to the endless regime of exploitable units of labor time, ultimately valued as such solely because they were "lost" to capitalist accumulation and reproduction. How absurd though. Is it really possible or ethical to quantify a life this way? Too many rural Chinese exceed the expectations and norms of a corporatist regime to presume any family would welcome a $29,200 price tag as an adequate replacement for the lost memories of life and shared experiences with a child who is now a future ghostly ancestor. This death reminds me of another one long ago reported by Angus Wright in his classic book, The death of Ramon Gonzalez: A modern agricultural dilemma. Ramon Gonzalez died from pesticide poisoning. He suffered a slow but agonizing death from multiple exposures over decades of field work in the export-monocrop plantations of the Culiacan Valley. In both cases, death is the result of the transformation of a local food system. Instead of place-based agroecosystems producing heirloom crops for local consumption and trade, the landscape is transformed into poisonous industrial monocultures, synthetic cogs in the machine of global commodity chains that sell poisons as nutrients. Meanwhile, the outgoing Bush administration has had a lot to say about the "price" of a human life in 2008: In one context, Bush declared that "every life is precious" and all life should be protected, an obvious reference to his anti-abortion views. In another context, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) "knocked $900,000 off the value of a human life." According to an Associated Press report dated July 10, 2008, the EPA decided in May that an American life isn't worth what it used to be. The EPA based its new estimate as the culmination of more than two decades of "neoliberal" logic encompassed by the peculiar over-quantification of everything known as cost-benefit analysis. The AP report states that the "value of a statistical life" is $6.9 million in today's dollars, a drop of nearly $1 million from just five years ago.

GUEST BLOG: A Critical Appraisal of the Slow Food Movement

Slow Food : Inching towards Food Sovereignty? By Meghan L. Holmes SAN FRANCISCO, CA. Recently, Carlos Petrini, the founder of the Slow Foods movement, has been incorporating the concept of food sovereignty in his social discourse. To some food activists, this is a logical consequence of Slow Food’s opposition to the industrial agi-foods complexes controlling our food systems. Others, dismiss the statements as superficial (and the movement as elitist). Still others find Petrini’s position a welcome surprise, and await further developments. Can Slow Food—a movement reknowned for it’s gourmet food and well-heeled consumers advance a broad-based notion like food sovereignty?

Slow Food Movement: History and Philosophy

The Slow Food movement was formed in response to the establishment of a McDonald’s restaurant in the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. Its founder, Carlo Petrini, was a food journalist who was concerned about what the presence of a McDonald’s would mean for the local food culture. In particular, he saw the food chain as a threat to the local trattoria and osterie, the local dining establishments of the working class. When Slow Food became an official movement in 1989 at the Opera Comique in Paris, the Manifesto stated:

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods...A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life…Our defense should began at the table with Slow Food. Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

The original focus of the Slow Food movement was predominately the defense of gastronomic pleasure from the “Fast Food model”, with particular concern for traditional food items. However, it soon expanded to encompass concerns of environmental destruction due to the industrialized and globalized food system. In addition to encouraging more ecologically sustainable production methods, the Slow Food movement also supports the protection of biodiversity, particularly of gastronomically significant crop and livestock species, varieties and breeds. This perspective, dubbed “eco-gastronomy”, incorporated the “recognition of the strong connections between plate and planet”. Eventually, the Slow Food movement philosophy also came to advocate for fair compensation for farmers and other food producers. The movement has more recently defined Slow Food as,

[G]ood, clean, and fair food. We believe that the food we eat should taste good; that it should be produced in a clean way that does not harm the environment, animal welfare or our health; and the food producers should receive fair compensation for their work.

These three main elements, which represent taste, environmental sustainability, and social justice respectively, are those which Carlo Petrini has identified as being essential to quality food.

More recently, Petrini has incorporated the term “food sovereignty” in his public statements. For example, in his opening address at the 2004 Terra Madre (to be discussed later) he stated that, “The pesticide and GMO multinationals are implementing policies incompatible with the environment, stressing mother earth, humbling the food sovereignty of peoples and jeopardizing the freedom of farmers and growers.” On the Slow Food website he wrote, “The principles of small-farming agriculture and food sovereignty can help rebuild the fabric of productive rural communities based on strong human relationships. They can create a new small-scale agricultural economy that respects the environment and provides small farmers and their families with dignity and skills.” He has also written a piece emphasizing food sovereignty as a human right and highlighting the commitment of Slow Food to the concept.

What is Food Sovereignty?

Food sovereignty is a term first conceived by the global peasant movement Via Campesina in 1996 at their Second International Conference in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Via Campesina is a “transnational peasant and farm movement [that has] vowed to collectively resist the globalization of agriculture to ensure that the voices of those who produce the world’s food would be heard.”

One of the most commonly used definitions of food sovereignty comes from Via Campesina:

Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to define their own food and agriculture policies; to protect and regulate domestic agricultural production and trade in order to achieve sustainable development objectives; to determine the extent to which they want to be self reliant; to restrict the dumping of products in their markets, and; to provide local fisheries-based communities the priority in managing the use of and the rights to aquatic resources. Food sovereignty does not negate trade, but rather, it promotes the formulation of trade policies and practices that serve the rights of peoples to safe, healthy and ecologically sustainable production. http://viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php

Via Campesina has also outlined 14 principles of food sovereignty, which refer to the specifics of the movement’s position. These include emphasis of food (and its production) as a human right, local production, pesticide and GMO-free agriculture, cultural protection, hunger elimination, greater control over public policy, fair prices for producers, removal of agricultural from trade agreements and out of the hands of related governing bodies, and prioritizing growing food over fuel production.

Food sovereignty is currently a powerful political concept and maintains a great deal of meaning for the peasants, fisherfolk, and food justice activists who use it. What does the term really mean for the defenders of “quiet material pleasure” in the Slow Food movement?. Petrini’s use of the term seems to imply a commitment to challenge the system that puts fuel over food, allows hunger in a time of abundance, prevents people from feeding themselves, prioritizes corporations over communities, and relegates biodiversity as secondary to productivity. Given that the concepts of food sovereignty and Slow Food come from very different philosophical, economic, and social reference points—and maintain different goals—can the Slow Food movement become a means to achieve food sovereignty?

Slow Food as a Means to Achieving Food Sovereignty

The philosophical positions of the Slow Food and food sovereignty movements are clearly compatible on many issues. In particular, Slow Food, like food sovereignty, rejects the use of GMOs, demands sustainable agriculture practices, fair prices for producers, supports biodiversity, and emphasizes the preservation of traditional techniques and knowledge.

However, the two movements diverge regarding the mean for achieving these goals. The Via Campesina has very clear political positions, and is outspoken in its opposition to many international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization. Their tactics involve demonstrations, protests and other forms of mobilization. Via Campesina defines itself as a peasant movement that focuses primarily on the rights of the world’s food producers.

Conversely, while “much of the work of contemporary peasant activists consists of identifying and drawing attention to the institutional agencies behind the increasingly deterritorialized and invasive market forces that buffet them from all sides” , the Slow Food movement has yet to make a political statement regarding the political and economic institutions which have significant control over the nature of world agriculture. The movement’s tactics could be described as passive: attracting attention to the Slow Food philosophy through education and taste rather than pursuing an overtly political agenda. According to Renato Sardo, former International Director of Slow Food, “[The movement’s president] Carlo [Petrini] always says he doesn’t want Slow Food to be a super big operation, a super political operation. Slow Food is a light movement and not a very powerful movement, and does not have enormous financial capacity. Slow Food is more [about] cultural stimulation that puts things in the minds of people in a general pro-positive way.” Personal interview with Renato Sardo, April 17, 2007

Further, while Via Campesina and food sovereignty arose directly out of opposition to the neo-liberal policies that devastate peasant livelihoods and undermine the ability of the world’s poor to feed themselves, the Slow Food movement is constantly battling accusations of elitism, due to its high membership costs, financially inaccessible events, and promotion of expensive gourmet products. Claims one prominent agroecologist, “They want the poor to prepare food for the rich.”

Despite these contradictions, Slow Food’s may have the potential to act as a suitable vehicle for at least some elements of food sovereignty. Currently, the Slow Food movement’s projects regarding biodiversity, education, the pleasure of food, creating networks, and building “food communities” may provide opportunities for introducing the food sovereignty agenda to those who might otherwise never have heard of the concept, or the movement . And don’t poor peasants, fishers and agricultural wokers have a right to enjoy good food?

Biodiversity

The Slow Food movement activists and the subsistence level agriculturalists, pastoralists, and fisherfolk view the current global agricultural system as a great threat to the most essential element of a viable food system: biodiversity. Agricultural plant genetic resources, which have suffered constant and substantial decline due to modern commercial agriculture (FAO 1996), are vital in that they provide ecosystem stability and adaptability, as well as retain cultural significance. However, due to the economic focus on just a few staple crops, many “minor” crops from a global perspective (FAO 1996) receive little attention but are locally, regionally or nationally important.

The Slow Food movement has attempted to address lesser known agricultural products of cultural significance through the Presidia. The Presidia, supported by the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity, is a project that assists groups of artisan producers or growers whose products are at risk of extinction. In the developed world Presidia projects help producers of products such as cheese and cured meats, whereas in the developing world the products tend to be cereals, herbs and spices, coffee, tea, and cacao. The Presidia helps producers establish standards for their products and create economic linkages with consumers through branding and marketing.

However, while Presidia projects give crops at risk much needed attention, the projects continue to propagate a system of market-based solutions to address the vulnerability of unique varieties and products to extinction. The Slow Food Presidia do little to challenge the political economy from which the original troubles stem, and therefore make negligible progress on the ultimate goal of a “viable future for traditional foods.”

In addition, particularly in the developing world, the Presidia products are best suited for foreign markets, thus they are generally exported. A focus on export-oriented crops may be problematic in achieving sovereignty. On one hand, Via Campesina’s concept of food sovereignty “does not negate trade.” By trading unique products with distinct gourmet value, producers can help maintain threatened plant biodiversity, and can capture a market that is willing to pay fair prices to producers. However, producing value-added crops such as vanilla or coffee does little to address the nutritional needs of the producing communities. According to Via Campesina, “food is first and foremost a source of nutrition and only secondarily an item of trade” (Desmarais 2004). Thus, the crucial questions therefore is, does the production of these export commodities displace local edible crops?

Education

According to Alice Waters, “Slow Food reminds us of the importance of knowing where our food comes from. When we understand the connection between the food on our table and the field where it grows, our everyday meals can anchor us to nature and the place where we live."

One of the aims of the Slow Food movement is to “improve public knowledge of food, particularly that of artisan producers, with the aim of securing awareness of our right to pleasure and taste.” The Slow Food organizers have founded the University of Gastronomic Sciences which “aims to educate and train students to be able to spread the philosophy of Slow Food and foster the development of sustainable agriculture.” On a smaller scale, local convivia (chapters) are encouraged to start school gardens in their towns or cities as, “there is no better way to understand food than to grow it yourself.”

Unfortunately, the Slow Food movement has directed little educational focus on the concepts of food as a right, social justice, land reform, or international trade policy—subjects that are of fundamental importance to food sovereignty. However, the emphasis that Slow Food places on food education and the institutions that have been established, have potential as vehicles for exploring a deeper analysis of the existing flawed food system.

Focus on Pleasure

Focusing on gastronomic pleasure may seem an unlikely means to achieving food sovereignty, particularly in the developing world. However, highlighting the pleasure that can be derived from food helps to develop a personal interest in what one is eating. Ideally, when food consumers start to pay attention to the quality of the ingredients they may also start to ask other questions about their food. Thus capturing attention through taste may serve to increase awareness of other food issues. Moreover, even if consumers are not incited to investigate the production of the food they eat, they may still be voluntarily participating in a system of production that exhibits characteristics of a sovereign system. For example, products of the highest quality are often made on a smaller scale, using traditional knowledge and geographically unique inputs rather than via an industrialized manufacturing process.

Clearly, touting the “pleasure principle” is not going to speak to the world’s hungry. It does, however, offer the hope that focusing attention on the quality of food will ultimately lead consumers to reject the industrial model that is common to the struggles of both Slow Food and food sovereignty activists. The question is, do they reject the industrial model, or simply the industrial product?

Communication Between Food Communities

Every two years since 2004, Slow Food has held an event called, Terra Madre in Turin, Italy. Terre Madre “[B]rings together representatives of food communities that produce good, clean and fair food in a responsible and sustainable way”. According to Renato Sardo,

The whole Terra Madre operation is simply to put the world’s attention on the farmers and to say ‘if we want to save the world we have to start with these people, we have to protect these people’. Listen to what they have to say, enable universities and science to learn from these people, because often times they have been neglected and deserve to be heard. Personal interview with Renato Sardo, April 17, 2007

While issues surrounding the politics of representation at the conference remain to be resolved (many participating farmers do not speak the languages used at the conference—much less each other’s…), Terra Madre offers a potential opportunity for communication links to be formed between food producers all over the world promoting a transmission of information and solutions.

Linking Producers and “Co-Producers”

According to the Slow Food website: [W]e promote the concept of being a “co-producer” – that is, going beyond the passive role of a consumer and taking interest in those that produce our food, how they produce it and the problems they face in doing so. In actively supporting food producers, we become part of the production process.

By introducing consumers to the idea that they are involved in the production of their food, the concept of “co-producer” encourages them to examine whether or not they contribute to a healthy, sustainable, and just food system.

To help create the linkages between the producers and “co-producers” Slow Food organizes events, fairs and markets. By focusing on locally-produced food, the movement seeks to minimize the number of steps through which food passes, simplifying the food system. This could be a step towards re-organizing the way wealth and market power is distributed within the food system, in order to increase benefits and decision-making power to those who produce our food. Or, it could simply make it easier for those who want good fresh food to get it at relatively lower cost…

Conclusion

In Petrini’s book, Slow Food: A Case for Taste, he says that “the Slow Food ‘recipe’….is a proposal to wed pleasure to awareness and responsibility, study and knowledge, and to offer opportunities for development even to poor and depressed regions through a new model of agriculture”(Petrini 2001). While the message is noble, as a food sovereignty movement, Slow Food will have a long road—with important political crossroads—ahead of it. Presently, the Slow Food version of development does little to actually challenge or dismantle the industrial agrifoods complexes that control our food systems, In practice, Petrini’s development plan to help “poor and depressed regions” is actually a plan to help them create gourmet products meant largely for export to foreign, rich “foodies.” This version of development, operating within the same neo-liberal market paradigm that marginalizes these producers in the first place, in and of itself is not enough to advance food sovereignty. If and when the Slow Food movement does propose a new, more equitable model of agricultural development, it remains to be seen whom within the movement will act to change the food system.—such a model would require a much more in depth analysis of the current model and its shortcomings.

However, the Slow Food movement, as it now stands, has the potential to support elements of food sovereignty. It has international networks with local chapters, and a food community representing the diverse interests of farmers, pastoralists, and fisherfolk, as well as artisans and chefs. Its focus on educating people about food can contribute to a greater global consciousness about where food comes from, how it is made, and who makes it, all the while piquing new interest by demonstrating that food can be a source of great pleasure. The greatest contribution that the Slow Food movement can have is to draw the attention of a brand new group of people to the social, cultural, and environmental tragedy that has arisen from an industrialized, corporate controlled food system. If Carlo Petrini is genuinely committed to pursuing food sovereignty, he must do more than just incorporate the term into his public discourse. He must also consider how to put the resources and membership of the movement at the service of those clamoring for food sovereignty. A strong first step would be to open space within the Slow Food movement not just for small producers to serve good food, but for them to speak. Slow Food will move towards food sovereignty when the movement ensures that the voices of those who produce the world’s food are heard.

MODERATOR'S NOTE: This blog was originally posted on the Food First home page on October 2, 2007. Please visit our friends at Food First: http://foodfirst.org/

NOTES

Slow Food Manifesto, http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/manifesto.lasso

Slow Food philosophy, http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/philosophy.lasso

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/events/petrini_speech.html http://sloweb.slowfood.com/sloweb/eng/dettaglio.lasso?cod=SW_00587 http://editore.slowfood.it/editore/riviste/slow/EN/54/slow54_02.pdf

Desmarais, Annette Aurelie. 2004. The Via Campesina: Peasant Women on the Frontiers of Food Sovereignty. Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme 23(1): 140-145.

Edelman, Marc. 2005. Bringing the Moral Economy back in…to the Study of 21st Century Transnational Peasant Movements. American Anthropologist 107(3): 331-345. http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/defense_biodiversity.lasso

Petrini, Carlo (2001) Slow Food: The Case for Taste. Columbia University Press: New York. http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/statute.lasso

http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/taste_education.lasso http://www.terramadre2006.org/terramadre/welcome_eng.lasso http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/linking_producers.lasso

Sodbusters and the 'native' gaze - Part II

Sodbusters redux: Responding to the epistemological violence of the Green Revolution My thoughts on the sodbuster joke pose some very serious radical questions and problems for epistemological genuflection including for my topic today, which is the grounding of an indigenous anthropology of food or, better, an alterNative anthropology of food systems. Anthropologists have had their fill of soil talk, but they have followed a rather circuitous route. We have tended to not want to get our hands, or our mouths, dirty. This is nowhere more apparent than in the study of the Green Revolution and its disregard for Native soil knowledge. Indeed, Frank Miller (1977: 194) in an article in American Ethnologist suggested that anthropology’s “actual role [in the study of the Green Revolution] has been negligible” and until that time there were only “four pieces of empirical research by anthropologists in the United States.” Apparently, while anthropologists have a long history of studying the anthropology of food, they have been much more reluctant to engage in study of the agroecological practices and politics of food systems. Anthropologists have contributed little to an understanding of how the development of the tools and methods underlying the Green Revolution (GR) occurred in America’s heartland. Indeed, the Midwestern USA model of monocultures of scale was the prototype for the modern hybrid-fertilizer-bioicide technology package. California, of course, also became a critical proving ground for GR technologies and methods that would later be exported to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This production model focused on high-yield/high input varieties (HY/HIVs) of maize, wheat, rice, and other cultivars for use by farmers across the world. The professed objective was to end world hunger through agricultural modernization. However, the industrialization and standardization of modern monoculture agriculture derived from one obsession only: The quest to universalize the American model was driven by efforts to concentrate the control of global food supplies within transnational corporations served by obedient scientists in the land grant universities and extension services. This surely had its analog in the organization of the GR and the captive role of various miracle crop development centers like Mexico’s CIMMYT, the International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat (see Wright 1984, 1990). The goal may have been for some of the technicians an innocent and well-intentioned effort to reduce world hunger but the methods were misguided and the results largely detrimental to food sovereignty and the prospects for meaningful agrarian reform. The Green Revolution – as it emerged and spread out centripetally from the Midwestern USA to the rest of the world – became part of our foreign policy-making. The corporate agribusiness lobby converted food into political weaponry (Cleaver 1972, 1981). This is not fringe left-wing conspiracy theory; it was the exact position formulated as policy by Nixon’s Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz in 1974. An important aspect of the policy was to create markets for American technologies, seeds, biocides, and other inputs and to meet the demand spawned by the endless bankrolling of infrastructure development to support a modern industrial agricultural system on a global scale. The GR created and promoted markets for the export of U.S. manufactured “economic poisons,” i.e., pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, etc. This is what led to the phrase the “Circle of Poison” and was the problem that Rachel Carson had the sense and passion to recognize and name with the more direct and honest term, “biocides.” Finally, the GR was also a strategy to suppress the struggles for substantive agrarian reform that would have favored the landless and the smallholder. Instead, the aim was to follow the USA lead by concentrating agriculture capital as a precondition for participating in the economies of scale envisioned to address world hunger while undergoing the process of technological and methods modernization. The advent of the Green Revolution opened unambiguously with its complement of anthropological advisors (see Miller 1977). Some anthropologists apparently did fairly low-key field studies to understand and perhaps manipulate the strategies that third-world farmers adopted in dealing with the new high-input methods of monoculture commercial crop production. I am not sure we know if there was a well-organized “Project Camelot” for the Green Revolution spearheaded by Chicago School-type boys, but I believe most of these scholars were guilty of being prone to engage in “remote social science,” the gathering and interpreting of the data collected by the thin ranks of “local” soil scientists, agronomists, and natural resource and land managers. What seems clear is that anthropologists, until well into the 1990s, largely ignored the massive displacement and immiseration of so-called third-world peasant farmers, a legendary consequence of the violence of the Green Revolution (Shiva 1988, 1992, and 1993). Anthropologists were by virtue of their relative silence and disinterest in these issues complicit in this epistemological violence. The revolts against the epistemological and political violence of the Green Revolution There are three phases in the rebellion against the Green Revolution and its academic purveyors and principals. These were results of discontent among small family farmer organizations and younger scientists in the emerging field of agroecology, who shared disdain for the privileging of the knowledge of experts based in university, governmental, or corporate entities. There was a call to embrace farmers’ local knowledge. This demand confronted an environment that routinely disqualified local farmers as producers of agricultural know-how. Wes Jackson (1980) and Marty Strange (1988) chronicle the efforts of farming systems theorists who first railed against the exclusion of farmer’s knowledge and best embodied the spirit of the rebellion during the early to mid-1970s in the USA context. The farming systems theorists were more likely economists, agronomists, or independent farmer scholars. There were no anthropologists among the first voices to challenge the knowledge of the technicians in lab white. The “new” paradigm shifted from ex situ to in situ models and favored the family farm as the basic economic unit. Farming systems theorists proposed returning to local and renewable inputs and argued for diversified farm operations. Organic methods were championed along with a preference for low-input biological traction. Human, animal, and renewable power sources were favored over energy-intensive mechanization. This hardly seems radical today. In its day, this was a response to the dominant scientifically prescribed biases born of a commitment to “heterosis” or presumed “hybrid vigor” and an equally unquestioned commitment to energy intensive and chemically addicted agriculture, both of which characterized the ‘normative infrastructure’ of the Green Revolution technicians. Agroecologists led the second rebellion against the Green Revolution beginning with the work of Miguel Altieri and colleagues in the mid- to late 1980s. They embraced the farming systems emphasis on re-qualification of local knowledge but added a preference for in situ conservation of biodiversity through heirloom land race cultivars adapted to place-based conditions. Agroecologists went further and outlined an explicit alternative epistemology and scientific basis for sustainable agriculture based on local, place-based knowledge, radical change ethics, and practical political strategies addressing issues like agrarian reform and the role of the state (see Altieri 1995; Peña 1999, 2005). They introduced a keener sense and respect for non-economic rationalities underlying many agroecosystems and the importance of mutual reliance interests, reciprocity, and coevalness. In a continuation of this struggle, we have entered a new phase that pits Agroecology against what I call “Agro-Genomics” (cf. Altieri 2004). The third wave is aligned against the “old” Green and “new” Agro-Genomics Revolutions. Since the early 1990s, movements for local/slow food, food sovereignty, and food justice have emerged. Farmer-activists, more apt to speak local/slow food than anti-globalization politics, lead these movements. Activists, farmers, and scientists in this third wave propose that socially just and resilient agriculture must become local and bioregional; its energy circuits must encompass the foodshed and respect the limits and opportunities of place. Communities will have to re-territorialize food systems and reawaken seasonally adapted heritage cuisines. This will further re-localize food production. The end of global commodity chains occasioned by the technological and consumptive limits of a post-Peak Oil world portends of a transition beyond the current global toward more bioregional food systems. Are we prepared for this transition? Not if we remain committed sodbusters with a cultural myopia on matters of soil knowledge. This is Part 2 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8. This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.

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.