Martin Luther King, Jr. on Food Justice

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

~ Martin Luther King, Jr., From remarks upon acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize

Shoreline, WA. Today is the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the blogosphere and mainstream media are filled with solemn quotes from pundits, reflective lamentations by activists, and even invocations and email solicitations from liberal politicians asking for continued dedication to the equality struggle.

I grew up listening to MLK, Jr. on the family's old black and White TV or crackling vacuum tube radio. My grandfather was a follower and once said: "That man would die for his people. How many of us are willing to do that?"  Little did we know he would be so punished for his principled dissent.

I eventually became suspicious of perceived limits apparent in his call for equality. This was due to the influence of lessons from my Uncles' experiences, drawn from a vicarious immersion in the rise of the early Chicano movement of the mid- to late 1960s. The principal lesson, then, was that the more important struggle was for self-determination, rather than for "integration" into "things as they are." For my Uncles, this was the dignified path to freedom for oppressed communities like ours.

In retrospect, I believe my Uncles misread Dr. King and underestimated his dedication to non-reformist reforms as Andre Gorz once characterized proposals for radical change through peaceful non-violent direct action and civil disobedience.

I have more recently started to appreciate the deep sense Dr. King had for the idea that justice was as much as anything about "freedom from violence." In the opening quote, King is clearly targeting hunger as an act of structural violence. His acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize demonstrates a commitment to a non-violent transformation of the structures that breed poverty and hunger.

That his struggle was for systemic transformation is evident from another quote: "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a...beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

Food Justice in the City

MODERATOR'S NOTE: Today's entry is a guest blog by Dr. Pancho McFarland, a Chicano sociologist from New Mexico now teaching at Chicago State University, and his partner Kourtney Craigmiles McFarland. It is our privilege to welcome the McFarlands to ejfood blog as regular guest contributors. Professor McFarland's most recent book is Chicano Rap: Gender and Violence in the Postindustrial Barrio (University of Texas Press, 2008).

Food Justice in the City: Key Concepts
Pancho McFarland and Kourtney Craigmiles McFarland

Capitalist Food Systems

Food production, distribution and consumption in a capitalist economy result from the bourgeois need to accumulate profits through the exploitation of labor, consumer, and the environmental conditions of life itself.  The global capitalist food system makes huge profits from the creation of monopolies and the intensive use of fossil fuels and petrochemicals.  Capitalists have used legal apparatuses such as the WTO, free trade agreements, intellectual property rights on genetic material and government-backing to control the production, distribution and consumption of food. 

Ideological apparatuses such as the media and public education have assisted capital in its domination over food.  They have taught us to not question the dominance of the market and the capitalist system and have limited access to information that would help us take control over food production, distribution and consumption.  In addition, the total reliance on petroleum to run highly mechanized agribusiness and for the development of chemical fertilizers and other key inputs has negative consequences for our Earth and other beings.  Under the authoritarian capitalist system we have little say in our food system.

Food Deserts

The capitalist food system has degraded our food supply at the point of production through the application of chemical toxins in order to support monocultural land use.  The hormones, pesticides and herbicides used to produce food cheaply ruin our food and water and create superpests and superweeds that further challenge food production and contribute to disease.  Additionally, the capitalist food system creates inequality with the wealthy and middle-class having disproportionate access to healthy food and the poor and working-classes living in virtual “food deserts.” 

Food deserts are geographic areas in which access to healthy food is limited or non-existent.  Measures of access to healthy food include the number of grocery stores in a given locale, whether stores in a given locale have fresh produce and meats or stock only highly processed foods, and ratio of fast food establishments to grocery stores.  Many in food desert communities lack access to personal vehicles. 

For example, in the food desert community of South Chicago nearly 30% of residents do not have personal vehicles.  They must take the bus or walk to distant full-service grocery stores.  In Chicago, a bus trip to a grocery store easily costs five dollars.  Additionally, residents in food deserts find that if healthy food can be found at neighborhood corner stores, it is much more costly than at supermarkets in other neighborhoods.  Healthy foods at these stores are also more costly than highly processed and nutritionally lacking foods.  Thus, working people are often forced to purchase unhealthy food. 

Some 600,000 Chicagoans live in food deserts.  Residents in Chicago’s majority Black communities travel twice as far to reach a grocery store as they do to reach a fast-food restaurant.  Given the lack of knowledge about healthy eating options, lack and cost of transportation, and cost of healthy food, Black and Latino residents of food deserts in Chicago’s Southside communities eat foods with low nutritional value (see the article, “Food Desert” in Chicago Magazine, by clicking on this link Food Deserts.

These obstacles to accessing healthy food means that hungry children are often given a couple of dollars to run to the corner store or liquor store to grab some chips, candy and a soft drink for dinner.  Of course, this poor eating leads to illnesses including chronic and life-threatening diseases such as diabetes.  In fact, studies have shown a correlation between food access and diabetes and obesity.

Food Justice: The Biocentric Roots

Food justice means combating the inequalities of the global capitalist system.  Since the capitalist system relies on racism and patriarchy to supply its profits, food justice requires ending racism, sexism, and colonialism.  It requires truly democratic and local politics; a radical democracy (see the writings and work of the Zapatistas and the book, Radical Democracy by Lummis).  Starvation, hunger, malnutrition, and disease caused by the current dominant food system can only be eradicated if people control politics and economics.

However, since the capitalist system has manipulated how we think about food and power and how we act as regards food and power, many are content to act to maintain the status quo or never give a second thought to food production, distribution and consumption.  We have lost touch with our ability to produce food, we do not value food production, nor know how to organize ourselves.  Capitalism’s cultural imperialism has also created an individualist ethic which keeps us from acting in the name of community or ecological good.

A central component of food justice is a biocentric (life-centered) ethic such as the Lakota, “mitakuye oyasin” (all my relations), Mayan, “in lak ech” (you are my other me) and Bantu, “ubuntu” (I am because you are).  We need to regain a community and love ethic; a philia which recognizes that all living beings are my relations. This means that we must become good stewards of the land and our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.

Food Justice in an Urban Setting

That’s all nice and Edenic, a utopic dream, but how do we achieve food justice in an urban setting?
Numerous groups and individuals in cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and New York have developed a food justice movement that creates on a small-scale, local, democratic, ecologically-sound food systems.  Through a combination of community-supported agriculture (CSAs), farmers’ markets, community markets, backyard gardeners’ networks and innovative community gardens, thousands are participating in alternatives to the capitalist food system. 

The challenge is to include more people and more communities in these alternatives and marginalize capitalism out of existence.  Examinations of previous and ongoing projects to establish and strengthen urban communities and local food systems can help us realize a political, economic, and cultural system based on food justice.

Food Justice as Radical Localism

A central problem of the organization of our world is that the systems we have created are beyond the human scale (see Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Postmodernism).  Our political, economic and food systems, our legal regimes and communication systems are global in scope and thus incoherent to the vast majority and out of our control.  Since they are out of our control they are by definition anti-democratic.  Radical localism brings our systems down to a human scale in which each of us can participate, debate, organize, and engage in mutually beneficial agency.

Radical localism includes radical democracy.  Such a democracy is a true form of democracy in that the people (demos) rule (kratia).  Every adult in a community participates in governance.  The autonomous communities of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico are organized on such a model.  This form of governance takes time (more time than authoritarian decision-making regimes) but, perhaps, this is a virtue as capitalism requires speed and efficiency.  Slowing down will help undermine it.  Only at the local level can a true democracy work.

Food justice in an urban setting requires a radical localism that includes radical democracy and an ethic of eating locally (locavorism).  To have a system based on food justice people, all people, must have a say in food production, distribution and consumption and how land is used.  Locavorism is an orientation toward food that privileges local food systems that are kind to the Earth and all our relations, respectful of traditional food practices, and supports non-capitalist methods of food production and distribution.

Locavorism encourages us to eat food produced with minimal use of non-renewable resources. Eating locally also helps solve the ecological problems created by the capitalist agribusiness food distribution system that imports foods from thousands of miles away.  This practice of shipping food contributes to climate change and other ecological problems since it relies on the burning of fossil fuels and food production practices that require additional chemical inputs to account for the long-distance travel. The long-distances involved also do not allow consumers to participate in the production process or to observe and resist the exploitation of farm workers who otherwise might remain faceless and unknown to us.

A food ethic based on mitakuye oyasin means we act locally and participate directly in the production of our food.  We act as producers and not simply consumers.  We support local farmers, CSAs and community markets at the same time that we produce in backyard and community gardens.  We tread lightly on the Earth and encourage biodiversity.  We are good stewards of the land and value all our relations.

Resurgent Local Food Systems and Polyculturalism

This call for food justice through developing local food systems is not a call for homogeneity, monocultures, cultural imperialism or some other form of authoritarian organization of society nor does it eschew our responsibilities to and recognition of our relations throughout the globe.  Local food systems recognize and encourage diversity and polyculturalism, an understanding and respect for the multiple and complex connections that we share with multiple peoples; see V. Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting).

Diversity in the production, distribution and consumption of food means allowing traditional horticultural and organizational practices to flourish.  Polyculturalism suggests that we learn from and exchange food production, distribution and consumption practices with multiple peoples with whom we interact (directly and indirectly).

Local food systems are not authoritarian regimes requiring adherence to a dogmatic orthodoxy.  They work from a rhizomatic pattern of interconnected, self-organized and self-governed units (seethe work of Delueze and Guattari).  Self-directed units may include communes, co-ops, or autonomous communities.  Local food systems increase diversity and interconnectedness as their local nature makes our interdependence visible.  This visibility of our dependence on one another reinforces our ethic of mitakuye oyasin, in lak ech, and ubuntu.

In the end, only local food systems can provide the solutions to the problems of capitalist production, distribution and consumption of food.  Future entries will focus on various aspects of food justice in urban settings including innovative projects, important individuals and groups, and other social problems and issues that impact how food is produced, distributed and consumed in the city.

GEO Watch: Roundup Ready 2 - Yield

I love Roundup Ready, a monkey can do it.

-Kansas City-area soybean 'bioserf'

Seattle, WA. We need to respect "labor's fire" - the creativity of the body engaged with the environment; the human capacity to be socially purposeful and meet the capacity to both transform (material nature to survive) and reciprocate (respect nature's capacity to remain resilient). 

On the way home tonight from teaching my class on "Food Justice in Mexico and the US," I listened to the NPR newscast on the local KUOW affiliate. The report was about the Monsanto Corporation's current problems with the Justice Department and other agencies over its monopoly control of several key sectors of the agrifood system including seed. The company is facing the end in 2012 of its Roundup Ready patent.

But things aren't all bad for Monsanto. Indeed, it has plenty of punch left after the patent expiration on its flagship biocide. Through the licensing of proprietary information it controls by virtue of the extension into Roundup Ready -2 Yield. The new transgenic soy has seven genetically-engineered traits what will not only allow the bean plant to survive ever heavier does of herbicide, it will deliver higher yields; and rainbows and butterflies, oh my!

The opening quote is from one of the soybean farmers [sic] that uses Roundup Ready technologies and seeds. He eagerly anticipates the shift from Roundup Ready 1 to Roundup Ready 2 - Yield.

The farmer's quote celebrates servitude to a corporate designed model that transforms the farmer from an independent operator into a postmodern "bioserf." Doing whatever the master dictates. "Cant' save the seed, boys. We own it." "Can't plant it that way. Your contract requires...precision farming according to the following GPS guidelines...."

Yet, there are plenty of alterNative farmers in the region surrounding the world headquarters of Monsanto in Kansas City; farmers that would prefer to save their own seed and avoid the practice of precision-farming contracts that typically give control to the proprietor of the seeds, herbicides, geo-informational resources, and other technologies related to this type of agrifood system.

"I love Roundup Ready, a monkey can do it." This statement is an extreme example of self-denigration. Why would a farmer want to sacrifice the inordinate range of skills and knowledge bases necessary to be a worker on the land? Why would she give up the skill and knowledge of natural (nonchemical-based) methods that sustain soil tilth while reducing weeds? Why would she sacrifice her autonomy in saving seeds, selecting those with the traits that suit the circumstances, and allow one to diversify as a hedge against monocrop failures?

I believe this attitude is lazy. It is unAmerican. Why are these corporate bioserfs so unAmerican? Because they demand liberty through crop subsidies and then cry if any one threatens their tax breaks for being contract bioserfs of Monsanto and its ilk? Because they ask for liberty to grow and swallow up the small and unfit [sic] and then ask for bailouts and protectionist policies as a response to the real threats posed by the global competition sown by the very same corporations that are selling them transgenic seed and herbicide back home? I wonder.

Draught Horse Cultivation

Traditional Practices Alive on Acequia Farms

Shoreline, WA. One of the joys of farming in the acequia bottom lands of Colorado's Culebra River watershed is the persistence of ancient and ecologically-wise practices. One of these traditions is the use of horses to cultivate row crops. The use of draught (or draft) horses presumably dates back to well before the earliest days of the Roman Empire.

Originating in the Asian steppes, moving through the Mediterranean world, and then north by northwest into Europe (before arriving in the Americas with the invasion of the Spaniards), the earliest draft horses were ubiquitous across Europe by the early Medieval period (500 to 1,000 A.D.). 

A particular type of heavy horse known as the "Black Horse of Flanders" became a predominant breed across the European low country in what is present-day Belgium and Northern France. The Black Flanders is recognized as the principal progenitor of all modern draft horses.

This video clip shows "Blackie," a stern and well-trained Black Flanders gelding, working with Joe C. Gallegos and some friends and students. They are cultivating part of the home kitchen garden at the Corpus A. Gallegos ranches (established 1851). Link to YouTube video of horse drawn cultivation at Corpus A. Gallegos Ranch, San Luis, Colorado (July 2009).

The persistence of the use of draft horses on some of the acequia farms of the Rio Culebra is explained by Joe Gallegos: "While this is good soil and we are not prone to soil compaction, the use of horse-drawn cultivators is better for the crops and land. The soil remains healthier. It is more enjoyable to work together, animal and person, as one unit. Tractors are noisy and they pollute the air and ground. A good draft horse is worth the extra effort. It brings out skill and passion in the farmer."