Moderator's Note: This is a fascinating and accurate documentary on the history of the land rights struggle for La Sierra, the 80,000 acre commons of the Sangre De Cristo Land Grant. It was prepared by emilyvid, a YouTube contributor affiliated with a group of college students working at the Auraria Media Center in Auraria, Colorado.
The documentary portrays the history of the land rights movement for La Sierra. The heirs and successors of the land grant achieved restoration of their use rights to this commons in 2002 under the terms of an unprecedented Colorado Supreme Court decision in the case of Lobato v. Taylor. For more information and updates, please consult our blog series on La lucha por La Sierra by linking through the topics cloud in the left-hand margin.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Shifting the Balance of the Class War
From Thanatopolitics to the Great Refusal
There’s class warfare, all right but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
When the history of the early 21st century is debated a hundred years hence, perhaps a central point of contention will be the variant forms used by capitalists to wage class war against other human beings during the so-called Neoliberal epoch? But capitalist strategy is not indeterminably variant when it comes to matters of life and death. “Structural violence” boils down to the principle that capitalism is irrevocably a system of thanatopolitics – the rule of the dead over the living.The dead labor of accumulated surplus labor time, machines, and the fancy abstract financial instruments of cognitive capital rule over the living labor of actual bodies. Increasingly, the working class is the same as the condition of a bare life; the new permanently unemployed and devalued service sector proletarians are the generalized Homo sacer subject to a state of economic exception.
Arizona state laws are currently proposing to effectively ban undocumented persons or their U.S.-born citizen children from seeking admission to hospitals. This is a perverse moment in the exercise of biopower. The telluric rationale is that “these people” will self-deport rather than face the dire consequences of children or elders dying from lack of access to medical care. These attacks are subsidized by billionaire support of Tea Party activists.
We are therefore currently witnessing capital’s death politics in the search for an enhanced ability to shock the immigrant, for e.g., by means of a ban from access to health care in hospitals. Such bans become a basic form of life and death power over entire categories of human beings subject to a state of exception.
Basement America
The conflict between the few rich and the rest of us is ultimately about the politics of death. The Left and all other progressive forces organizing from the multitude today must surely come to understand that we cannot resolve this attack on the conditions of our ability to live by negotiating with the perpetrators of death who are killing us by means of economic shock and awe or what we really ought to call slow legal murder by means of exclusion, a sovereign ban on the life-sustaining activity of the unwanted.
Such are the nuanced postmodern antics of neoliberal niceties in this fateful march toward the martyrdom of the rest before the magisterial aggrandizement of the elite selfish few aligned with those who have decided to fear the “Other.”
Increasingly, the mechanisms of the state of economic exception are being used to attack all the institutionally inscribed democratic gains that painfully improved the prospects of social and biological reproduction of working-class life in the fading Keynesian liberal democratic state.
Education, health care (including reproductive health), social security and pensions (so-called entitlement programs), environmental protection (including workplace health and safety), and investments in public amenities (libraries, parks, open space, heritage areas, etc.) and public goods (housing, water and sewage, electricity, telecommunications); the right to organize and struggle toward workplace democracy. All these working-class and progressive gains are under intense attack.
The last vestiges of the New Deal social contract are being dismantled, cut or eliminated in a savagely driven massive upward transfer of our common wealth. There has never been a louder giant sucking sound than the screed violently heralded by the shift of wealth that has led us to the current class composition of the USA in which 371 families have as much wealth as 150 million of the rest of us. We are Basement America. And it is time to dig out.
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| Chart outlining planned budget cuts and tax-breaks for FY 2012. Original image from The Christian Left. |
It is Chile post-1974 in the USA, of 2011. Put a mustache on Wisconsin Governor Walker and the physical similarity to Pinochet will startle you. You need not imagine or invent the ideological similarities in the anti-democratic shock doctrine politics championed by both regimes; that is already blatantly clear as was illustrated by the brilliant fake call from Koch to Governor Walker staged by a Buffalo, NY Internet activist a few weeks ago. No amount of faking by the Governor can convince most of us that he is interested in the preservation of democratic values.
Mexico 1911: USA 2011
Frankly, the U.S. is more like Mexico in 1911 and we all know what happened to that failed state [sic]. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution, approximately 300+ families controlled more than 90 percent of the arable land and 80 percent of all wealth assets and income.
For example, the Creel-Terrazas family in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico controlled 50 haciendas and ranches throughout the state with more than 7 million acres or about 28,000 km2 on which were pastured 500,000 cattle, 225,000 sheep, 25,000 horses, and 5,000 mules. This was typical of the northern landed elite during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.
Today’s American billionaires don’t just dominate cattle ranching or land holdings. That’s the small stuff, even in high-end ecotourism destinations like Jackson Hole or the vast expanses of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range in Colorado and New Mexico that are owned by billionaires like Ted Turner and Louis Bacon.
Today’s 300+ billionaire families ground their dominance in finance capital. They control the investment banking empires and hedge funds that finance and speculate on production in most economic sectors and then some.
But the number of families controlling the much larger, more complex, and thoroughly globalized US economy (2010 nominal GDP of $14.7 trillion) is roughly the same as the number that dominated Mexico’s economy before the Mexican Revolution.
For example, the Creel-Terrazas family in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico controlled 50 haciendas and ranches throughout the state with more than 7 million acres or about 28,000 km2 on which were pastured 500,000 cattle, 225,000 sheep, 25,000 horses, and 5,000 mules. This was typical of the northern landed elite during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz.
Today’s American billionaires don’t just dominate cattle ranching or land holdings. That’s the small stuff, even in high-end ecotourism destinations like Jackson Hole or the vast expanses of the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range in Colorado and New Mexico that are owned by billionaires like Ted Turner and Louis Bacon.
Today’s 300+ billionaire families ground their dominance in finance capital. They control the investment banking empires and hedge funds that finance and speculate on production in most economic sectors and then some.
But the number of families controlling the much larger, more complex, and thoroughly globalized US economy (2010 nominal GDP of $14.7 trillion) is roughly the same as the number that dominated Mexico’s economy before the Mexican Revolution.
Compañías deslindadoras: Citizens United, Inc.
Like Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911), we are in the later stages of a massive anti-democratic project. Díaz used compañías deslindadoras (colonizing companies) to dispossess the rural populations and dismantle the communities and land holdings of indigenous peoples.
Díaz sought to vaccinate Mexico from foreign domination oddly by using foreign investments to develop the railways, mining and textile industries, power generation, and agriculture.
He borrowed heavily from European bankers to subsidize this policy of attracting foreign capital for the modernization [sic] of Mexico's economy. Debt accumulated; people went hungry; were worked to death; or murdered by the companies sent by Díaz.
The peasants, workers, and natives got restless. They started striking, raiding, squatting, and fighting guerrilla wars against the hated rurales and company towns.
Like Mexico during the Porfiriato, the neoliberals in the USA have operated, since the time of Nixon, by borrowing increasingly from foreign bankers to finance the federal budget. Today, this is increasingly done with the substantial participation of the Chinese who are buying USA government debt bonds like the Big Macs one can eat outside the walls of the Forbidden City.
Since taxes on corporations and the wealthy have all but disappeared, deficit budgeting has increasingly become the norm. This creates additional public debt that is now blamed on unionized public sector workers. The Derivatives Depression exacerbated the federal debt through the perfect storm of a cumulative burden derived from reduced corporate and wealth taxes and the debt-financed bailout of those responsible for the 2008 financial capitalist and credit market crisis.
The roots of our current encounter with this form of structural violence date to the end of the Bretton Woods world order that defined capitalist inter-state relations after WW II. When Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar he basically exposed the world to the threats posed by the binary construct of the Cold War and the struggle with the USSR for militarily-imposed hegemony.
One supreme irony is that Nixon could not have foreseen the end of the Cold War. And Reagan did not understand that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was not the end of history since the USA had yet to achieve status as a debtor nation to China.
Perhaps the super-rich response we are seeing occurs in the face of these declining fortunes of the USA as a unitary superpower? Does the rise of an increasingly multipolar world and global decline of USA hegemony signal the intensification of neoliberal trickery on the home front? Has the state of economic exception brought the technologies of the Pentagon, derived from the Viet Nam to the Afghanistan War, home to be used against the ghetto and barrio, the strategic hamlets and social control districts of domestic class war?
At this late stage, the domestic attack is less monetarist and more explicitly a phase in the exercise of constituted power involving blatantly political investments by the titans of the market to manipulate electoral and legislative democracy. This is a principal mechanism which the capitalist class (e.g., today, the Koch brothers) has in effect used to commandeer control over the process of state lawmaking in places like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio with the approval of the Supreme Court.
Capitalists are using this new organizational form, call it Citizens United, Inc., to launch a direct attack on the remnant forms of working-class political organization that were institutionalized by the New Deal and largely focused on collective bargaining and arbitration rights dispensed through the mass-base power of industrial labor unions in the private sector. The private sector unions have largely been destroyed over the past 40 years. The public sector unions grew and adapted and are now threatened in this latest conflict against complete capitalist command.
The political recomposition of constituent power
But these attacks on immigrants and public sector workers might very well back-fire. They appear to have unleashed a growing revolt circulating struggles led by youth among undocumented workers, mixed-status families, and their extensive allies; public school teachers, students and parents; and college students.
There are emerging alliances with firefighters, police, nurses and other public health workers, drug abuse counselors, safety inspectors, farmers, prison guards, and many other public sector workers including academic professionals, lawyers, doctors, architects, and planners. This is part of an immanent process of political recomposition that emerges through the exercise of constituent power by all these sectors.
Like the youth democracy revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, American youth are vital forces in this insurrection of the multitude that transcends divisions of race, national origin, legal status, gender, and sexuality. Immigrant rights, racial equality, marriage equality, collective bargaining, guaranteed social insurances contribute to the sublation of divisions imposed on the multitude. Solidarity across differences is part of the process of political recomposition in the act of constituent power.
The old form of private sector unionism was basically organized to save capitalism from itself which is why workers at Ford Motor Co. received a “Five Dollar Day.” As Mario Tronti points out, the New Deal was a “productivity deal” that required labor to acquiesce to a tripartite system of bargaining and arbitration. Ford knew: No mass production without mass consumption and so workers must be able to purchase the cars they make. That was the deal.
Many of us called this type of unionism a form of class collaboration. In return for more wages, workers gave capital more productivity. This trapped American workers on the treadmill of an endless growth machine and eventually right of out work as dead labor in the form of automation and globalization undermined the mass worker organizations and their capacity to resist and counter-plan.
The current wave of attacks on workers’ rights to collectively bargain in the public sector is of the same class of capitalist strategy as the telluric attacks on immigrant workers in Arizona and other states. Both are designed to impose a state of siege on those remaining sectors of the working class that have the potential for greatest militancy and circulation of struggle to other sectors.
New organizational forms of resistance and terrains of struggle are emerging that could allow the multitude to respond more effectively to current neoliberal strategy based – semiotically anyway – on a contrived public debt crisis caused by tax breaks to the wealthiest among us and the effects of the Derivatives Depression as a pretext to attack basic rights of due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and assembly. This attack is occurring because these rights are actually the foundation of our everlasting potential to exercise constitutent power.
The challenge for us involves a paradigm shift that rejects having to choose between Mises/Hayek and Marx. Hayek and Mises are the fathers of extant neoliberal theory and are the intellectual precursors of the Chicago School boys. Hayek is also the most strident source of anti-Marx ideology produced by the European generation of his time that flirted with “communism” during a disillusioned youthful spell. My point is that all of these are white European thinkers.
In the words of Foucault biographers, Miller and Miller, von Mises and von Hayek, “…[are] apostles of a libertarian strand of modern social thought rooted in a defense of the free market as a citadel of individual liberty and a bulwark against the power of the state.”
Marx, on the other hand, provides a useful toolkit for strategic thinking, but it is somewhat dated. And Negri still sees the world through European eyes. We need a homespun response to the theoretical and strategic quagmire produced by the clash of neoliberal and socialist/communist ideologies, both of which came to the Americas as part of the cultural baggage of invasive violent settler states. Marx and Foucault are both Dead White Males.
The current class war presents opportunities for a qualitative rupture toward the horizon of generalized refusal and the struggles of Mesoamerican Diaspora peoples are a major reason for this challenge and opportunity.
Like Mexico during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911), we are in the later stages of a massive anti-democratic project. Díaz used compañías deslindadoras (colonizing companies) to dispossess the rural populations and dismantle the communities and land holdings of indigenous peoples.
Díaz sought to vaccinate Mexico from foreign domination oddly by using foreign investments to develop the railways, mining and textile industries, power generation, and agriculture.
He borrowed heavily from European bankers to subsidize this policy of attracting foreign capital for the modernization [sic] of Mexico's economy. Debt accumulated; people went hungry; were worked to death; or murdered by the companies sent by Díaz.
The peasants, workers, and natives got restless. They started striking, raiding, squatting, and fighting guerrilla wars against the hated rurales and company towns.
Like Mexico during the Porfiriato, the neoliberals in the USA have operated, since the time of Nixon, by borrowing increasingly from foreign bankers to finance the federal budget. Today, this is increasingly done with the substantial participation of the Chinese who are buying USA government debt bonds like the Big Macs one can eat outside the walls of the Forbidden City.
Since taxes on corporations and the wealthy have all but disappeared, deficit budgeting has increasingly become the norm. This creates additional public debt that is now blamed on unionized public sector workers. The Derivatives Depression exacerbated the federal debt through the perfect storm of a cumulative burden derived from reduced corporate and wealth taxes and the debt-financed bailout of those responsible for the 2008 financial capitalist and credit market crisis.
The roots of our current encounter with this form of structural violence date to the end of the Bretton Woods world order that defined capitalist inter-state relations after WW II. When Nixon ended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar he basically exposed the world to the threats posed by the binary construct of the Cold War and the struggle with the USSR for militarily-imposed hegemony.
One supreme irony is that Nixon could not have foreseen the end of the Cold War. And Reagan did not understand that the collapse of the Soviet bloc was not the end of history since the USA had yet to achieve status as a debtor nation to China.
Perhaps the super-rich response we are seeing occurs in the face of these declining fortunes of the USA as a unitary superpower? Does the rise of an increasingly multipolar world and global decline of USA hegemony signal the intensification of neoliberal trickery on the home front? Has the state of economic exception brought the technologies of the Pentagon, derived from the Viet Nam to the Afghanistan War, home to be used against the ghetto and barrio, the strategic hamlets and social control districts of domestic class war?
At this late stage, the domestic attack is less monetarist and more explicitly a phase in the exercise of constituted power involving blatantly political investments by the titans of the market to manipulate electoral and legislative democracy. This is a principal mechanism which the capitalist class (e.g., today, the Koch brothers) has in effect used to commandeer control over the process of state lawmaking in places like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, New Jersey, and Ohio with the approval of the Supreme Court.
Capitalists are using this new organizational form, call it Citizens United, Inc., to launch a direct attack on the remnant forms of working-class political organization that were institutionalized by the New Deal and largely focused on collective bargaining and arbitration rights dispensed through the mass-base power of industrial labor unions in the private sector. The private sector unions have largely been destroyed over the past 40 years. The public sector unions grew and adapted and are now threatened in this latest conflict against complete capitalist command.
The political recomposition of constituent power
But these attacks on immigrants and public sector workers might very well back-fire. They appear to have unleashed a growing revolt circulating struggles led by youth among undocumented workers, mixed-status families, and their extensive allies; public school teachers, students and parents; and college students.
There are emerging alliances with firefighters, police, nurses and other public health workers, drug abuse counselors, safety inspectors, farmers, prison guards, and many other public sector workers including academic professionals, lawyers, doctors, architects, and planners. This is part of an immanent process of political recomposition that emerges through the exercise of constituent power by all these sectors.
Like the youth democracy revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, American youth are vital forces in this insurrection of the multitude that transcends divisions of race, national origin, legal status, gender, and sexuality. Immigrant rights, racial equality, marriage equality, collective bargaining, guaranteed social insurances contribute to the sublation of divisions imposed on the multitude. Solidarity across differences is part of the process of political recomposition in the act of constituent power.
The old form of private sector unionism was basically organized to save capitalism from itself which is why workers at Ford Motor Co. received a “Five Dollar Day.” As Mario Tronti points out, the New Deal was a “productivity deal” that required labor to acquiesce to a tripartite system of bargaining and arbitration. Ford knew: No mass production without mass consumption and so workers must be able to purchase the cars they make. That was the deal.
Many of us called this type of unionism a form of class collaboration. In return for more wages, workers gave capital more productivity. This trapped American workers on the treadmill of an endless growth machine and eventually right of out work as dead labor in the form of automation and globalization undermined the mass worker organizations and their capacity to resist and counter-plan.
The current wave of attacks on workers’ rights to collectively bargain in the public sector is of the same class of capitalist strategy as the telluric attacks on immigrant workers in Arizona and other states. Both are designed to impose a state of siege on those remaining sectors of the working class that have the potential for greatest militancy and circulation of struggle to other sectors.
New organizational forms of resistance and terrains of struggle are emerging that could allow the multitude to respond more effectively to current neoliberal strategy based – semiotically anyway – on a contrived public debt crisis caused by tax breaks to the wealthiest among us and the effects of the Derivatives Depression as a pretext to attack basic rights of due process, equal protection, freedom of speech, and assembly. This attack is occurring because these rights are actually the foundation of our everlasting potential to exercise constitutent power.
The challenge for us involves a paradigm shift that rejects having to choose between Mises/Hayek and Marx. Hayek and Mises are the fathers of extant neoliberal theory and are the intellectual precursors of the Chicago School boys. Hayek is also the most strident source of anti-Marx ideology produced by the European generation of his time that flirted with “communism” during a disillusioned youthful spell. My point is that all of these are white European thinkers.
In the words of Foucault biographers, Miller and Miller, von Mises and von Hayek, “…[are] apostles of a libertarian strand of modern social thought rooted in a defense of the free market as a citadel of individual liberty and a bulwark against the power of the state.”
Marx, on the other hand, provides a useful toolkit for strategic thinking, but it is somewhat dated. And Negri still sees the world through European eyes. We need a homespun response to the theoretical and strategic quagmire produced by the clash of neoliberal and socialist/communist ideologies, both of which came to the Americas as part of the cultural baggage of invasive violent settler states. Marx and Foucault are both Dead White Males.
The current class war presents opportunities for a qualitative rupture toward the horizon of generalized refusal and the struggles of Mesoamerican Diaspora peoples are a major reason for this challenge and opportunity.
The Great Refusal
Von Hayek and his busy neoliberal Chicago School protégés have bequeathed the world some five and a half decades of experiments. They gave us the expansion of thanatopolitics by melding neoliberal governmentality unto the cruel state of exception.
Against what might be the last gasps of neoliberal governmentality, we must nourish the constituent power of the multitude. Perhaps by recognizing how it may reside in a creative variant of the old Wobbly idea of the General Strike? I agree with Mario Tronti, that the General Strike is a naive and romantic notion, especially in the age of immaterial labor. However, the idea of the strategy of refusal (of noncooperation with capital, etc.) is a different creature.
The abolition of the relationship to capital can be undertaken many ways including through conscious withdrawal rooted in the immediate social sphere of the commons through collaborative engagement with the fields of labor's fire. This is not a General Strike, absurd, since so few of us in the USA are material workers in that strict sense. In some ways, this involves a refusal to consume commodities and to be reduced to mere status of labor-as-commodity (i.e., withdrawal from the formal labor market).
The Great Refusal confronts the challenges and opportunities of the age of immaterial labor and the reduction of American workers to mere consumers or shards of labor time trapped inside the fleeting locations of structurally violent workplaces. Escaping the grip of the reduction of our selves to the bare life, to whatever results from the ungovernable wisdom of the invisible force of a system that operates on the amoral base of “price signals,” means the multitude refuses to work to produce or consume commodities. Decoupling of consumption from the circuits of capitalist reproduction is a time-honored and effective strategy of refusal.
This does not imply that one stops eating or living. This is a revolt against prices, if you will. The refusal as withdrawal from the market affects the ability of capitalists to actually dance with prices, as Hayek would want.
The refusal is the refuge of self-valorizing labor. Grow some of your own food and barter for the rest instead of consuming store-bought commodities. This is one example of the type of direct agency that, if generalized, can bring everything to a standstill.
The strategic problem is more complex: Again Tronti: “...we can see the evident truth of that simplest of revolutionary truths: capital cannot destroy the working class; the working class can destroy capital.”
That was 1965. Today, biopower presents a different set of challenges that conduct the ability of capital to destroy workers if not quite the working class as such. This requires that we destroy the working class as labor power for capital or consumer of capitalist goods.
To do this we first must confront the negative dialectic of the sovereign constituted power, and this is where Tronti's analysis takes us in a dead-end direction. The state of exception suspends the rule of law to allow for the destruction and removal of entire categories of people like the undocumented worker. Are we to refuse engagement with the juridical order and allow thousands of deaths?
The telluric partisan attack on the lives of undocumented workers is precisely the sort of biopolitical violence that we face today but also in 1965. Today, the 35-40 million uninsured workers in the USA without access to nominal preventive health care are also Homo sacers. The sublation of partisan violence requires at this point a strategic legal defense of the juridical order that provides the organizing space for constituent power to emerge so that the multitude can assert social force and practice democracy.
The strategy of refusal thus requires mass mobilization of the sort we have witnessed in Arizona and Wisconsin. So, get your shovels out and start digging a garden with your neighbors. Get out on the streets and join the protests. Occupy the citadels of constituted power, the capitol buildings, legislator hallways, town halls, and yes, the banks and corporate headquarters. Disrupt capitalist command by interrupting business as usual. Close your bank accounts and withdraw your savings (stuff the money under your mattress); destroy your credit cards; consume less, it does not make you happier any way.
This is not rocket science; it is class war. And our withdrawal from the market is the most powerful form of constituent power at our disposal at this time. If we dare, we can precipitate a crisis that capital cannot escape.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Irrigation Commons
In Nexapa, 5 thousand irrigators sustain a water commons
Estevan Arellano offers this YouTube video prepared by our colleague Jacinta Palerm, a leading researcher studying the organized community irrigation systems of Mexico. This video is part of the collaborative work Palerm and her team have developed over the past several decades of research dedicated to the protection of indigenous water and watershed management systems located in the Nexapa River valley in the state of Puebla in the meseta central.
This documentary video focuses on 5,000 parciantes or irrigators spread across 33 communities with vested water rights to irrigate 9,120 hectares. The system includes a tunnel that moves water from the Atoyac to the Nexapa river. There are twelve principal channels (acequia madres) feeding hundreds of local ditches that irrigate intact ejidos. The diversion point or obra de cabecera (principal headgate and dam) is also a collective structure and responsibility of the Committee of Nexapa ejidetarios.
But it is not just the irrigation structures that are revealed in this documentary. The underlying organization and process of community governance of water and maintenance of these structures is the principal lesson. We witness here the expression of a deeply held form of watershed consciousness and a commitment to collaborative and participatory democracy. The description of the importance of the annual limpiezas (ditch cleaning) and monthly general assembly is also an important part of the organization of a watershed democracy and should serve as a reminder to acequia parciantes in Colorado and New Mexico of the importance of bread labor and cooperative governing.
When asked to explain why mutual reliance interests are so important to the governance of the irrigation community, one of the leaders of the ejidetarios explains in eloquent terms:
“Porque son compañeros... y uno debe de sobrellevarse con sus compañeros.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Book Notes: New Memoir Charts Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Times of War
War and food and other negations
Annia Ciezadlo is a journalist that has covered the wars in Lebanon and Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor and The New Republic. Along the way she has also gathered recipes and stories about food, life, and death. People shared experiences and memories through food and eating in times of war. This is an auto-ethnography in which people share their food, recipes, and lore in the context of the experience of war.
War, of course, is structural violence carried to militaristic extreme; a situation in which the invader dictates the conditions of the state of emergency which brings about the flattening of buildings, homes, fields, and ditches. Farm fields and marshlands are destroyed; the landscape is littered with depleted uranium casings from tank munitions. Orchards are bombed to blackened erasure; food stores are demolished; water poisoned; seed banks raided or burned. All these and more represent a different form of collateral damage that is slowly inflicted on civilian populations during war time and subsequent hunger, malnutrition, and starvation.
This book is not a romanticizing travelogue with quaint exotic recipes. It is a serious effort to confront the question of what you do when you cannot stop eating just because a war surrounds you with everyday risks and threats to life and limb. Eating in times of war is difficult and dangerous and more often chronicles failed attempts to gain access to produce, water, and cooking heat.
These are the diets and recipes one might experience under a state of exception: Here, the Iraqi Homo sacers seek to get past the bare life in times of barren fields and bare cupboards. In the midst of the chaos of war people seek la comida, the sharing of food to bring a bit of order to life in tumultuous times.
Ciezadlo's book, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and Lore, is not quite just another memoir woven into a recipe list from the traveler's happenstance itinerary. The book is part travelogue but was not written in the ugly and long discredited genres of the missionary or colonial gaze. This is not a celebration of exoticism. The stories after all were told in tumultuous times.
The title for the book comes from an Arabic phrase: youm aasl, youm basl, meaning "day of onion, day of honey." Anyone familiar with agricultural dichos in historic acequia communities of the Rio Arriba will recognize this dicho. The saying invokes a sense of plenitude but also of sharing. We do not celebrate this bounty alone. We celebrate the sweetness of conviviality. This is Arabic ethics in the most elemental forms. In the acequia communities we also realize that this dicho is one of many associated with the fact that the development of agricultural science owes much to Arabic philosophers and agroecologists.
Day of Honey explores the meaning behind a widespread Arabic aphorism: Fi khibz wa meleh bainetna—"There is bread and salt between us." In a recent interview with NPR, the author takes this to mean "that once we've eaten together, sharing bread and salt, the ancient symbols of hospitality, we cannot fight. It's a lovely idea, that you can counter conflict with cuisine. And I don't swallow it for a second."
This is a bold assertion. I can already hear the liberals complain. Some may ask: Perhaps we can use it to cook recipes while sharing stories of our feelings about the foods and lives threatened by these wars we fight in remote places to maintain our nation's dominance? Such discursive rationality will not be easily served by this war-time cookbook and memoir.
In most cultures, food is always more than nutrition. It is about conviviality. This has always been the case with Arabic, Persian, Sephardic, Chicana/o, Mexican, and Mesoamerican peoples. La comida is as not a meal but the practice of sharing of food, story, and memory. Ciezadlo shows us how food becomes more important in times of war:
In every war zone, there is another battle, a shadow conflict that rages quietly behind the scenes. You don't see much of it on television or in the movies. This hidden war consists of the slow but relentless destruction of everyday civilian life. The children can't go to school. The pregnant women can't give birth at a hospital. The farmer can't plow his fields. The musician can't play his guitar. The professor can't teach her class. For civilians, war becomes a relentless accumulation of can'ts. But no matter what else you can't do, you still have to eat.
This book makes me think of other 'war zones' like the U.S.-Mexico border. In Arizona and other border states, there is a growing number of "can'ts" that restrict the productive and reproductive labor of transborder workers and their families.
The death chamber of the hot Arizona desert is I am sure producing its own version of a state of exception diet: Microwaveable burritos, a can of salsa casera, a precious liter of bottled water, and some homemade carne seca. Take the burrito and cut it open. Set aside (while you check the surroundings). Saute the carne seca with some water on a pan over hot coals made of cacti remnants. (Survey the surroundings again). Empty the burrito ingredients into the pan and add to the carne seca, stirring (quietly). Last, mix a bit of salsa and water and stir some more. Serve on hot corn tortillas, grilled on the remnant coals. (Survey your surroundings; stay quiet; duck for cover.)
That might get an immigrant through her own version of 127 hours in the canyon lands of the Sonoran desert. Or not: It might instead beget a death in the desert in the war on transnational Mexican workers; like someone's bare life laid down while casting about for dreams of la comida in Ciezadlo's book.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Student Blog VII: Branding Female 'Latinidad' at the Grocery Store
Moderator's Note: With this entry, we continue a series of blogs written by students in my University of Washington courses. I am teaching two courses this Winter 2011 Quarter: Comparative Social Movements: Mexico and the United States and a seminar on Food Sovereignty. The seventh contribution in the ejfood student blog series was prepared by Molly Thornton, a student in the Food Sovereignty seminar. Ms. Thornton focuses on the use of racial and gender stereotypes in the marketing of fresh produce. She finds this to be problematic as it confounds the consumer by objectifying women for the sake of higher sales while obscuring the underlying history of dispossession and exploitation of women farm workers. Your moderator thinks this post boldly illustrates the need for consumers to a get a stronger grip on reality and start demanding social justice and human rights for women and all other farm workers exploited by corporate agriculture. A shift to worker-owned organic cooperatives would be a good alternative that consumers can support.
“Chula Brand” Introduces Stereotypes
to New Age Consumers
to New Age Consumers
Molly B. Thornton
In American society, advertisements constantly bombard us with messages of beauty, luxury, happiness and wealth. These often cause people to attempt to buy a lifestyle with their new pair of shoes. This access to glamour through our purchases has now made its way to the produce section.
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| Chula Brand pineapple. |
On a recent search for organic produce in a discount grocery store, a woman with a gorgeous smile and dark flowing locks captivated my attention. She was peering at me over her shoulder from the label on a Mexican pineapple. Her name was Chula.
Chula Brand is a Mexican produce company selling tropical items like papaya, avocado, pineapple, lime and coconut aided by a brightly colored package with the face of a gorgeous Latina woman. The company is proud of its Mexican origin, and eager to interest American consumers in the fruits of the nation. “Chula” is a Spanish word used to describe something lovely, attractive, or beautiful. The face of Chula Brand is certainly all of the above, although, those words are meant to refer to the limes and coconuts, right?
However, the word means even more. “Chula” can be used as a slang term for a cute, sexy or hot woman. It can even mean brazen or low-class. The range of connotations clearly indicates this word is meant to describe a woman, not an avocado.
Chula’s coyly come-hither portrayal is framed in bright colors and bold geometric shapes evoking fantasies of the tropical paradise where she and her bounty originate. Sound familiar? Chiquita Banana was the Central American equivalent, inviting Americans to taste exotic fruits with her plunging clothing lines and catchy song. Of course, this conveniently gives the consumers an excuse to forget the history of how the United Fruit Company and the C.I.A have overthrown democratically-elected presidents to protect Banana Republics.
Chula Brand is a Mexican produce company selling tropical items like papaya, avocado, pineapple, lime and coconut aided by a brightly colored package with the face of a gorgeous Latina woman. The company is proud of its Mexican origin, and eager to interest American consumers in the fruits of the nation. “Chula” is a Spanish word used to describe something lovely, attractive, or beautiful. The face of Chula Brand is certainly all of the above, although, those words are meant to refer to the limes and coconuts, right?
However, the word means even more. “Chula” can be used as a slang term for a cute, sexy or hot woman. It can even mean brazen or low-class. The range of connotations clearly indicates this word is meant to describe a woman, not an avocado.
Chula’s coyly come-hither portrayal is framed in bright colors and bold geometric shapes evoking fantasies of the tropical paradise where she and her bounty originate. Sound familiar? Chiquita Banana was the Central American equivalent, inviting Americans to taste exotic fruits with her plunging clothing lines and catchy song. Of course, this conveniently gives the consumers an excuse to forget the history of how the United Fruit Company and the C.I.A have overthrown democratically-elected presidents to protect Banana Republics.
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| Chula Brand limes with the now familiar label. |
Such blatant stereotypes of women and minorities are so overdone and have been so widely addressed that it seems redundant to discuss it. But if we all see through it, why do these images persist? Femininity has been associated with motherly duties not just in the domestic realm, but also as embodied in Mother Nature, indicating that women hold some kind of mystical relationship with the natural world.
This myth of women in nature makes characters like Chiquita and Chula doubly inviting. They are not only entertaining, sexy, Latin women, but also fertile caretakers of the earth, offering the bounty of nature to their children all over the world.
This marketing strategy works by appealing to the product’s presumably Earth-loving consumer base with a measure of appreciative multicultural exoticism thrown in. It also holds meaning as a set of signs marking corporate ideologies and political relationships. The Chiquita Banana Brand is a deceptive symbol of Latin America as a happy and friendly place but it is also a symbol of structural violence stemming from assassination of elected leaders and endless military interventions by U.S. forces asserting hegemonic interests.
“Chula” attempts to fool us with the same appeal, ignoring the injustice of Mexican-American trade relations as unleashed by NAFTA and centuries of dispossession and devaluation of women’s productive and reproductive labors in Mexico.
This myth of women in nature makes characters like Chiquita and Chula doubly inviting. They are not only entertaining, sexy, Latin women, but also fertile caretakers of the earth, offering the bounty of nature to their children all over the world.
This marketing strategy works by appealing to the product’s presumably Earth-loving consumer base with a measure of appreciative multicultural exoticism thrown in. It also holds meaning as a set of signs marking corporate ideologies and political relationships. The Chiquita Banana Brand is a deceptive symbol of Latin America as a happy and friendly place but it is also a symbol of structural violence stemming from assassination of elected leaders and endless military interventions by U.S. forces asserting hegemonic interests.
“Chula” attempts to fool us with the same appeal, ignoring the injustice of Mexican-American trade relations as unleashed by NAFTA and centuries of dispossession and devaluation of women’s productive and reproductive labors in Mexico.
Consuming Culture
The consumption of global foods has gained popularity as an expression of cross-cultural experiences. The American mainstream is a frequent audience for the staging of culture. Americans travel the world by choosing between Mexican, Japanese, and Indian when asked, “What’s for Dinner?”
In a transnational context, eating ethnic food superficially symbolizes the sharing of global traditions. The possibility of eating outside of your culture is ever present and retains a feeling of the exotic even as tropical foods and “ethnic cuisine” become staples in our diets. The result of global capitalism is a society that attempts to quantify qualitative experiences. Americans expect to encounter pineapples and limes in their neighborhood produce section at all times and drive around the corner for burritos, fajitas, and guacamole any night. Ironically, these “Mexican” foods are based on traditional foods but often hybridized to appeal to American palates.
Culturally-relevant foods are arguably dumbed down to reach a wider audience, yet in a capitalistic trade-oriented society, gaining economic viability serves an important purpose for marginalized people. Sylvia Ferrero in Food Nations says, “By gaining economic and social relevance, ethnic objects enable those who are involved in the economic transactions of these objects to state a position in a dominant social and economic environment.”
The Real Face of Chula Brand
Although we invite Chula into our kitchens as an exotic symbol of cultural exchange, tropical places and flavors, we ignore the Mexican faces that truly got Chula to our table. Who benefits from the financial viability of Mexican produce in the American market? Only a handful of (mostly male) corporate administrators make a profit. Farm workers in the global market largely face poor working conditions including long days in inclement weather, exposure to pesticides and herbicides, and low pay. Additionally, this agricultural workforce is largely made up of women. The faces and voices of these female farm workers are inadequately represented in the global economy.
These workers have little say over their job situation and even less control over the ability to feed themselves and their families. Farm workers employed in agribusiness corporations grow products for export, feeding middle class consumers in the North; the value of their labor never supports their own localities. The problem of export-oriented (mal)development is a significant issue in the food sovereignty movement where the voices of women are finding their place.
Women are the main producers of the world’s staple crops and their knowledge and labor are essential to sustainable food systems. Female farm workers and food producers are voicing their right to grow their own food and in doing so begin to produce their own self images.
As women’s faces emerge in the global food movement, the “Chula” image will face opposition. Latina women are diverse and made of many qualities, but it is not their pretty faces that represent their contributions. Nor should a woman’s image bring success to the brand’s higher-ups who depend on a myriad of underpaid farm workers to keep their product on the market.
What “chula” needs a revamp. I’d prefer to imagine it’s a woman with calloused hands and a mind full of agricultural knowledge, benefiting from the fruits of her own labor in a community-owned and worker self-managed cooperative farm rather than as a superficially-sexualized moniker for product desirability. As female farm workers gain control of their work and their community, others will lose their ability to plaster female stereotypes to sell toxic food and exploitative labor practices.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Student Blog VI: Environmental Justice and the Greek Fires of 2010
Moderator's Note: With this entry, we continue a series of blogs written by students in my University of Washington courses. I am teaching two courses this Winter 2011 Quarter: Comparative Social Movements: Mexico and the United States and a seminar on Food Sovereignty. The sixth contribution in the ejfood series was prepared by José Vazquez, a student in the social movements course.
Travel has provided an opportunity to place me directly in settings where the concerns of EJ are evident. In Spring of 2009, I studied abroad in Greece. The focus of our study was to compile footage in order to develop a documentary pertaining to the Greek wild fires of 2007. In 2007, wild fires raged throughout Greece. The fires resulted in the destruction of an estimated 20% of the land. On a visit with Michael Brabant, correspondent in Athens with BBC News, we were able to witness how the fires had completely done away with the forests in the hills surrounding Athens.
Environmental Justice Around the Globe: My big fat Greek fire?
José Vazquez
In his book, Mexican Americans and the Environment, Professor Devon G. Peña discusses methods by which Mayan and Aztec communities in Mexico worked with the land. The biodiversity the Spanish witnessed included elaborate roof gardens, public bathrooms, and programs in composting. There were flowers and birds everywhere and ponds filled with fish.
Most appealing perhaps were the xinampas constructed by the Mexica community within Lakes Texcoco, Xalco, and Xochimilco. the xinampas were artificial islands constructed for the purpose of growing and harvesting crops. The water from the lake underneath the floating gardens provided a constant water source.
The ill-advised Spaniards eventually drained Lake Texcoco. Such a major change in the natural landscape led to the loss of traditional methods of working with the land. As a result of this, a heavier burden was imposed on subgroups within the large Mayan and Aztec populations such as the Mexica when they were displaced and forced to labor in encomiendas and later haciendas. (Peña 2005)
History provides vivid accounts of how invading powers exert force when entering foreign lands for the purpose of domination. In the case of the Spanish in Mexico, sustainable landscapes were destroyed, native lands altered by new European forms of agriculture, and el pobre indio [sic] was left to ‘cope’ under a new world order where domination included cultural domination and erasure of proven ancient ways of life.
The Principles of Environmental Justice (PEJ) have provoked a significant amount of thought. Discussion of environmental justice with my peers has revolved around the differences between mainstream environmentalism (ME) and EJ. Particular focus has been placed on ME’s disregard for how low-income communities and communities of color are impacted by environmental degradation. Topics have included: how industry destroys the Native sentiment for how the land should be used; how native traditions disappear with the loss of land; and how health disparities arise due to the location of polluting industries and factories in areas inhabited by low-income populations and people of color.
It is safe to say that the legacy of ecological destruction due to invading powers has been suffered by communities such as the Mexica and these patterns continue today. The shape of the invading force has changed (from colonialism to neoliberalism, perhaps?), yet displacement from native lands, unequal distribution of ecological burdens, and an unwillingness to have those most affected express their sentiment remain strong.
Most appealing perhaps were the xinampas constructed by the Mexica community within Lakes Texcoco, Xalco, and Xochimilco. the xinampas were artificial islands constructed for the purpose of growing and harvesting crops. The water from the lake underneath the floating gardens provided a constant water source.
The ill-advised Spaniards eventually drained Lake Texcoco. Such a major change in the natural landscape led to the loss of traditional methods of working with the land. As a result of this, a heavier burden was imposed on subgroups within the large Mayan and Aztec populations such as the Mexica when they were displaced and forced to labor in encomiendas and later haciendas. (Peña 2005)
History provides vivid accounts of how invading powers exert force when entering foreign lands for the purpose of domination. In the case of the Spanish in Mexico, sustainable landscapes were destroyed, native lands altered by new European forms of agriculture, and el pobre indio [sic] was left to ‘cope’ under a new world order where domination included cultural domination and erasure of proven ancient ways of life.
The Principles of Environmental Justice (PEJ) have provoked a significant amount of thought. Discussion of environmental justice with my peers has revolved around the differences between mainstream environmentalism (ME) and EJ. Particular focus has been placed on ME’s disregard for how low-income communities and communities of color are impacted by environmental degradation. Topics have included: how industry destroys the Native sentiment for how the land should be used; how native traditions disappear with the loss of land; and how health disparities arise due to the location of polluting industries and factories in areas inhabited by low-income populations and people of color.
It is safe to say that the legacy of ecological destruction due to invading powers has been suffered by communities such as the Mexica and these patterns continue today. The shape of the invading force has changed (from colonialism to neoliberalism, perhaps?), yet displacement from native lands, unequal distribution of ecological burdens, and an unwillingness to have those most affected express their sentiment remain strong.
Greece, Spring 2009
Travel has provided an opportunity to place me directly in settings where the concerns of EJ are evident. In Spring of 2009, I studied abroad in Greece. The focus of our study was to compile footage in order to develop a documentary pertaining to the Greek wild fires of 2007. In 2007, wild fires raged throughout Greece. The fires resulted in the destruction of an estimated 20% of the land. On a visit with Michael Brabant, correspondent in Athens with BBC News, we were able to witness how the fires had completely done away with the forests in the hills surrounding Athens.
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| Burnt trees on Athenian hillside. |
The fires sparked major controversy. Conspiracy theories arose alluding to governmental and private industry involvement in the fires. During our interview with Brabant, it was indicated the possibility that the large-scale fires on the Athenian hillside were not just due to governmental inability (or unwillingness) to control the fires. Instead, the fires were meant to destroy the forests in efforts to take the land from the hands of preservation institutions and begin development of high-end residential projects. The forests above Athens are considered the city’s natural form of air conditioning. Without the natural cooling system to the city below, hotter summers than the ones experienced today are expected. YouTube videos illustrate these issues on Greek forest fires and the resulting protests marking EU solidarity.
The effect of the fires on the natural and built environment is visible. As it pertains to EJ, the effect on people and their ways of living was made apparent. On visits to the regions of Peloponnese and Evia, group members interviewed locals. These locals provided detailed accounts for the massive destruction of olive groves, the death of livestock and other wildlife and the health effects on the population.
My portion of the project focused on health burdens. I recall an interview with Dina who recounted her family’s struggle with the fires. Besides losing their olive farm, all of their livestock accept for a cow, and their home, Dina and her family was also having to take care of their mother whom at that point was in a coma. After having experienced third degree burns all over her body, the woman had developed pneumonia while in intensive care. A random cough spur resulted in lack of breathing, which triggered a heart attack, leaving her in a coma. Since the fires, Dina’s father was coping off and on with episodes of depression.
The effect of the fires on the natural and built environment is visible. As it pertains to EJ, the effect on people and their ways of living was made apparent. On visits to the regions of Peloponnese and Evia, group members interviewed locals. These locals provided detailed accounts for the massive destruction of olive groves, the death of livestock and other wildlife and the health effects on the population.
My portion of the project focused on health burdens. I recall an interview with Dina who recounted her family’s struggle with the fires. Besides losing their olive farm, all of their livestock accept for a cow, and their home, Dina and her family was also having to take care of their mother whom at that point was in a coma. After having experienced third degree burns all over her body, the woman had developed pneumonia while in intensive care. A random cough spur resulted in lack of breathing, which triggered a heart attack, leaving her in a coma. Since the fires, Dina’s father was coping off and on with episodes of depression.
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| Sheep raised by Dina's family. |
In 2009, residents were still struggling with local governments over the start of reconstruction efforts. A few were vocal about their concerns with the government’s unwillingness to assist the local populations, instead seeking to lure the interests of private investors.
Today, Greece remains a top global tourist location. Yet, there are growing signs of environmental degradation and impacts on local communities. On a visit to the island of Naxos, group members and I went on a mini-road excursion around the island. The group stopped to look at what appeared to be a slanted hill slope. Once we came closer, we noticed that the slant was a result of marble that was being carved out of the hillside. The marble presumably was being carved-out for export.
Today, Greece remains a top global tourist location. Yet, there are growing signs of environmental degradation and impacts on local communities. On a visit to the island of Naxos, group members and I went on a mini-road excursion around the island. The group stopped to look at what appeared to be a slanted hill slope. Once we came closer, we noticed that the slant was a result of marble that was being carved out of the hillside. The marble presumably was being carved-out for export.
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| Naxos marble quarry |
Further along on the road trip, we also came across a massive garbage disposal site. Both sites were quite sobering after having been used to the finals days of our program sitting next to the beach overlooking light blue waters and multi-colored skies.
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| Sunset at beach on Naxos Island, Greece. |
EJ accounts for the relationship between people and the land; how the land is not only a resource, but also a home safeguarding the livelihood of its inhabitants. It is within this context that we begin the see the wisdom of protecting traditional cultural forms of working and living on the land. Through EJ analysis, we can begin to understand how the extraction of natural resources by those outside of the local sphere not only impacts the natural environment but also the peoples inhabiting particular lands.
EJ focuses on marginalized communities. In the U.S., these communities are comprised of people of color and low-income peoples. The application of EJ is possible in other locations. Greece provided me with the first hand experience of ecological degradation and its impact on vulnerable local communities. Dina and others experienced absolute loss. Whether conspiracy theories are at some point validated or not, what remains are the struggles of the Greek people attempting to reclaim their connections to the land.
EJ focuses on marginalized communities. In the U.S., these communities are comprised of people of color and low-income peoples. The application of EJ is possible in other locations. Greece provided me with the first hand experience of ecological degradation and its impact on vulnerable local communities. Dina and others experienced absolute loss. Whether conspiracy theories are at some point validated or not, what remains are the struggles of the Greek people attempting to reclaim their connections to the land.
Sources cited
Peña, D. 2005. Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y vida. Tucson. University of Arizona Press.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Student Blog V: Food Sovereignty and the End of Obesity
Moderator's Note: With this entry, we continue a series of blogs written by students in my University of Washington courses. I am teaching two courses this Winter 2011 Quarter: Comparative Social Movements: Mexico and the United States and a seminar on Food Sovereignty. The fifth contribution in the ejfood series was prepared by Kat Asselin, Kendra Broadwater, and Mollie Tarte, students in the food sovereignty seminar. This is an eloquent and thoughtful critique of the conventional approach taken by the USDA, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and other agrifood and health systems actors to the public health problems posed by the continued rise of obesity in the USA and especially in low-income communities of color.
The three co-authors argue in favor of a paradigm shift toward food sovereignty to address obesity and other negative health outcomes of systemic malnourishment of vulnerable populations. This approach rejects the dominant reductionist models championed by government agencies that emphasize a focus on individual behavioral and genetic factors. The student scholars writing here favor an approach that addresses issues of structural violence and environmental conditions as factors that interact with genomic diversity and biodiversity; They also call for rebuilding robust local and place based food systems and reconnecting people to their heritage cuisines. Finally, they propose adoption of policies that reward local farmer investments in perennial polycultures, agroecology, and other food-related Traditional Environmental Knowledge practices and models. This paradigm shift will strongly improve the resilience and equity of our agrifood systems and promote better public health outcomes.
The three co-authors argue in favor of a paradigm shift toward food sovereignty to address obesity and other negative health outcomes of systemic malnourishment of vulnerable populations. This approach rejects the dominant reductionist models championed by government agencies that emphasize a focus on individual behavioral and genetic factors. The student scholars writing here favor an approach that addresses issues of structural violence and environmental conditions as factors that interact with genomic diversity and biodiversity; They also call for rebuilding robust local and place based food systems and reconnecting people to their heritage cuisines. Finally, they propose adoption of policies that reward local farmer investments in perennial polycultures, agroecology, and other food-related Traditional Environmental Knowledge practices and models. This paradigm shift will strongly improve the resilience and equity of our agrifood systems and promote better public health outcomes.
The Paradox of Obesity and Hunger
Kat Asselin, Kendra Broadwater, & Mollie Tarte
In a world of climbing food costs, media outlets are predicting the downfall of Americans increasingly subject to the diseases of obesity while concurrently talking about the epidemic of food insecurity that has only worsened in the decades since the so-called Green Revolution.
Obesity is clinically defined as a body mass index in excess of 30, but other studies and models suggest that there is genetic diversity in body types and a strong correlation with century-old dietary practices and co-evolution of human bodies and heritage cuisines.
Over the past 30 years, the proportion of obese adults has climbed in most states, in some cases from less than 10% to more than 30% today. The attention given to the ever-expanding American waistline has been impossible to ignore.
You can even see this drama unfold on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) website. The map clearly illustrates the fact that the poorest states in the nation are those with the highest levels of obesity, and other data presented on the website confirm that levels are significantly higher in minority and low-income populations. Blacks are 51% more likely to be obese than whites, Hispanics are 21% more likely and obesity levels are significantly higher in predominately low-income counties than middle to high-income counties across the country[i].
To put the problem of hunger into perspective, if you live in an urban area, it is likely that you will see someone every day who receives aid in the form of food benefits. We’re producing (and wasting) more food than ever, yet one of eight people in the United States is utilizing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly the food stamp program)[ii]. The groups that have the highest incidence of obesity have also the greatest risk of being food insecure: impoverished and minority communities. How can we be getting heavier and going hungry at the same time? While this question has been addressed in a number of different forums, we’re looking to focus on the basic causes of this paradox and possible solutions that we can initiate.
Maybe it is an artifact of the concept of American Individualism, but often these problems are presented as a problem of the individual who is obese or poor; the affected is lazy or weak-willed. However, this perspective is not very well supported in neither the science nor the study of trends in the population. This is not simply a question of individual will; if it were, efforts like SNAP would stop hunger and the billions pumped into the diet industry would eradicate obesity. In reality, this paradox has arisen from the structure of the national agrifoods system (which is one product that we have been painfully successful in exporting) and our misguided attempts to correct the problems that have been borne from it.
So, one logical conclusion here would be that we don’t really have a problem with eating too much or not having enough to eat, it’s simply malnourishment in the most basic sense of the word. We don’t have enough of the “right things” to eat, or alternatively, the “right things” are expensive or difficult to prepare. This is where the heart of food sovereignty lies, in what we consider the “right” foods: deep, slow, and local. How are we going to fix these problems in order to produce and consume the “right” food with meaningful, likely and lasting solutions?
Our agrifood systems and how we look at nutrition: the heart of the problem
Why is it that those who are at the highest risk for hunger (low-income and minority populations) are also at the highest risk for obesity? Such an obvious paradox seems like good material for a media sensation, but for some reason the media doesn’t seem too keen on discussing this particular aspect of the obesity problem. Nor does the CDCP website, which, on its “Causes and Consequences of Obesity” page, defines the cause of obesity as a “caloric imbalance,” and quickly notes that, “Behavior and environment play a large role causing people to be overweight and obese. These are the greatest areas for prevention and treatment actions.”[iii] It goes on to describe ways for individuals to change their behavior and environments so that they will be more conducive to a healthy lifestyle.[iv] Most of the advice the site gives are along the lines of “eat less and exercise more, and encourage those around you to do the same” and seems to suggest that obesity is caused by a lack of individual will power to eat better and exercise.
Does this mean that poorer, non-white people are more likely to have inadequate will power, and thus are more likely to be obese? Certainly not! There are many different factors that contribute to higher levels of obesity in those who are at a higher risk for food-insecurity. One factor that the CDCP website fails to acknowledge is that for some reason, unhealthy food tends to be cheaper than healthy food, and the disparity is deepening.[v] Why is it that buying a burger and fries from McDonald’s is cheaper than buying fresh ingredients from a local farmers’ market and making dinner at home? Certainly less processing, shipping, packaging, and other inputs went into the homemade meal, so why doesn’t this translate into lower cost?
Again, there are many reasons behind the similarly paradoxical truth that highly processed foods are more accessible to low-income and minority populations than whole, unprocessed foods. One that the CDCP, as a government agency, is probably particularly unwilling to admit, is that highly processed foods are cheaper than unprocessed fresh fruits and vegetables because the government promotes overproduction of the ingredients that are made into processed foods. This is a consequence of the high subsidies that are given to farmers who grow corn, soy, wheat, and other ingredients that make up most processed foods (in some highly adulterated and unrecognizable form). The terms of the agreement are simple- the more of a crop a farmer grows, the more subsidies the farmer receives from the government. In a subsidy-less world, farmers would regulate yearly production of these crops by the laws of supply and demand (generally speaking) - if prices (and thus demand) were high, they would grow more, if prices were low, they would grow less of the commodity crop and diversify to other crops. But in a world of subsidies, it does not make sense for farmers to abide by these laws. It makes sense for them to grow more of the commodity crop every year and receive the government subsidy.[vi]
The consequence of this is over production. Too much corn, soy, and other subsidized commodity crops are produced, and prices fall. In swoop the food companies, who buy the commodity crops at low prices and figure out cleaver ways to transform them into the wide variety of processed foods we now see on the shelves of every supermarket. However, due to the over production of commodity crops, food companies suddenly face the problem of having more calories on the market than people really need to eat. Of course, this threatens profits. In order to avoid losses, food companies must get people to consume more calories. To do this, they use marketing- lots of it.[vii]
While all races and economic classes are probably equally affected by the bombardment of food company advertisements, low income and minority populations are still at a higher risk of diet-related diseases because they cannot afford to buy healthy, unprocessed foods. Still others may reside in “food deserts” where fresh food is not just too expensive but literally unavailable, such as in inner cities where the food source is limited to the shelves of the nearest gas station mini-mart.
Wasting resources by focusing on the wrong solutions
Food assistance, defined by the US government, is known as “The United States Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), historically and commonly known as the Food Stamp Program, is a federal assistance program that provides assistance to low- and no-income people and families living in the U.S. Items allowed to purchase with food stamps include: bread & cereal, fruit & vegetables, meat, fish, poultry and dairy products. [viii]
According to the USDA, the average monthly allotment was about $101 per person and about $227 per household in FY 2008.[ix] SNAP is designed to increase food and income mobility. In theory, SNAP allows families to spend the money originally intended for food on other necessities. In reality, the $227 per household allotment does not suffice to feed an individual. According to The Massachusetts Law Reform Institute immigrants cannot receive food stamps, however “children of undocumented immigrants can get SNAP/Food Stamps if they are citizens or legal permanent residents.”[x] Other eligible individuals disabled legal immigrants, refugees, asylees, and deportees.[xi] When the “per capita gross national income ranges from about $1,700 to $9,990 a year” for low income groups, such as migrant families. It is not surprising that malnutrition is prevalent in these communities given such poverty.[xii] It is nearly impossible for families to eat healthy with that range of income. As result many are forced to eat food that is cheaper and often less nutritious. Their forced eating habits lead to diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity.
Extending food and medical aid to migrant families will ensure global economic stability. Bauer (2010) states that, “At least six in 10 of our country’s farm workers are undocumented immigrants…They help produce billions of dollars’ worth of grapes, tomatoes, strawberries, melons, beans and other grocery store staples… Deporting all of these immigrants, according to one recent study, would leave a $2.6 trillion hole in the U.S. economy over the next decade”[xiii]. Our food supply depends on migrant families, thus why we should be concerned with well being of migrant workers.
In the long run, food distribution is not a viable model for sustainability. This is seen by “the number of Americans receiving food stamps reached 43 million in November 2010, the highest number since the SNAP program began in 1939”. Research suggests, “The lack of affordable housing in urban areas means that money that would have been spent on food is spent on housing expenses.”[xiv] This half-century old model needs to be revisited so that a new system that helps communities provide for themselves can be adopted. However, unless our food system is reformed to allow low-income and minority populations access to an adequate amount of healthy food, supplemental measures like the SNAP program will have to continue.
Moving from treating the symptoms to the cause
The following is a compilation of solutions to the problem of malnutrition in it’s current form and into the future. These are a few of the essential steps to take if we intend to achieve food sovereignty.
• First, as a guiding principle, we need to begin by changing the perspective of the problem. Working on rebuilding agrifood infrastructure has to be a community endeavor and not based solely on individual efforts.
• Building strong, resilient producer to consumer networks is a necessary aspect of a more sovereign food system. This can be done through community-supported agriculture, including urban farming, pea patches and farmers’ markets. Ultimately, such measures would lead to fewer food deserts and hopefully lower prices for local produce. Using the social capital found in community, religious, youth or cultural organizations we can empower local food movements. This has been seen in efforts like Los Angeles’ South Central Farm and Seattle’s University of Washington Student Farm.
• Funding for program like SNAP and other food aid projects need to be reallocated to more comprehensive and effective programs that facilitate community food sovereignty rather than continued dependence on government aid. We need creative solutions to end hunger, without pushing people to rely on low-nutrient foods. What if we start to pay local farms to sell goods in urban communities? What if we provide space or resources to open Farmers’ Markets?
• Another huge dilemma, both figuratively and literally, is the amount of food that is thrown away every year in the United States. We should emphasize conservation of food, perhaps through donation or cooperative networks so unwanted food can get to those who need it.
• Perhaps the most important step on behalf of the national government will be modification of the Farm Bill. A few of the changes that are necessary include lowering commodity crops subsidies especially for large producers and Incentivizing the diversification of crops and reformation of land management practices, such as the allotment of a certain percentage of farmland to conservation. Rewarding perennial polycultures, agroecology, and other food-related Traditional Environmental Knowledge would strongly improve our agrifoods system.
Obesity, hunger and diet-related disease rates will never decline if we continue to blame individuals for their unhealthy eating habits, when the cause of these diseases are no more the fault of the individual as is being born in to one culture instead of another. Blaming individuals for their obesity or other diet-related diseases will only foster self-deprecation and further damage the people and communities that need assistance the most. We must abandon the kinds of discourse that reinforce such detrimental fallacies and instead focus on solutions that address the true causes of hunger, obesity, and diabetes.
References
Center for Disease Control and Prevention. U.S. Obesity Trends (2011) http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
[ii] United States Department of Agriculture. “SUPPLEMENTAL NUTRITION ASSISTANCE PROGRAM: NUMBER OF PERSONS PARTICIPATING”. (2 March 2011). http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/29SNAPcurrPP.htm
[iii] Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Causes and Consequences. (2011) http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
[iv] Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Causes and Consequences. (2011) http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
[v] Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Cost of Healthy Eating. (March 2009)
[vi] Environmental Working Group. Government’s Continued Bailout of Corporate Agriculture (2010) http://farm.ewg.org/summary.php
[viii] United States Department of Agriculture. Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program. (Washington D.C.: GPO, October 2010). http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/retailers/eligible.htm
[ix] United States Department of Agriculture. Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program. (Washington D.C.: GPO, October 2010). http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/retailers/eligible.htm
[x] Massachusetts Law Reform Group. “10 Myths and Facts about SNAP/Food Stamp Benefits and Immigrants”. (May 2009). http://www.masslegalhelp.org/income-benefits/food-stamps-immigrants-myths-and-facts
[xi] Social Security Administration. Food Stamp Facts. (Washington D.C.: GPO, September 2008). http://www.ssa.gov/pubs/10101.html
[xii] Bauer, Mary and Mónica Ramírez. Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry. Southern Poverty Law Center. (2010).
[xiii] Bauer, Mary and Mónica Ramírez. Injustice on Our Plates: Immigrant Women in the U.S. Food Industry. Southern Poverty Law Center. (2010).
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