Our Food and our Stories
Depending on who you are and where you are, having control over what you eat is part real and part illusion. The global food system self-markets as serving everyone, though communities across the globe have lost and continue to lose control over their food. The localism and dynamism in those communities are meeting a similar fate.
Counting those losses takes us back centuries into the history of food in this country, which has control and subordination rooted in its origins. Our contemporary food system is certainly an evolution of that same system, though some of us are fortunate to have more agency flow through our vantage points.
I am one of the lucky ones. From where I stand, studying food systems is otherwise known as studying nourishment: the food and conditions critical to good health and community livelihood. Studying food has been a proxy to explore how political frameworks around food complicate nourishment and deprivation, and how those frameworks ultimately dictate social realities across the globe.
Several narratives bring those realities into clear view, narratives that are at once seemingly disparate yet intimate upon closer examination. I have learned about and imagined this particular portrait of Mexico: kitchen counters covered with ancho, habanero, and pasilla chili varieties, the dust of freshly ground masa, and the smell of garlic everywhere. I learned not long ago that the typical Mexican refrigerator houses eggs and milk regularly. Bringing home countertops of ripe produce is then a daily exercise in looking outward into the local community. For many, nourishment becomes an experience that is both personal and collective.
A second, darker portrait, decades later: uncountable truckloads of cast-off American corn make their way onto Mexican land until they have suffocated everything that once grew there. The depletion of local Mexican economies leaves little else for the Mexican families from the former portrait to do, except to flee north of the border to assume the position of migrants in America. Some Americans look on in ahistorical disgust, and in the air looms the tragic irony of chastising Mexicans for chasing the same capitalism we do.
Another narrative in my own cultural memory rewinds three centuries back, when slaves were tilling American earth and imprinting into our minds the central idea of what it means to seek, and find, abundance in America. What many of us know about slavery: the sun meant work, the moon brought break, and rest was an abstract and distant concept in the Black imaginary. Lesser known is that there were pockets of slaves who were given plots of land by their owners, with permission to grow their own food on the condition that it took no time away from the arduousness of their slave work. Even lesser known, those same slaves participated in a food trading marketplace of their own: growing through the day as told, and then finding life enough to cultivate food for a subversive bartering system of their own. That history is tucked deep beneath the ancestry of food and community in this country, but well alive on the continuum of my own understanding of how food and localism flow through each other.
Still, I am one of the lucky ones. On hot summer afternoons in New York City, I walk down 15th street to Union square and engulf myself in a world of freshly picked food, like many fortunate others who know that they are headed towards the depths of daily nourishment. My weekly staples are bunches of bright orange carrots and deep fuchsia beets. Cash and bag space allowing, I reach for wild spinach weeds from Hudson, New York, and pasture-raised eggs from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Recently, I was twelve cents short for a $2.50 half-dozen case of eggs. But there is a particular friendliness among these market-sellers and me as dweller. We are all smiles as the seller reaches for the money I have and gives me the eggs anyway after adding, “Don’t worry – I’ll fix you up.”
I rarely leave the market without taking a look around. A look around provides a moment to sense what else this localism holds, and who else seems to move freely within its boundaries. There are women in their twenties pausing from work to buy produce for the week, groups of young friends sampling fresh orange blossom honey sticks and yellow peaches, caretakers wheeling around those they care for with one hand, and weighing sacks of leafy vegetables in the other. There is a dynamism at these markets that feels sacred. Some are here to nourish; others have come seeking nourishment.
The same connectivity that draws me here draws me to issues within the global food system. Thinking about food in my own life conjures up gratitude for my capacity to nourish myself and the people around me, and to cook the native foods of my Afro-Cameroonian heritage. Thinking about food in the communities I am now a part of allows me to teach seven-year olds in the Red Hook corner of Brooklyn how to cook seasonal recipes using local ingredients, and teenagers from across New York City how to eat, cook, and shop with localism and nourishment in mind. All of those experiences are both central to my own life and beyond my own life as they interlace with the narratives of the world around me.
In an ironic sense, I find myself most drawn to the way that something immensely personal becomes political. Whether one sees the global food system as feeding everyone or feeding a select few, the system exists with everyone in mind, whether to assume the perceived responsibility of dignified or passive consumer, cheap laborer, or the guy who says, “Hey, I just drive the truck.” I find the global food system captivating in the way that it connects us all, a priceless and indescribable intimacy within a devouring globalism.
The history of food is a history of stories: stories about growing, harvesting, transporting, and selling. Stories about bellies – and communities – that are hungry, satisfied, overstuffed, and starved. As these stories bring us closer to each other and the world around us, they become as fueling as food.