Erik Drews
S.O.S. ComAlt Seminar pre-writing week 2
16 January 2017
Word count: 252
Triggering Passages:
“But it is not simply the ‘what’ of what one eats that matters. It is the “where’ of where we eat and where food comes from; the ‘when’ of historically specific economic conditions and political pressures; the ‘how of how food is made; and the ‘who’ of who makes and who gets to eat it. Finally and most important, it is the many ‘whys’ of eating- the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and protest-that most determine its meaning.”(Tompkins 2012: 4)
“This is the story of the secret life of food, the history of how it all came to be, including where, how, and why our food is traded, a critical but nearly invisible connection between the farm and plate.” (Newman 2013: 3)
News Media Content:
Why Going Organic Just Got Easier For Farmers
“If only you were selling organic soybeans and corn. They’re worth almost twice as much, per bushel, as your conventional crops.
So why not grow organic crops instead? There’s a catch. You’d have to follow the organic rules, renouncing synthetic pesticides and fertilizer, for three entire years before any of your crops could be sold as organic. For those three “transition’ years, you’d have the worst of all worlds: Low organic yields and low conventional prices.”
Discussion:
From reading the introductions of both “Racial Indigestion” as well as “Secret Financial Life of Food” the concept of eating commoditized food shifts from a normal practice to an abnormal one riddled with seemingly arbitrary labels indicating value. When asking the question of how a particular commodity receives its value, one must consider these questions of what, where, when, who, how and why. Within the quote from Tompkins that I have selected, I was strongly drawn to “the many “whys” of eating, particularly protest. When I think of someone choosing to eat one type of food over another type of food based in protest, I become increasingly frustrated with the way in which capitalism drives the food industry throughout the world. This reaction mostly stems from my understanding that making supposedly ethical food decisions requires a higher level of financial stability than is available to the majority of the world’s population. Organic farming practices are considerably better for the environment, as well as the people who inhabit said environment, however the farmer looses money by switching from conventional practices to organic practices. In order for the famer to make a living, they often must compensate for this monetary deficit, driving up the price for organically produced products. The more consumers purchase these products the more stable the organic farming industry will become. How can we expect this industry’s stability to strengthen, when ethical farming practices can only be supported by particularly wealthy individuals that make up a decreasing percentage of the overall population?
Week 3
Erik Drews
S.O.S. ComAlt Seminar Pre-writing week 3
23 January 2017
Word Count: 262
Triggering Passeges:
“Food and Drink belong to the generic and stylistic registers that are traditionally vulgar: to associate them with serious and noble themes is to upset the accepted hierarchy, to join orders which are conventionally separate and to confuse the normal relations between form and content. This incongruity produces a crack in the system and generates comedy; furthermore it gives received vocabulary and discourse a shock which gets rid of the cobwebs and revitalizes them.” –Michel Jeanneret (Tompkins 2012, 23-24)
“What was the real value of spices in Roman times? Prestige. Exotic
fragrances and flavors announced themselves as luxuries and advertised a
consumer’s extravagance. “The prestige function of spices can scarcely be
exaggerated,” john Keay writes. “Like fine silks and acknowledged works
of art, exotic fragrances and flavours lent to aspiring households an air of
superior refinement and enviable opulence. “ (Newman 2013, 19)
Will Trump’s Tough Talk on Immigration Cause a Farm Labor Shortage? (NPR)
“You think a gringo’s gonna be pruning pistachios?” he asks me in Spanish. He says in his 17 years working the California fields, he’s seen only Latinos — mostly immigrants — doing this work. So he’s not buying the idea that he’s taking away a job from a U.S. citizen. (Rancano 2017)
The view reflected in the quote from “Racial Indigestion” is an unfortunate one. To acknowledge that challenging the antebellum period’s normalcy could only result in comedy strengthens the arbitrarily designated concept that food preparation is associated with the lower class. “To upset the accepted hierarchy” must be comical because it would be viewed as abnormal to question such a heavily enforced social construct. This quote loudly exemplifies a type of illusion that is still in place today. The quote that I got from an NPR article reflects how this type of illusion still exists today in regards to agriculture in America. As food is more and more commoditized the upper class is unwilling to take part in its production. Due to this type of cognitive dissonance farmers may have a hard time finding laborers if large amounts of undocumented immigrants are deported. When side-by-side it seems that not much has changed between these two time periods in the case of how society regards this hierarchical difference.
The second passage from Newman refers to a different type of status that was assigned to a particular type of food during an earlier period: being that pepper was luxurious in Roman times. I have chosen to include this quote because further within this chapter in “The Secret Financial Life of Food” we discover that due to pepper’s status as “black gold” a surplus of pepper was produced and by the nineteenth century, pepper had lost its luxurious status. Because pepper was assigned such a high level of value it was over produced which lead to its value decreasing abruptly.
Erik Drews
S.O.S. ComAlt
January 30th 2017
Week 4 Seminar prep
Triggering passages:
“This created a dramatic oversupply during the autumn, with insufficient available buyers. As a consequence, grain frequently went unsold in the city, and large quantities were either dumped in the streets or tipped into Lake Michigan. Not unexpectedly, during the late winter and spring, when available stores were short and the lakes and waterways frozen, the supply of grain was insufficient to meet the demand of a growing urban population, and the price of grain soared.” (Newman 2013, 45)
“Bread has generally been considered as the staff of life to man, being the most important and universal article of his sustenance. For this reason, it is the practice of all wise states to subject the price and quality of this grand staple of our food, to the regulation of the civil magistrate. . . . Of such importance is the article of bread, that the government of every country ought to hold a controlling hand of those circumstances, within its reach, which may have a tendency to augment the price of this commodity.” (Tompkins 2012, 58)
News Media Content:
“Food System Transformation: Brazil, Rwanda, and Vietnam”
“Vietnam’s experience focused on land reforms together with agriculture-led growth and nutrition-sensitive approaches. Land reforms in support of smallholder agriculture greatly enhanced agricultural growth in the 1990’s, which contributed to higher rural incomes and to the movement of labor into non-agricultural sectors. While rural incomes grew, the government increased investment in nutrition and health programs, which helped accelerate the reduction of hunger and under nutrition.” (International Food Policy Research Institute 2016)
Discussion:
I chose this first passage from “The Secret Financial Life of food” because it directly reflects a very real flaw within the structure of the free-market economy. When supply is high, and demand is low the value of this staple food plunges making it worthless and subject to being disposed of in mass quantities, but after a short period of time, due to inclement weather, the supply becomes low and the demand becomes high. This type of shift causes the prices to skyrocket and become unaffordable for a large percentage of the population. This can lead to a vast amount of malnutrition and hunger, all driven by the concept of attributing value to human necessities based on scarcity.
The reason I have included this passage from “Racial Indigestion” is because it offers a solution to the problem presented by the previous passage. If the government can have ownership of the means of production of grains they would be able to make sure that the price of grain (and therefore the cost of living) does not become unaffordable to the working class. If the working class is unable to provide themselves with sustenance, many industries will be inadvertently affected and the entire economy could become unstable. However, in anticipating the counter argument, a corrupt government could raise the price of such necessities in order to do away with the lower class.
The reason I included this final passage was to point out that even in present times particular governments are taking progressive steps to combat starvation and malnutrition by investing is “nutrition and health programs.”
Erik Drews
SOSComAlt
Week 5
Word count: 341
Triggering passages;
“No sooner had he reached the sidewalk (little cannibal that he was!) than Jim Crow’s head was in his mouth. . . She had just placed another representative of the renowned Jim Crow at the window, when again the shop bell tinkered clamorously; and again the door. . . disclosed the same sturdy little urchin who, precisely two minutes ago, had made his exit. The crumbs and discoloration of the cannibal-feast, as yet hardly consummated, were exceedingly visible about his mouth.” (Tompkins 2012, 94)
“The Choctaw Nation sent $710 to the Irish for famine relief in 1845. The Equivalent of that would be close to $1 million today in foreign aid. ‘These gentle folk were at their most downtrodden, yet they raised $710 and sent it across the Atlantic to Ireland to ease our famine woes.’ Sculptor Alex Pentek tells a reporter from the Irish Examiner.” (Laduke 2016, 91)
News Media Content: “Black and White and Not All Right”
“Fourteen years later, in a Ft. Lauderdale deli in 2008, President Obama likewise dubbed the black and white “Unity Cookies.” And I…I just don’t understand. I don’t understand why the black and white cookie has come to be hailed as the pinnacle of how a racially harmonious society should be, when in actuality it is an illustration of how society actually racially functions right now. Y’know, with black people allll on one side, white people allll on another side, and a very thin margin in between where both sides are able to actually meet. How exactly did our society get duped into thinking that the baked good representation of the Mason-Dixon line was an awesome thing to aspire to?” (MaNishtana 2015)
Discussion:
I was pretty intrigued by this passage from Tompkins because it seems to kind of turn tables. It seems ironic to me to see someone present a white child as cannibal-like, beast-like or savage. Mostly because during and long before the Antebellum period southerners tended to attribute these characteristics to African American people. By having to charge the “sturdy little urchin” for one of her racist cookies, it seems that Hepzibah is facing a type of existential crisis that diminishes her value to that of her perception of those below her. This seems to rattle her perception of the socially constructed hierarchy that is essential for her prior elitist designation.
The passage from Chronicles struck my interest because my immediate response to this passage filled me with suspicion. I may be way off base here but, as much as I would love to believe that the Choctaw people were so extraordinarily selfless in 1845, I am a bit skeptical. Now, I assume that if a bunch of white Anglo-Saxon types had just moved in, (searching for a better life) committed a sort of cultural genocide against their people, and relocated them all to Oklahoma, the last thing that they would really want would be for the Irish to feel the urge to leave Ireland in search of a better life. Not to diminish the exceptional acts of the Choctaw people of course.
When reading the 3rd chapter of Racial Indigestion, the part about the Jim Crow cookie made me a bit curious. After searching “Jim Crow” cookie on google, I saw images of the Black and White cookie that I remember from a Seinfeld episode. In the Episode they use the cookie to talk satirically about race relations in America and this has always seemed a little inappropriate to me. This article seemed pretty relevant to the ways our culture can become extremely deluded by the meanings that we inaccurately attribute to inanimate things such as the idea of sugar being a pure, luxury item to molasses being a waste product.