Update!

 

On Thursday I went to the afternoon farm practicum workshop where we pruned the kiwi and apple trees. Part of participating in that practicum has opened up a new writing project for me that I will be slowly starting in the next few weeks and completing more substantial work on during the spring and summer. Currently, I am planning on taking Practice of Organic Farming beginning in Spring 2017. In preparation for the changes that the farm program will be going through to include culture studies in Spring 2018, I will be doing extra work that is focused on documenting student projects happening at the Organic Farm over the next season. While the actual application and presentation of this project is still in progress, the ultimate goal is to create a writing piece that is similar to the Farmer’s Almanac but specifically focused on the Organic Farm at Evergreen. I have accepted to begin working on this project after a conversation about reflective writing that I shared with Sarah.

I’ve begun writing about the winter farm workshops as well as an introduction/proposal for the project. Here is a snippet of the pre-writing I completed before beginning to draft the project proposal:

 

Reflective writing is about remembering how the body is the mind is the mouth. In our field research, the earth has been our subject of study; our practicum is set in her stomach. Possibly it was through our own mouths that we first let matter and memory mix. Privileged enough to experience the product of the land as sustenance and sensual experience. Is it our own consciousness that has consumed us into the practice of working with the soils of the farm? What did we swallow that consequently swallowed us? We’ve landed here, in her earthy belly. It would be indigestible, not to write here, too.

 

As for my current exploration around social food movements and intersecting identity, I spent a lot of my time this past week collecting/revising my notes in order to start writing my Week 7 Research paper. After the hours spent doing this, I did not end up reading everything that I originally planned to, which is fine, given that there will be time to catch up during Week 5.

I did begin to read Spaces of Danger and Food Transgressions: Making Sense of Contemporary Food Politics, two books which I’ve been increasingly excited to start reading this quarter

Spaces of Danger

I read a few sections of essays within Spaces of Danger, however I am thinking I will trade out this book with another one that is more relevant to my project as there is only one section that appealed to the ideas that I am working with. Chapter ten, “Even in Plurinational Bolivia: Indigeneity, Development, and Racism since Morales” written by Nancy Postero is about the racism that indigenous people in Bolivia face from the government. Since the first election of indigenous president Evo Morales, outside of the country itself, Bolivia has been an example of a socialist and equitable government. However as Postero and other scholars are quick to claim, this is not the case whatsoever. Before his election Morales was a member of the Cocaleros, the Bolivians who were fighting for the indigenous rights to continue growing coca on their land. However, in the past years, Morales has let other legislation that would negatively impact the environment for indigenous people pass by. The most well known example of this is the TIPNIS highway case from in 2011 and 2012. The plans for the route, led the highway through the Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS). This road, designed to carry oil exports, would have cut off people from water resources that are needed for agriculture.

 

Food Transgressions: Making Sense of Contemporary Food Politics

Two different essays I read in Food Transgressions are about the ethics of Community Supported Agriculture as well as the criticisms of Slow Food. The first passage about CSAs was reporting results from surveys that CSA community members participated in. The second passage about Slow Food reminded me of a journal titled Mobilising Bodies: Visceral Identification in the Slow Food Movement that I read during Week 1. The difference between that article and this newer material is that the authors of Mobilising Bodies separated issues such as race and gender from their journal that was based upon class accessibility. The reading I read this week did not abandon these ideas and therefore felt much more reputable.

Week 4- January 31, 2017

Wk4 Seminar

“Eating, the seemingly most quotidian and universal of bodily acts…Sarah Josepha Hale reveals diet as a crucial technology through which nations are formed as communities against racial, moral, and physiological contamination…by partaking of the substance [bread], seemed to mingle their own physical constitution with that of the nation’s, unpolluted by the richer foods of decadent monarchies or the exotic fare of the tropics” (Tompkins, 2012: 57, 61, 63).

“Corn had a duel identity…indispensable to the slave trade: corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America” (Newman, 2013: 28).

“Don’t expect any quick action on the Farm Bill that’s due in 2018…60 votes will be needed in the Senate…numerous consumer groups with a variety of interests and concerns also want to be heard and exert an influence…the purposes of a Farm Bill is to provide safety nets for farmers” (Mueller, 2017).

 

The texts this week beg to ask, what is the significance of eating and our relationships with each other? From my perspective, I find that eating is food is commodities; but it does not always feel that way, there is more separation. In Racial Indigestion, the theme of eating is more than just nutrition, but power and historical racism that flows in and out of the mouth. I do not find the sensual mouth to be shocking, but the xenophobia and nationalism, that is not often too far from the plate, highlights the violence that has historically contaminated our food.

What we produce in our gardens and what we choose to eat are parts of our identities. In some cases, like the African slaves who were only given corn, food can also play a role in the defamation of an identity. Commodities today present a similar kind of lock on the lives of farmers and consumers. Reliant on government subsidies, farmers are a part of a scheme to produce more grain in order to keep their businesses and feed their families. These same subsidies are what trap consumers into buying cheap products that are produced with HFCS and low-cost wheat. Whether or not we can agree that ‘eating is food is commodities,’ it is evident that there is sufficient systematic damage to the intersecting relationships between the three.

 

Sources:

Mueller, Ray. (2017). No fast track for 2018 Farm Bill. Wisconsin State Farmer. Retrieved from http://www.wisfarmer.com/story/news/2017/01/30/no-fast-track-2018-farm-bill/97245900/.

Newman, Kara. (2013). The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. (2012). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York: New York University Press.

 

Update!

This week, I centralized the themes of text more than I did the previous week. It’s the last week that I am planning on thinking about the underlying structures and organization of movements. While in the upcoming weeks, I’ll still be reading literature about these issues, I am also thinking about more timely and critical matters that are related to the current federal administration.

The three most interesting/enlightening/challenging resources I used this week are all vastly different from one another. The three that I am choosing to talk about in this post are not necessarily the resources that were the most helpful at answering my learning objective questions, but they are the ones that I am continuing to think about, which seems to me to be just as important.

 

Cultural Modeling in Two Eras of Food Protest: Grahamites (1830s) and Organic Advocates (1960s-70s), Jeffery Haydu

I found this article incredibly frustrating. The main thesis that was presented compared the Grahamites to the Organic Advocates of the 1960s. Haydu uses the term “social movement” to describe both of these groups in their respective historical and political climate. I suppose that Haydu is not incorrect to label them as such, however I felt that he left out important details about the motivations of the Grahamites group. Early on in the text, Haydu refers to the Grahamite diet as the consumption of minimally processed foods to reconcile “social, spiritual, and physical corruption,” there is never any mention of the nationalist or religious extremist ideology that started the movement. Haydu continues on to say that the case of the Grahamites shows us that our inquiry to the safety and quality of our food is a long-term trend, leading to the argument for the similarity between early organic advocates and the Grahamites and dismissing the underlying differences between the two movements.

Possibly the reason I feel uneasy about the legitimacy of this text is because I kept on waiting for the author to make the one claim that we all already know to be historically accurate. Evangelical Sylvester Graham began his movement with the intention of persuading people not to masturbate. Just as relevant, the foods Graham was deeming as exceptional were domestic products such as grain (for bread, not beer) and the sinful foods were imported items such as spices that were both exotic and lustful. I don’t believe that one can accurately support the argument that the Grahamites started something that later inspired Organic Advocates.

While social movements strategies such as lunch counter sit-ins or the crossing of feminist ideologies are often used repeatedly from past movements’ success, the context that these two specific movements fall into are too different to claim that one influence the other. For starters, organic advocates, both in the 60s and 70s as well as today, are defensive mobilizers. The overlapping message of their issue is that they are fighting against types of industrial agriculture to uphold health of person and land. Food movements today are based in prefigurative politics that see a world where organic agriculture is the norm and biodiversity is a valued standard. However, they are also fighting against corporate lobbyists and monopoly producers that continue to buy our organic farmers. On the other hand, we have seen that the Grahamites platform was only prefigurative. Sylvester Graham’s crusade of non-masturbators stood to convince other people to join their eating agenda but did not have any larger powers that were against their movement, unlike organic advocates.

 

Another Politics, Taking Across Today’s Transformative Movements, Chris Dixon

This book is dense and often repeats itself, but so far it has been the most helpful book I have read regarding organization and strategizing. Also, it’s written by an Evergreen graduate, which I did not realize until I was a about a quarter of the way through it. The layout of the book first introduces the reader to the history of larger movements of the 20^th and 21^st century, then, using this information discusses the politics of social movements and the anti-authoritarian ideology that many activists as well as introduces the idea of pre-figurative politics versus knowing what a movement is ‘against.’ The last two sections of the book are focused on developing strategy in a world that does not yet accept a movement’s vision as well as the leadership/organizer role that many movements develop.

At the end of this week, I was preparing to start writing my research paper that I am still aiming to complete by Week 7. After finishing this book, I finally felt able to start writing parts of the final paper. I ended up citing this book quite a few times, and while I’m not going to write any personal incites or analyses about my time reading it now, I did have a couple of favorite quotes that I can share instead:

Rojas-Urrutias says of social movements in Latin America, “the struggle is on the people’s struggle for autonomy, not gathering power to take over the state and topple it. Revolution is about the process of making power creating autonomous communities that divest from the state” (105)

“There are in fact a few kinds of activity that tend to get lumped together under the label “prefigurative.” Perhaps the most widely recognized of these forms is to practice countercultural lifestyles that in some way point toward a better society. Whether vegetarianism, collective living, or nonmonogamous relationships, such lifestyles generally involve efforts to “live our values”—to bring day-to-day ways of living into line with radical aspirations” (131).

“As organizers, we struggle with the often harmful ways we have been socialized to treat one another and with how to develop more healthy and liberating practices. And if we’re succeeding, we’re grappling with these things inside movements that are fighting against injustice. We face important questions about how to combine our attempts to develop new social relations with our efforts to challenge existing social relations…work around healing is a powerful basis for developing consciousness and taking action against structural forms of violence” (142).

 

The Poetry of Creatures, On Being podcast with Ellen Davis and Wendell Berry, hosted by Krista Tippett

Overall, I’m a huge fan of this podcast series. It’s been in production for over a decade and I’m always finding old shows that I’ve never listened to before. Each show is based in theology, which I’m sure may be a turn off for some people, however I personally find theology rather captivating and the guests that Tippett interviews are diverse in terms of both identity and profession.

In this podcast, Tippett interviews Ellen Davis, an environmentalist and biblical scholar and uses recordings of Wendell Berry reading some of his poetry about agriculture. At one point, Davis talks about one of her students telling her she needed to ask a question about land on a test she was writing. Davis was caught off guard; she had not realized how often she spoke about the necessary relationship that humans have with the land. Davis continues to say that there was no need to search for mentions of land and sea within the bible because it seemed to appear in everything. From a literary perspective, I personally return to thinking back to the importance of kitchens as a space in the house. In some ways, the mention of land is the same way. They are both grounding, and reconnecting to memory, life, and hearth.

Consciousness is crucial to the relationship that we hold with land and garden. Davis mentions this when she speaks about the times she was unaware she was lecturing about land. She relates the same thought to the practices and traditions in how we eat and remembering that our land is our food and vice versa. When we’ve made these connections, the next step is asking questions about the morals that are tied to our food and what it means to eat the food we choose to eat.

Certainly, this podcast is tied directly around the subject of land and conservation efforts that will lead to change while also abstaining from romanticizing farming or the work of the land. In one of his poems in the podcast, Berry says, “When hope sets out on its desperate search for reasons, it can find them.” In some search for clarity, Davis responds by saying, “The is a difference between hope and foolish optimism. And in order to have hope, you have to see the depth and dimensions of the problem.”

Update!

For the sake of transparency, I’d like to make it clear that I have chosen to create this ILC project for myself so I could stay home and read all day. Not that there is anything shocking about that statement, but I feel that as the weeks go on, this intention will be clear for anyone who checks my weekly updates on the regular. I have about five main books that I will be reading over the next ten weeks as well as Racial Indigestion and plenty of articles that I have chosen to read.

I believe that the easiest way to communicate my work with others is to break up my learning objectives by weeks. During Weeks 1-3 I will focus my time reading about the history of organizing social movements and overlapping strategies that have been used in different kinds of political climates. I will be asking: how do we create change that works outside of institutional practices in the hopes of changing said institutions? Weeks 4-7 will be focused primarily on food movements and their legitimacy at including intersectional identities. These weeks, I will be asking: in what ways does the food choices we are making perpetuate global racism and violence? And, are there systems of agriculture and production that do not incite violence? By Week 7, I will have completed a research paper that answers these questions. The remainder of the quarter, I will be reading more about media and social movements. I have included this as a part of my project because I feel it is important to discuss what the general public knows about food access and food movements. There is plenty of information in the form of documentaries about nutrition, but what about the policy that makes that kind of nutrition unavailable for some people?

This was the first week that I was truly starting to get into some of the texts that I have selected for myself. While the plan was to read texts that stick to the theme of social movement organization, I definitely strayed from that plan and ended up consuming the information that I was most eager to get into. Below, I have highlighted the four most captivating resources I used this week.

 

Poverty INC (film)

Poverty INC is a documentary about the industry of poverty and failure of NGOs to provide sustainable resources for those who have experienced crisis. This documentary focused on Haiti and the problems that were created due to the 10,000 foreign NGOs that are currently set up on the island. Paternalism, the assumption that people in a lower-income country, or a country that has currently faced distress are helpless and in need of foreign assistance. In cases such as Haiti, volunteer crusades, or the more institutionally powerful NGOs create dependence of Haitian people, change the ways that Haitian people think about their situations, and are the new face of the historically colonial government.

The poverty industry is designed to benefit those who have created instead of the people who they are supposedly trying to help. They receive funding from a couple of different places, but the majority of funding comes from corporate institutions. Another reason NGOs and social entrepreneurs continue to be successful is because of well-intentioned people who are convinced by propaganda that appeals to their empathy. However, local businesses in places that are over run with said social entrepreneurs, are suffering from imported aid donations. Such donations are infrequent and unpredictable; yet still take jobs from the local economy. The solution does not reside in taking out all aid or organizations and letting communities rebuild on their own. This idea is romanticized. What people truly need is an outlet to receive resources to reconnect with the economy.

Modern day colonization has made countries economic slaves to external loans and ruling elites have monopolized the political government, thus making change stagnant. The solution will rely on internal social organizations, composed of the people at the center of crisis and offering sustainable solutions that do not trap people into a system of dependent support.

 

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks

Eating the Other, written by black woman activist bell hooks, is about ethnicity as spice in a white world. She writes, “Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the mainstream white culture.” This essay analyzes the racism that is acted not through apparent white supremacy but by a culture that claims, “I’m not racist.” Hooks writes about this new racism as something that allows for sexualizing of the black body, denial of accountability to history, as well as commodification of the Other.

In this piece, I felt the most charged by her discussion about nostalgia and what it means. As quoted in the text, Renato Rosaldo defined nostalgia in Culture and Truth as “people mourning the passing of what they themselves have transformed” or “a process of yearning for what one has destroyed that is a form of mystification.” Part of this nostalgia is a longing for “primitivism” and an “atavistic belief that the spirit of the ‘primitive’ resides in the bodies of dark Others whose cultures, traditions, and lifestyles may indeed be irrevocably changed by imperialism, colonization, and racist domination.” This nostalgia is a part of the sexualizing of bodies and the denial of accountability to history that I mentioned previously. It’s a part of a lusting after something that they believe someone else has, as well as romanticizing the experiences of others as a way discredit the experience that they may have gone through.

At the beginning of this essay, hooks writes, “fucking was a way of confronting the other.” She describes white boys who consider sexual partners based on race as a way to deviate from past white supremacy. Yet they still differentiate themselves and cast women of color as a thing—something that will change them and offer a special or “exotic” experience. This fetishism is directly tied to denial and a desire to prove that the relationship with the Other is more than about domination. This part of the text made me question how sexualizing someone is deemed as more acceptable in our culture than admitting one’s own participation in institutional racism. It seems evident that this tactic of becoming one with Otherness is still a strategy of domination, yet one that is more normalized by the intersectionality of sexism and imperialism.

The last theme of hooks’ text that I want to bring attention to is her discussion on the commodification of art and culture that makes the political and radical edible for white mouths. Rap, an emotional and verbally expressive route to translate pain has been contemporarily oversaturated by a culture of anhedoia—the inability to feel (pleasure). Yet, the commoditization of this art promises recognition and calls to people who feel some kind of Otherness or separation from a society that is dominated by people born into socio-powerful positions, but is in reality a fruitless machine with little chance of redemption or reconciliation for institutional pain.

 

Fire Worship, Nathanial Hawthorne

I read this text after reading passages cited in chapter one of Racial Indigestion. Summary-wise, I don’t have too much to say about it. Hawthorne writes about the transition of the kitchen and the architectural shift that occurred between the hearth and the stove. Hawthorne argues that the “sullen stove” has replaced the warmth and congeniality that the hearth brought to the kitchen. Hawthorne is wistful for the hearth, saying that the relationships and stories that were made by the hearth cannot be replaced and that the stove has changed the social intercourse in less than satisfying ways.

Reading Fire Worship brought me back around to thinking about Eating the Other and the definition of nostalgia created by Rosaldo. Hawthorne’s nostalgia for the hearth fits perfectly into the definition mentioned, “a yearning for something that one has destroyed.” In literature, the hearth is the place for the primitive, where people of different social statuses can join together. Alternatively, the implementation of the stove and the correlating architectural separation of kitchen and the dining area separated the people who used to join around the fire.

 

Seed: The Untold Story (film by Jon Betz and Taggart Siegel)

Seed is about the importance of seed biodiversity and the seed banks all over the world. I went to the Olympia Premiere On Sunday afternoon at Oly Film Society. I appreciated this film; I thought that the way the story was told had a significant impact on the value of the film as whole. I also had the chance to catch up with a few Evergreen graduates from the Terroir program last year as well as a few other people involved with food/agriculture studies at Evergreen. I feel such gratitude to this community of food scholars and this afternoon was especially striking just to be around so many of them all at the same time.

 

Week 3- January 24, 2017

Wk3 Seminar

“Spices were valued because they were extremely difficult to obtain…because it was so heavily traded, pepper eventually lost its ‘golden’ status and fell to be considered among the most prosaic of spices” (Newman, 2013: 18,20)

“In raising the question of who gets to eat and who gets eaten or, alternatively, who is a ‘who’ and who is a ‘what,’ the literature of the hearth space box fixes and destabilizes social hierarchy…the end of the fireplace signals the beginning of modernity… The literary nostalgia for the hearth arose alongside a widespread unease with the “cheerless” stove” (Tompkins, 2012: 28, 32, 37).

“Essential oils can add great flavor to your cooking…people consume them topically, aromatically, or as a part of their diet…therapeutic grade essential oils are very complex, highly concentrated, and require a large amount of plant material to produce a small amount” (Witwicki, 2017).

At the center of the story of the hearth, we should consider the significance of heat. In Racial Indigestion, the hearth is the place of the contained fire that provides both light and warmth. As quoted by Tompkins, Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in his essay, “Fire Worship,” about the light of the fire that provides a scene that illuminates the heart of the human spirit (Tompkins, 2012: 32). The hearth is used in literature to bring all kinds of creatures to the heat and is a platform for storytelling and performance that destabilizes social norms. The sensation of heat is culturally and historically important in food. In The Secret Financial Life of Food, we learn that Roman banquets demanded spiced wines to add heat to the atmosphere (Newman, 2013: 18)

The texts this week continue to answer how nostalgia and tradition set a place for the food that we eat. If the hearth was a setting for connection across identities, we find that the modern stove closes the opportunity for those connections and reinforces cultural separation. The commodification of grain and spice has a set a standard for value that relies on a hierarchical society for the success of a global economy. Despite this, eating traditions are still important. Certain techniques, such as the use of essential oils in cooking, occasionally make news and inform new people about old customs. Moving forward, my final question is how does this nostalgia happen and what does it mean to pretend that historical traditions are something new?

Sources:

Newman, Kara. (2013). The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. (2012). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19^th Century. New York: New York University Press.

Witwicki, Alysha. (2017). Cooking with essential oils can pack a flavor punch. Journal Sentinel. Retrieved from http://www.jsonline.com/story/life/food/2017/01/17/cooking-essential-oils-can-pack-flavor-punch/96457560/

Week 2- January 17, 2017

Wk2 Seminar pdf 

“Foodie” culture is… romanticized and insufficiently theorized attachments to “local” or organic foodways, attachments that at times suspiciously echo nativist ideological formations” (Tompkins, 2012, 2). Said Karl Marx, “[a commodity] appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing…” in society at large, the word gets pretty bad press…is associated with dull, repetitive products, however useful, that generate low margins… our lives, literally, depend on them. America’s commodity exchanges runs a parallel course with the history of industrialization…the connection was much tighter…there was less packaging and the food did not travel as far…every dollar spent on food, 15 to 20 represents the raw commodity of that product (Newman, 2013, 14). The conversation that I heard between the texts this week invited me to explore the relationship between “foodie” values and commodities versus commodification. Foodie culture is based on white, bourgeois standards that use food and purchasing patterns to create a heightened social status for those that choose buy local and organic. Within that realm, there is pride in not purchasing items made with commodity grain or any product that is associated with mass marketing. More than anything, opposing commodities is an aesthetic, whether that aesthetic is founded in environmental health or increased social stratosphere. Given the current economic climate that ranks monetary value higher than moral values, we are stuck in a cycle where we need commodity food sources, at their low prices, in order to survive. While the sales of commodities cannot be separated from the act of commodification, the classic “foodie” is not exempt either. The foodie is guilty of commodification on account of upholding values that are historically and inherently based on isms that discriminate against race, gender, and class. As we continue to ask questions about popular food trends in relation to commodification, I think that it is important to ask ourselves who was the original labor force that harvested and packaged commodity goods in the mid 20th century. Is it only in this setting that some bodies are deemed “politically productive”? It is these same bodies that are absentmindedly exploited by the foodie movement. Sources: Newman, Kara. (2013). The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets. New York: Columbia University Press. T,H. (2017). What makes something a commodity? The Economist. Retrieved from http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/economist-explains-0. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. (2012). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. NewYork: New York University Press.