Seminar Week 3

Jessica Herrera
SOS: ComAlt
Seminar Pre-Writing Week 3
18 April 2017
Word Count: 308

Passages:

“Her Kitchen was a former closet. …Cooking those good meals there would be way beyond the capacity of most women. Isn’t it amazing that black people in spite of all the misery and oppression have been able to keep on keeping on?” (Smart-Grosvenor 2011:20)

“According to the USDA 2012 Census of Agriculture, of the county’s 2.1 million farmers, only 8% are farmers of color and only half of those are owners of land.” (Harper, Holt-Gimenez 2016: 4)

“ Organic, local, seasonal, fresh, sustainable, fair trade—the words have become platitudes that skeptics associate with foodie elitists who can afford to shop at natural food stores and have kitchen that boast $5,000 ranges and larders filled with several varieties of vinegar, extra virgin olive oil and “natural” sea salt. It’s easy to forget that those oft repeated words do mean something.” (Estabrook 2012: xvi)

News Media Source:

“The report found that stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants across the southern border—which currently accounts for between 50 and 70 percent of the agricultural workforce—would cause retail food prices to jump an average of five to six percent, and that “the quantity and variety of grocery store produce would diminish.”

If Trump Builds the Wall, What Will Happen to our Food System?

Discussion:

The readings this week centered heavily on racial inequalities in our food system. While this was the central theme in Food First’s, Dismantling Racism in the food system, these issues were key to the narratives of Vibration Cooking and Tomatoland as well. As Estabrook noted, people of color account for very little of our farmers, only 8%, and only 4% of those farmers own land. At the same time, people of color make up the majority of farm laborers, who not only make less money but also have overall less job security.

In Vibration Cooking, Vertamae says of her family’s old house, “ We had a big house and a lot of land. That’s important! Some Land! Black people got to have some land!” (Smart-Grosvenor 2016:4) According to Hold-Gimenez and Harper, African-Americans owned 16 million acres of farmland at one point – down to 2 million acres by 1997 and just 1 million acres today. This didn’t happen by accident. In reading these texts, I kept thinking of the Homestead Act of 1862. This act gave land to any US citizen that could commit to farm the land for at least five years – guidelines of course favored white citizens.

The ownership of land is a huge deal when thinking about food sovereignty and who has control of the food system. If power is not equally distributed at base levels, people are set up to fail. The Homestead Act and its tricky guidelines have become today’s “urban” areas – the neighborhoods that don’t get as much funding and don’t have as much access to healthy foods or good school. People don’t often talk about it, but these designs were intentional.

Because I was not in ComAlt last quarter, I would love to explore Tompkin’s Racial Indigestion for a better understanding of how deeply entwined race and the food system are.

Works Cited:

“If Trump Builds the Wall, What Will Happen to Our Food System?” Modern Farmer, January 10, 2017. http://modernfarmer.com/2017/01/trump-builds-wall-will-happen-food-system/.

Estabrook, Barry, and Andrews McMeel Publishing. Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. Kansas City [etc.: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2012.

Holt-Giménez, Eric & Harper, Breeze. (2016). “Food—Systems—Racism: From Mistreatment to Transformation.” Retrieved from https://foodfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/DR1Final.pdf

Smart-Grosvenor, Vertamae. Vibration Cooking, Or, the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011.