Throughout the time I have spent working on piece number four in the meditations series I have found myself diving deeply into writings, podcasts, and videos around the topic of indigenous food systems and the concept of food sovereignty. For those unfamiliar, food sovereignty is defined as the right of peoples to define their food systems for themselves, produce food in ecologically sustainable ways, and to produce culturally appropriate food. It is as much about access to food as it is access to land, seeds, and the rights to hunt and fish in traditional ways. Framing issues of the food system through this lens dramatically shifts our conceptions of what the issues, and, in turn, the solutions to those issues are. If the problem of food insecurity is seen narrowly as a lack of food for a household then the solution becomes simple: give them food. However, if the problem is viewed as a lack of food sovereignty the solution might need to become increasing access to land, protecting heritage seeds, and/or a whole host of related initiatives focused on developing both foodways and broader democratic systems.
In considering this concept of food sovereignty for both indigenous cultures and for our society more broadly it becomes clear that the vast majority of us in the US have very low food sovereignty. Think about the food that you have access to. Did you grow it? Do you know who did? Would you call that food “culturally appropriate” for you? How about for your neighbor? The fact is that the distance, both physical and conceptual, that the majority of people in the US are from the production of their food gives us very little power in determining what is grown, and the way that it is grown. In general our food choices are dictated to us as finished products entirely devoid of connection to the natural world, seasonality, or any sort of cultural meaning. This is certainly true for the average american, and people experiencing poverty, living in “food deserts”, or subsisting on government food assistance often have even more limited options in purchasing food.
Food sovereignty also tells us that this is only half of the issue! A conception of food sovereignty also includes access to the means of producing those food choices. Certainly most Americans don’t have the resources to access land, seeds, or hunting rights to define their own food production, and even more so for people experiencing poverty. The extremely high cost of arable land (and lack of supply of that land), historical and present racially based violence, and a knowledge gap formed after generations living apart from the land all present barriers to achieving true food sovereignty on the community level for the average American and people experiencing poverty.
So how did we get to this point? Food is a basic physical need, you will die without it, but also it is the main way that we as humans connect to one another and the environment. Food systems serve as the base for the development of culture among groups of people, and a way for us to connect on an interpersonal level. Our traditional foodways defined us for millenia, and the connection with the natural world that was often at the center of those foodways shaped the ecosystems that have sustained human life up until now. The degradation of those traditional food ways, both directly and indirectly, is the basis for massive exploitation of both people and the larger environment in the modern day. By removing people and cultures from traditional agricultural and foraging practices through the use of force and persuasion governments and corporations foster dependency and then use that dependency to exploit those same people and cultures.
While there are incredibly numerous examples from around the world of this intentional degradation or sabotage of traditional foodways in an effort to oppress cultures, one of the most pertinent and prominent of those can be found in the case of the indigenous cultures of North America. As european colonists arrived in the Americas they slowly but surely pushed indigenous communities off of ancestral lands and away from highly productive agricultural practices that had been developed based off of them.
In the case of nations on the eastern seaboard these practices included complicated agroforestry operations, hunting and fishing practices, and gardening with a focus on highly specialized heritage seeds. All of these practices are inherently rooted in place, and the removal of these cultures from those various places directly impacted their ability to achieve meaningful food sovereignty. Forests that had been cultivated for generations were either no longer accessible with new property laws, or they were cleared entirely. Hunting and fishing grounds were similarly damaged or made inaccessible. Seeds that had been crossbred for generations for resiliency and productivity based off of a region’s climate and diseases were displaced from those regions. Consider the difficulties that must have been experienced by the people of the Seminole nation in redefining their food system from that of lowland tropical florida to the plains of Oklahoma. The fundamental differences in those ecosystems all but rendered traditional foodways obsolete, and forced those people to adopt unfamiliar agricultural practices dependent upon a combination of government supplies of seeds and other agricultural assistance along with direct food distribution.
This physical relocation was paired with practices of assimilation that focused directly on degrading traditional cultures. Given that these cultures were often focused around foodways, as is the case for most indigenous cultures worldwide, there was a huge push to move indigenous peoples to single family homesteading and away from a community collective food system. That single family homesteading model has proved disastrous for our food system in the long run, leading to rural depopulation, farm consolidation, and the monopolization of agribusiness. For indigenous communities this forced assimilation fostered a dependency upon the US government that was in turn used to further the oppression of their people and cultures via corrupt treaties that weaponized food aid, and food aid that was nutritionally inadequate and harmful (see the Dakota-US war of 1862 which resulted in the mass hanging of 38 Dakota men).
In stripping these indigenous communities of their land, huge swaths of territory were converted from place based agricultural and foodways practices that centered the relationship with the natural environment into large scale plantation style agriculture. This agriculture style placed focus on monocultures of commodity crops instead of the production of food for people. As these practices evolved they gobbled up small scale farmers who couldn’t stay profitable, and transitioned to widespread use of herbicides and pesticides. These are the practices that form the base of many of our modern environmental issues as well as feed into issues of poverty and diet related disease.
In the case of many indigneous communities in the Americas this degradation of their traditional foodways was accomplished through direct violence by the US government. In the case of many black Americans, the degredation of their foodways and sovereignty came about through a subtle combination of direct violence and more nuanced discrimination. After the abolition of slavery many black Americans worked arduously for years to secure land and develop farms in the American south. Despite enormous hurdles being placed before them (think sharecropping, the start of mass incarceration for the purpose of maintaining essentially a slave based workforce, and other forms of discrimination) black land ownership was high, with black farmers accounting for roughly 13% of total farm operators in the US in 1900 (they represented about 11% of the total population at the time). These farmers carried with them specialized foodways that blended a multitude of cultures and diets with a focus on adaptation to local ecosystems and climate.
Traditionally the story of the great migration is taught as a story of black Americans moving to northern cities in search of opportunity that they could not find in the rural south, and leaves out the stories of those farmers that chose to remain on their land in the south. This simplified picture neglects to acknowledge the rampant descrimination and violence that these farmers endured on personal and systemic levels. Possibly the most heinous example of that discrimination is found in the practices of the USDA itself which were brought to light by the landmark case Pigford v Glickman. While this case was focused on the specific time period of 1981-1997 (it resulted in over $1 billion in payments to over 13,000 black farmers) the discriminatory lending policies and repression of political power it exposed are long standing practices throughout the south. Federal loan officers delayed payments, “lost paperwork,” and outright denied black farmers assistance they gave to their white peers leading to financial ruin of those black farmers. Couple those systemic attacks on the financial viability of their farms with rampant hate and violence at the hands of local white Americans, and the share of farmers in the US who are black has decreased to under 1% in 2000.
In transitioning away from a life on the land that offers the opportunity to grow and produce food, these folks experienced a dramatic reduction in their food sovereignty, but couple that reduction in sovereignty with the lack of access to food that is all too common in low income, urban neighborhoods and you have huge swaths of the population that are at the whim of food producers. This semi forced migration of black Americans away from farmland and into larger urban centers was matched by policies like redlining, the war on drugs, and other violent practices that compounded the exploitation and vulnerability inherent in a reduction in sovereignty. While these oppressive conditions have given rise to some of the most powerful activists and organizations fighting against the problems in the food system (we will talk briefly about responses later in this essay) the impact that the initial removal from the land has had on generations of black Americans can hardly be overstated.
The other side of this coin is that as those black Americans were forced off their farms, those farms were in turn purchased by wealthy owners of larger farms. This cycle again feeds into the larger trend of depopulation of rural areas and consolidation of farmland. By keeping these lands entrenched in plantation style monoculture farming we have never quite transitioned away from an agricultural system based on slavery, and without black sharecroppers to fill the shoes left after emancipation those farmers needed to turn to other exploitable communities. The primary population that has fallen into the grips of this plantation style agricultural system have been immigrants or people on H2A visas. Through the legal mechanisms of those visas and the threat of violence these people have been subjected to inhumane working conditions in fields, pay rates that fall below the federal minimum wage, and, in some cases, literal modern day slavery (see this artcile from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers). Clearly the stripping of land and culture from black Americans has led to deep exploitation of black Americans in urban centers, the environment and land itself, and other communities that have been used to continue propping up an agricultural system based on free land and labor.
While white Americans have often been the ones instituting the systems of oppression like those described above, they have similarly experienced an attack on food culture that has left them without food sovereignty and contributed immensely to the rampant environmental crisis. This attack was much less frequently violent or direct, but certainly discrimination and hate directed at various European immigrant groups contributed to their assimilation into the American mainstream and loss of individual food cultures. These direct attempts did occur, but more frequently white Americans willingly surrendered their food sovereignty in favor of the promises of an “easier life” off the farm in blossoming American cities.
This presents another strange wrinkle to the complex question of how our food system has gotten to a place that puts so much distance between consumers and producers. We hear so often the narrative of the child of a farmer growing up and leaving behind the family farm that it has almost become ubiquitous. This story is incredibly romanticized time and time again. Life on the farm is demonized in popular media and advertising, rural people are portrayed as dumb or ignorant, rural spaces as boring or devoid of life. These portrayals play into a much more subversive attempt of creating a culture of dependency among the American populace.
While not nearly as direct as the violence experienced by indigenous or black Americans, the result is the same. As white families have fled rural areas they too have lost the ability to access the means of production within our food system. As generation after generation grows up in urban or suburban environments, the ties to traditional foodways that were brought over by those immigrant populations or developed over years by previous generations of farming both in the US and Europe have been lost.
Without a tie to that traditional culture, or an understanding of the intricate relationship between food production and the environment, white Americans have been at the mercy of advertisers and agribusiness corporations along with other groups who have less willingly given up those ties. And, without a direct connection to land, food, or the environment, those concepts have drifted into the abstract for most Americans. We don’t know what it looks like to sustainably manage an ecosystem, or even to grow the lettuce for a salad. This fundamental misunderstanding of both the tangible details and the broad policies that make up the food system have been intentionally furthered in the name of ever increasing corporate profits and governmental power. This has led to a wave of food trends around labels like “organic”, “grass-fed”, “regenerative” and others that appear in our groceries accompanied by a higher price tag, but often have very little substance behind them. This happens for a multitude of reasons that include corporate influence in government to loosen or tighten restrictions for a certain label to make it accessible only to large farmers, inconsistent regulatory authorities around various certifications, and simple misunderstanding by the general public of what that terminology actually means. My favorite example of that last point is the term “grass fed”. Most folks imagine “grass fed” meat products to have come from animals living on open pasture outside of the confined animal feeding operations that wreck so much havoc on our environment. In truth the vast majority of all beef products are technically “grass fed” as calves are born on larger farms and grow up on open pasture for about a year and a half before being sold to those CAFOs. By divorcing people from their traditional foodways and cultivating misunderstanding of food and agriculture, governments and corporations have been able to flourish at the expense of all of us.
Let me be clear: all three of these examples are incredibly generalized, and this writing leaves out a lot of incredibly complex issues within them. However, by viewing all of these side by side through the same lens I believe we can begin to see the ways in which these issues weave together. Clearly there are differences, many of which relate to the racial injustices that are all too present in our current society. It is very different to have your people ruthlessly slaughtered and driven from their land versus a willing sale or surrender of that land, but both feed into the modern day issues within our food system and society at large. Through both these three examples and the countless others from around the world it is clear that divorcing people from their land and their traditional foodways is a favorite tactic of corporate colonizers. In directly attacking peoples’ ability to feed themselves you are able to make them incredibly more vulnerable to exploitation. This is a trend that we have seen time and time again throughout the 550 year history of european colonization of the Americas.
While this reality is a very bleak one, it is important to recognize that there is incredible work being done to begin to rectify some of the vast injustices inherent in our current food system. Around the nation there are indigenous people reclaiming traditional foodways and fighting for hunting and fishing rights. They are working with tribes around the nation to inventory seeds and establish seed sovereignty programs. Black Americans for years have been growing urban gardens and farms well before they were popularized. Through the formation of cooperatives they are exploring ways to vertically integrate sustainable management systems in order to provide ecologically sound food at a price that is actually reasonable for our citizens experiencing poverty and food insecurity. Countless groups are organizing around the rights of farmworkers, and putting pressure on corporations to adopt both fair labor practices for their employees and to purchase food from farms that do the same. There are fantastic efforts out there (see the list below), and now it is up to us to use our voices and dollars to put pressure on the people that are driving these policies.
By fundamentally reframing our understanding of the issues present within our food system we begin to see these modern issues within the much broader historical context. Food can be a huge number of critical things for human beings, physical nourishment, connection to land, or a means for us to connect, but food can also be weaponized. Just as it has been throughout the millennia of human existence, our food system is currently being used to keep people vulnerable to exploitation. When we begin to understand the ways this has been done historically we can see the ways it is being done now, and when food is viewed through that lens it becomes clear that no amount of handouts will fix the underlying issues of structural violence that keep us oppressed.
Organizations to follow:
HEAL Food Alliance
Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance
Sylvanaqua Farms
A Growing Culture
Soul Fire Farm
Black Urban Growers
Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Seeding Sovereignty
Indigenous Seedkeepers Network
Agrarian Trust
Muloma Heritage Center