Food crisis, food justice, food relationships by Ornaith O'Dowd, NYC

We are in the midst of a global food crisis the likes of which we have not seen in at least a generation. Such is the official consensus, from the UN to the corporate media. We have heard appeals for increased food aid from humanitarian organizations; we have heard of unrest in over thirty countries as a result of soaring food prices. There are dark mutterings of political destabilization, even revolution. Already one head of government, Haiti's Prime Minister, has been turfed out of office as people protest the growing gap between their incomes and the price of food. Others are surely feeling uneasy.

Commentators have reached a broad consensus about the causes: rising oil prices, increased ethanol production, more people in India and China adopting Western food consumption habits (such as eating a lot of meat and a lot of processed foods), extreme weather events (such as the Australian drought, arguably caused by global warming). Major producers from Argentina to Vietnam have restricted exports, further tightening supply.

Two other factors are relevant, but somewhat less widely mentioned: the effect of large-scale speculation in commodities markets (see here, and the effects of neoliberal trade "reforms" dictated to poorer countries by international financial institutions (IFIs) like the IMF and World Bank (see here). As speculators have helped drive prices up, poor countries whose food production base was destroyed by trade "liberalization" are left dependent on ever more expensive food imports.

Who are the winners? Predictably, major transnational corporations-- and not only in the food/ agribusiness sector (the recent good news for big oil being the most obvious example).

Short-term, emergency food aid is necessary immediately; unfortunately, given richer countries' dismal record in responding to past and continuing emergencies --have we forgotten the millions dying of AIDS and malaria and starvation even before the current crisis hit the headlines?-- it is hard to be optimistic that there will be an effective response. In the longer term, though, that is not enough, even if it were to happen: we need to be clear about what has led to the crisis.

The basis of the neoliberal project of globalizing "free market" capitalism was ostensibly, at least, that open trade would maximize the efficient flow of goods throughout the world. Somehow, we were told, every country would find its niche, and in the end, everyone would get everything they wanted through exchange at the global level. Many of us have found that story deeply unsatisfactory: transnational corporations seemed to get everything they wanted, but the farmers undercut by European or US imports, or the children unable to afford newly-imposed school fees, or the workers abused in sweatshops, did not. TNCs reaped benefits and externalized costs (environmental damage, displacement of local people, labor and human rights violations, and so on). Global poverty did not, strangely enough, evaporate. All of this is familiar to anyone concerned about global justice. The food crisis is simply the latest and most dramatic effect of capitalist globalization. The point I want to make here is that it may be useful to connect the global food crisis to the concerns of the food justice movement in the US, especially in New York City. They represent different aspects of a food crisis deeper and more generalized than the one diagnosed by the news media and officialdom in the last few months.

The food justice movement (for an introduction, see here) has developed largely in urban centers in the US and is a response to inequalities of access to healthy food. In short, poor communities, especially communities of color, tend to have less access to healthy food than richer, whiter communities. "Access" means both physical proximity to stores, farmer's markets, and restaurants where healthy food is available, and the resources to obtain it. The better-off you are, the easier it is for you to make healthy, ecologically sound, and ethical food choices: you can afford to pay double for organic milk, or fresh, locally grown vegetables, or fair trade coffee. The poorer you are, the more limited those choices become. The New York Times reports this morning that city officials are concerned about the health consequences-- obesity, diabetes, and so on-- of poor people's lack of access to decent supermarkets. The city's planning director is quoted as saying that a significant percentage of people surveyed for a recent report on the subject had not eaten a single fruit or vegetable the previous day: not surprising when even basic supermarkets are disappearing, especially from poorer, minority neighborhoods.

There is a tendency in US culture to blame the poor for the consequences of their poverty, often in "humorous" contexts: the recent movie Baby Mama, for example, invites us to laugh at a working class white character whose hilarious unpreparedness for motherhood and adult life generally is signaled in her fondness for snack cakes and Dr. Pepper, and her strong hostility to vegetables. This is, of course, easier than acknowledging that this society structures itself so that safe, healthy food is a luxury too good for the working class. Let them eat Twinkies!

One way to understand the global food crisis and the low-level food crisis in cities like New York together is that they both involve a sundering of the relationship between people and their food. If I'm in Jamaica, the milk I'll put in my cereal will most likely be made from powdered milk imported from the US or EU; subsidized imports undercut local dairy farmers as part of IMF-mandated "free market reforms". If I'm in a working class neighborhood of a US city, the nearest store probably won't have fresh fruit and vegetables; if it does, they will have traveled perhaps thousands of miles to get there, and will have been treated with pesticides.

Fancy food magazines are full of feature articles extolling the virtues of eating fresh, organic food produced by local small farmers, and they are absolutely right, but usually silent about the fact that this is out of reach for most working class people. It is a strange phenomenon: it has become an upper-class luxury to eat a carrot that you know came out of the ground without having been interfered with, and that you know was grown by a small farmer within a hundred miles of your home. The simplest, most natural, least processed, least transported food is prohibitively expensive.

What does it say about our relationship to food that we often consume products without knowing or understanding what is in them? What does it say about our relationship with food that we consume products that, as food writer Michael Pollan would say, our grandmothers would not recognize as food at all? It is perhaps little wonder that food relationship breakdown of one sort or another is rampant in societies like the US: diet pills, junk food ads, and the cult of the skinny supermodel jostle for airtime. Have a super-whopper-XXXtra-size cheeseburger, flick through a magazine to compare yourself with the mandated ideal, and pop a diet pill to try to reconcile the contradiction. How can we get our heads clear?

Food justice activists in the US know that what is required is not merely to get another Key Food in this or that neighborhood; what is really empowering, and what many food justice groups are doing, is (re-)establishing a healthy, non-exploitative, sustainable relationship between communities and their food. Notable projects include the Red Hook Community Farm in Brooklyn, New York, where young people from the surrounding working-class neighborhood produce fresh food for their community, cutting their way out of the corporate food chain and building a model of grassroots, community-centered economic activity. Finding ways to produce as much food as possible as close as possible to people, at prices they can afford, is one important aspect of food justice activism; analysis of food injustice and its broader political context is another.

Whether it is in New York or Mauritius-- although the scale of the problem is very obviously different-- one basic element remains the same: where the corporate food chain displaces local food production, the least well-off will suffer. The poor in Mauritius are at risk of starvation; the poor in New York are (disproportionately) at risk of obesity-related illness.

A small number of TNCs mediate millions of people's relationship with food. That's the reality in India, in Haiti, in the US, in Ireland. Of course, that is what capitalism does, as we know from Marx: it turns everything, including the worker, including food, into a commodity. Everything-- health care, friendship (aka "social networking"), culture, science, food-- is turned into a profit-making venture, with control ceded to those who make the profits from it. In my view, this is objectionable across the board, but I think it is especially vivid, and especially inhumane, when applied to food, the most basic material human beings need to live. What's important is not that I am saying this, but that those who are affected are saying the same: food is the issue that has ended people's patience with their leaders, from Haiti to Somalia to Egypt, where food riots and strikes are creating worries for the elite. It is one thing to be estranged from the products of your labor generally; it is another still to be estranged from the food you put in your mouth. That estrangement is a common human experience today, especially for the least-privileged, and the more aware they are of that fact, the closer we get to a decisive political moment.