Food - Farming - Feminism
Elaine Lipson
“What’s for dinner?†is just too simple a question for anyone to ask these days.
How about, “What’s for dinner, where did it come from, who grew it, and did they use toxic and persistent pesticides or genetic modification?â€
No matter how we rebalance gender roles, women’s lives and health — and those of their families — are intricately connected to how food is produced. But putting food and feminism in the same sentence can make one wary. Wasn’t that part of the whole liberation plan — to make women less responsible for food? And what’s gender got to do with food choices and food production methods?
In answer to the first question, women worldwide are still primarily responsible for feeding families. They need to be aware of what they’re serving and what they are eating.
To the second question, I’d say, “Plenty.†Every feminist, woman or man, who embraces equality and diversity and opposes violence and domination, should recognize that the foods we eat, and how they’re grown, matter to our environment and to our lives.
deedee:
Who has time to incessently focus on what is in our food, where it comes from etc these days?
I mean, I guess it’s a matter of priorities, and that is a priority but its one that most people will subordinate to other things and reasonably - even if not rightly - so.
STAN: Go to http://www.insurgentamerican.net/analysis/ , click on “Food and Finance,” read it, then come back and we can have a polysyllabic discussion of food and priorities.
9 January 2007, 7:52 amNelson H.:
Off topic, but whatever.Comment spamming below:
In the coming weeks I’m challenging myself to take on questions of white supremacy and white privilege as a central focus in all forthcoming posts. I’m extending this challenge to others in our corner of the blogosphere. I remember Villa Villekula’s call for bloggers to make “classim” the topic en vogue this past Labor Day; and in this vein I propose a very specific form of the aforementioned challenge.
Let’s take the MLK holiday as an opportunity to blog against white supremacy.
A broad topic indeed, but one that is so foundational to any other conversation we might have, whether we are talking about patriarchy, capitalism and class structure, popular culture, etc. Plus many, many folks already do this daily. But the idea is a more coordinated effort to flex out collective muscles. If others agree with this idea, spread the call far and wide. Everyone has a solid 6 days to get a story worked out. At the very least transcribe a good theory piece and put together a decent intro. Get friends who don’t blog involved. I’m always amazed at the shear number of folks on MySpace - get friends to post something there in the blog section or even as a bulletin. It doesn’t matter, just lean on them to do it.
Drop a comment on this post back at my blog if you are up for it. I will start keeping a list of co-conspirators on the side-bar along with a post early next Monday with a list of blogs to follow that day.
9 January 2007, 9:24 am-Nelson H.
Victoria:
It would do us all good to think about what we are going to do with our waste, and where we will get food. There is more and more sense in supporting local producers rather than agro-business, even if the cost seems higher. Agro-business benefits from gov. subsidies not just in the area of farming but even more in transportation - who paves and maintains the roads?
If folks haven’t yet woken up to the reality of our changing environment, then some more shocks are in store. Up here in Maine we have had the warmest winter - with NO snow - on record, 60 degrees last week! Trees and bushes are budded out, flowers are blooming and what is happening to insects and all other life forms dependent on seasonal cues, I don’t know. We may not like to think about food but, when you DON’T have it, you start to think about it a lot more.
9 January 2007, 1:55 pmMike Polacheck:
Have you seen the films “The Future of Food” and “Fed Up”? These are 2 fine videos that explore the problems of modern food production and the solutions that people are creating. Let me know if you would like to see them.
9 January 2007, 2:26 pmpeggy:
There may be another reason, besides freshness and supporting your local community, to eat locally. This is that each person’s body is part of a local ecosystem. The longer you stay in one place, the more your body adapts to that place. If you move places, your body must and will readapt.
Likewise, the plants that grow for generations on a particular patch of soil have adapted and learned to thrive on that soil.
Human beings are likely to move around, but I think if you find a place that suits you biologically and in other ways, you should stay and live there. Devote yourself to and live in and become a part of one place, if you can. To do this can entail a some sacrifices, but we need people to do it, at least as much if not more than we need cosmopolitans to make connections.
And those folks in parts of the Mediterranean and the Caucasus who commonly live past a hundred, that scientists are always seeking the secret of - what is it but that they have lived for many generations in one particular part of the world, that has the exact right combination of properties to protect the physicial welfare of those people who have lived there for so long, and who have become adapted to that place? And is this not another reason to reconsider the value of indigeneity?
Just thoughts
9 January 2007, 5:32 pmWindhover:
Here are my two carrots worth:
To me (a farmer-female) food, in addition to being necessary for life, is the symbolic representation of independence from hostile governments. Food production is about land: who lives from it, owns it, and who controls it. Wide-spread land ownership or land under communal control means that the resources locked into the land (water, mineral, timber) and the resources of the people who occupy the land (i.e. labor, consuming ability) are not accessible to growing empires. All too often the people are simply in the way and dealt with accordingly. Genocide anyone? In my native land of the Appalachian-American south, we have by and large been left to rot as irrelevant by-blows of a land that contains unbelievable wealth desired by the empire.
Simply put, the ones who control the land control economic wealth, power and populations.
We can wax on and on about the fruity characteristics of conventionally grown Mediterranean olive oil vs. sustainably grown oil from Gaza but every olive grove that gets bulldozed is about wealth, power and population control. If people cannot provide basic sustenance for themselves they will be forced to leave. Those moves are usually into urban ghettos. Ask African-American farmers in the American South, Native Americans, South Central Los Angeles farmers; native people in whatever lands you wish to name.
High land prices, suburbanization of farm land, extremely low prices for on-farm products, gene patenting and biotechnology and constantly growing number of regulations for small farms making even the simplest acts of farming criminal are the ways this empire is amassing control of its least controllable populations.
If common peoples do not control their land they do not control their governments. The farming population of the United States is less that two percent of the nation total.
On the bright side, I see an increasing number of gardeners…
10 January 2007, 11:37 amDeAnander:
The hundred-mile diet…
s eating locally through the winter more a matter of survival than of pleasure or good health? The surprising answer is an emphatic “no.” Vancouver-based registered holistic nutritionist Paula Luther is an adherent of year-round local eating for the sake of nutrition. “If we look at what’s in abundance right now, we have lots of squash, carrots, things like that, which are actually beneficial at this time of year,” she says. These winter foods are rich in beta-carotene, antioxidants, vitamin A — just the sort of nutrients our bodies need to fight off colds and maintain energy levels for the season.
10 January 2007, 2:14 pm