Author Archives: alouie2

Slow Food Washington

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The action group I was a part of worked with Slow Food Washington to help gather resources to inform the SF community about Washington House Bill 2777 (SHB 2777), also known as the “Tamale Bill.” Slow Food is an international organization that promotes its three pillars of “Good, Clean, and Fair Food for All” through community engagements. The legislature created by another non-profit Ventures Marketplace permits home cooks to legally sell food without a commercial kitchen which directly aligns with Slow Food’s mission for fairness as it supports local businesses. Our role was to create a digital toolkit to engage the SF Washington community about SHB 2777.

The first page of our rough draft of the digital toolkit

Highlighting the importance of relationships with community members and other organizations in order to enact collective change, the project provided me a window into how a fairly large organization operates and the importance of communication. I learned tangible ways to get involved such as donating, volunteering time, or working with people in the community to create positive change.

Slow Food started as a wide-scale movement against the globalization of Western fast food and now as an organization, its mission is to support marginalized communities in taking active roles in the food system. My involvement in this project shaped my understanding of the importance of food sovereignty in local communities. Monica White, the author of Freedom Farmers, also shares a similar sentiment about the importance of food sovereignty through community-led organizations. White illustrates the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s successes in creating food security and economic autonomy through community farming. (White, 127)

All SF chapters are volunteer-driven communities working on different campaigns and initiatives important respective to their own needs in regards to food.

COVID-19 has disrupted the global economy and the food system, exposing weak links such as working conditions, overproduction, and trade deals leading. In a broader lens, allowing community members to start their own business out of their kitchen is one of the many ways communities can build toward food sovereignty. SHB 2777 and other campaigns like it proves that within a living system comes evolution and adaptation to challenging circumstances. This state legislature is one of many examples of how people’s direct relationship to food creates a personal, deeper understanding of the entirety of the world’s food system.

Also, just a few of the many resources out there to get involved in regards to the abolishment of the police: https://linktr.ee/acab

 

Work Cited:

White, M.M (2018). Drawing on the Past toward a Food Sovereign Future. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (pp. 117-140) Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

 

From Texas to Ethiopia: Food Crisis & COVID-19

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The article “Will COVID-19 lead to a food crisis?” the author explores the different ways the pandemic has affected the global supply chain in mid-April while speculating the various ways the possible outcomes of the stress COVID-19 will cause. It has been more than a month since the article was published and the matters of individual diet changes to disparities between the Global North and South have been even more exacerbated as time carries on.

The question has been answered: yes, COVID-19 is leading the charges for reasons why we are entering a period of extremes, intensifying weak links in our food system. Due to a myriad of reasons, the US is seeing overproduction of produce and consequently food waste, worker shortages leading to the bottleneck effect on food items like meat.

The US can no longer run from the detrimental effects of how the pandemic has tested our inefficient food system that favors profit over workers as seen in federal demand for meat factory workers to return to work. From the imperial practice of “free” trade disrupting food sovereignty to depleting natural resources, something as natural as food has become an entirely political entity and can affect food prices.

In the Horn of Africa, COVID-19 is intensifying the situation in a place where 60 million hectares are allotted to land grabs and local farmers battle plagues of locusts. These events have contributed to previous food scarcity within the region. With COVID-19, food access due to distribution delays and the declining market prices for food will affect everyone from farmers to children.

Map of Horn of Africa region showing how land grabbing affect food shortages https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/c60c68c9fda947589359fea4633163bf

As the pandemic changes our daily situation, it is clear that what we need as a planet is a systemic approach that has the future of humanity and our planet in mind.

The Bitterness of Chocolate

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The contemplative practices have forced me to reconcile with the fact that I take part in the food system, a system that profits off of child labor and sustains the inequalities between multi-billion companies and farmers in the Global South. This became more apparent to me through the contemplative practice on chocolate.

Before the contemplative practice, I saw myself as a chocolate fiend. Coming from a transnational family, my mother usually enlists her siblings for brands of chocolates uncommon in the States. With an abundant amount of chocolate in my house, I associated chocolate with family and a quick sugar pick me up, but through the practice, I realized at the heart of each bite is the cocoa bean.

A picture I took of some of the chocolate in my house

A cocoa bean

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Make Chocolate Fair reports that about 90% of farmers’ incomes from the Ivory Coast depend on the cocoa bean which is to be an annual average of $2,400 for a typical farm family. This compensation is microscopic compared to the total global retail sales of the chocolate industry which was reported to be 98 billion dollars in 2016.

chocolate bar broken up into fragments describing the share in the value chain of chocolate production. 6.6% going toward cocoa farmers, 35.2% for chocolate manufacturers, and 44.2% for retail. 4.3% for taxes/marketing board, 2.1% for transportation and traders, and 7.6% for processors and grinders.

The percentage breakdown of share in the value chain of chocolate production.

Source: https://makechocolatefair.org/issues/cocoa-prices-and-income-farmers-0

Not only is the pay insufficient for the actual value of the extensive labor, but the chocolate industry is infamous for utilizing child labor. Many broken promises have been made by companies like Hershey and Nestle to eradicate the use of child labor that fall flat due to the complexity of reasons such as poverty, lack of farm-level supervision, and the reverberation of civil war within the area. Many of these reasons for companies’ shortcomings are also weak links within the greater living food system that spans beyond chocolate.

While listening to Karen’s voice pull me into a state of self-awareness about the different parts of the commodity chains within the production of chocolate, I began to notice the bitterness of chocolate.

Food Waste & Food Insecurity: COVID-19

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Since beginning the Political Ecology of the World’s Food System course, I find myself awakening to the way I, my family, my nation, and the world contribute to this planetary system. In the wake of COVID-19, one consequence of our current system that has been more apparent to me is food waste.

Due to the shutdown of bulk buyers like restaurants, the disruption of the food chain has led to farmers struggling to find the demand for their perishable products. As food banks are being overwhelmed by government-bought surplus donations, dairy farmers dump thousands of liters of milk. The abundance of food does not match my individual experience in the grocery store midst COVID-19 where food products appear limited.

The lack of food on the shelves is driven by fear buying and the shortage of labor that cannot keep up with new demands. Fear buying is cited to be a substantial contributor to the current exacerbation of food waste. While the US maneuvers surplus and food hoarding, other nations fear a food crisis due to job shortages and the halt of open trade.

A Call to Action put out by The Food and Land Use Coalition calls on world leaders to maintain open trade, strengthen social programs, and invest in domestic farming. This letter focuses on countries where food insecurity heavily affects their population, such as countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Although this letter was written for and during the pandemic, the issues addressed such as malnutrition and access to healthcare have spanned long before Coronavirus.

Food waste and food insecurity are both products of our current system and with COVID-19 disrupting the ability of grocery store workers and trade, this pandemic has magnified pre-existing infrastructure deficiencies.