Author Archives: jzgs

What does it mean to change the system?

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I’ve spent the last 10 days and nights at protests across Seattle on police brutality in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But the demands of protesters go well beyond policing and criminal justice and stretch into areas of education, jobs, and voting rights.

Demonstrators are constantly speaking in ways similar to how we talk in this class.

“This isn’t about one thing, it’s about changing the entire system,” is a common theme I’ve heard from protesters I’ve talked to in my role as a reporter.

And this idea made me think about how this class is structured not about food in a vacuum, but instead of food as a system that is part of an even larger system. You can change one part of the system, but the change won’t truly be visible and rightful until the system is entirely overhauled.

For example, on the protest side, people are calling for Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan to resign, but demonstrators note they will only replace her with someone similar and nothing will change for Black people in this city. This is not systemic change.

Mapping of the food and agriculture system showing its complexity. (Source: https://medium.com/@agwelker1/fixing-our-food-agriculture-system-with-systems-thinking-892893805df9)

And on the food side, one person can stop eating meat or consume more responsibly, but that won’t make a lasting dent in emissions from cattle. This is not systemic change.

Outlawing chokeholds and cutting police funding in half won’t make so much meaningful change for the Black community in changing outcomes. What is needed is economic assistance, educational opportunities, and justice for 400 years of wrongdoing that would start to make up for this country’s wrongs.

And similarly going vegetarian won’t get us substantively closer to a sustainable food system. What is needed is accountability, strict regulation of consumers, and likely a wholesale change in how people around the world consume food to get to the point where our antiquated structures are no longer harming our world.

The point is that true change isn’t as easy as one might think and that’s why it takes so damn long.

Why are so many people hungry?

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In response to “Thoughts on hunger after contemplative practice.”

Tristram Stuart’s TED talk that we watched earlier this month first got me thinking about food waste in a structured way. He says that the United States has twice as much food than it actually needs to feed its citizens, a statistic that shocked me. But when I thought about it, I wasn’t really surprised. I throw out food I don’t finish all the time, not feeling too guilty about it. What did I know about what good my food could do in someone else’s hands?

And then it went to the back of my mind for a couple weeks — as concepts we learn so often can — but going through the blog, this post brought it back up again. It reminded me of the connections between our overconsumption and waste of food with famine in less developed countries. Especially as climate change wreaks havoc on our food system both now and even more so in the future, we need to think critically about how we dole out the world’s food because the amount is finite and so many people need to be fed. And the system we’re using now isn’t equitable.

Author Tristram Stuart with a pile of discarded bananas, an emblem of global food waste. (Source: https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000148-bd38-d00e-adef-ffbc74fb0000)

“Global hunger is a problem of distribution, access, empowerment,” Michael Carolan writes in chapter 4 of The Real Cost of Cheap Food (italics are the authors).

Carolan rightly notes that global hunger is not the result of a lack of food, but instead is a socioeconomic problem in our system that disproportionately gives food to industrialized countries like ours over developing countries that desperately need it. 

This is not a scientific issue, but a political one that could be solved that way. But the question is: will we?

The Inherent Exploitation of Chocolate

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The contemplative practice that has resonated the most for me was the one on the production of chocolate because I crave it so often while I rarely eat breakfast or raisins.

The practice asked us to think about who was affected along the way, but perhaps the better approach after watching those videos would be to ask who was exploited along the way? Is it the unpaid child laborers dragged away from their families who allowed me to get this piece of Dove milk chocolate (or, more correctly, a few pieces)? Is it the farmers struggling to make ends meet who are so separated from much of the commodity chain that they’ve only heard stories of what their cocoa is used for?

Highlighted are cocoa growing countries in southeast Asia, west Africa, and Latin America. http://www.cargillfoods.com/emea/en/products/cocoa-chocolate/origins/index.jsp

It made me, to a certain extent, savor the chocolate more. Perhaps I’m not going to stop eating something I love so much because of these revelations, but instead I’ll at least be conscious of the chain of injustice that brings it to me, both the injustice against people but also the environmental injustice which professor Litfin notes with chocolate’s strain on our water system.

As I opened my eyes and stood up to throw out the wrappers strewn across my coffee table, I was left still thinking of the farmers eating chocolate for the first time and the looks on their faces. It was a joy rarely seen and reminds us how our food system keeps the people most integral to it disconnected from its rewards.

In this stressful time, few things can hold my attention for more than a few minutes, but this stuck in my mind for a while. That is the beauty of the contemplative practice, those moments of solitude to sit back and just reflect.

What COVID-19 means for undocumented workers

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As several other posts on this blog have mentioned, the COVID-19 pandemic could have drastic consequences for the food supply chain given social distancing restrictions? But what about the workers this leaves in the lurch?

There are more than 2.4 million farmworkers across the United States and most of them are undocumented. Considered essential workers, but not given the same protections as others and without health insurance, agricultural laborers are at a high risk of catching the virus and have been having trouble obtaining personal protective equipment. 

A farmworker in Immokalee, Florida, waits aboard a crowded field bus for the pre-dawn drive to work on a local farm. Photo by Scott Robertson.

With over half a dozen cases in America’s “tomato capital,” and more on farms across the country, this will significantly limit some region’s ability to cultivate crops as workers will have a harder time recovering without health insurance and will likely be ostracized from work if they catch it.

It’s yet another example of how America, both politically and socially, is once again kicking migrants to the curb and turning a blind eye to foreseeable problems in favor of hoping things work out by continuing to exploit vulnerable populations. 

While dollars from the stimulus package are going to many affected workers, undocumented laborers are getting none of it and who knows how much will be spent on occupational safety, according to the Food & Environment Reporting Network.

Obviously the world food system is just that: a system. And when one step in that system is forced to sputter, things can go off the rails. So they’ll probably regret this decision of inaction when the supply of fruits and vegetables from these farms suddenly aren’t as plentiful as the fields are under-staffed and overworked. 

It’s good to see activists working on behalf of these silenced workers because otherwise this important story would once again not be told.