Category Archives: Consumption

Sharing systems thinking in our ongoing advocacy

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As our world grieves in the aftermath of the horrific murder of George Floyd, I have become extremely grateful for the knowledge about systematic racism my education at UW has afforded me. My greatest takeaway from this class was learning to think systematically about the world food system, which allowed me to realize how everything from climate change to land grabs to severe income inequality in the food distribution chain levies a disproportionate impact on people of color in their struggle to access affordable and healthy food. Through course content such as Lester R. Brown’s “Full Planet Empty Plates” we have learned that there is an abundance of food in America, yet the reason so many of our citizens go hungry is because of a lack of income, and ultimately, a lack of privilege in our capitalist system leading to the harshest impacts of food insecurity to be felt by POC and BIPOC communities.

Systematic impact of the Pandemic on our food system.

                         

Examples of the disproportionate impact felt by communities of color.

 

Much of my undergraduate education has been focused on race relations in the America, and I was able to incorporate this knowledge into my group work with Our Climate this quarter. We were given the opportunity to meet with Representative Tina Orwall, who has been a champion for racial equity throughout her career. We were able to advocate for bold, equitable climate change policy with a focus on the disparate impact of climate change on poor people of color. Representative Orwall was extremely receptive to our goals and told us that we had taught her new things about racism in the ecological system. From this, I became cognizant of my power of advocacy and sharing information, as Representative Orwall was able to get us in contact with other relevant politicians and added that she would further research and incorporate our findings into her agenda. Now as we are in the midst of a widespread Black Lives Matter movement, I find myself again as an advocate, and I have similarly been able to share useful information about the systematic racism in the world food system as part of the widespread sharing of resources against racism we are seeing. Just as we have achieved recent policy changes by educating our fellow advocates and putting pressure on our politicians, we are slowly dismantling systematic racism, and I am confident that if we can keep pressure on, we can one day create a just and equitable ecological system for all.

Food is a Political Subject

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One cannot ignore what is happening in the US right now. Peaceful Protests have turned to rightful riots against police brutality when militarised cops decide violence is an “okay” response to anything they deem threatening. Racism is what built this country and it what it continues to stand on today, from the genocide of native people and the slave trade to mass incarceration and unfair representation in media. Food is a building block of life, and it has been a building block of the United States, as we will always be an agricultural and cultural powerhouse to the world, but how that food is produced and shared is how it becomes political.

Thanksgiving is one of the only true American Holidays, and it is built on lies, deceit, and the mass burial grounds of Native Americans. The hallmark story told in schools is that the pilgrims and the native peoples came together on this day and shared food, teaching each other how to grow different plants like maize, and became the first sharing of culture amongst the peoples. It was a day of a “peace treaty” following the massacre of the Pequot people in 1637, to which the native people were not even invited. The native people did teach the pilgrims how to farm American crops, but the teachers were sold into slavery or died of smallpox introduced by the Pilgrims themselves. It is impossible to partake in this holiday without recognising the false stories used to sweeten the history of the beginnings of American agriculture as we know it. 

Cotton and Tobacco are not food crops, but their agricultural value drove the slave trade in the United States to a massive extent. Black and brown people, primarily from Africa, were treated as livestock to work on farms to make money for their owners. The generational trauma and erased generational wealth of the slave trade have built the culture of racism that is still prevalent today. The ability to own a human being is something that should be looked upon in shame but is still revered by statues of confederate generals, including ones in my own neighbourhood (sign the petition to remove it). Agriculture is what drove slavery to exist and be as prolific as it was in the United States, and without it, the culture of black oppression would certainly not be the same as it is today.

These incidences seem an infinite distance from us, as the past is something we do not have the ability to change, but racist practices exist in food and food culture today. Bon Appetit, a highly respected and revered food magazine, has just fired its Editor in Chief after BIPOC staff accused (rightfully) Adam Rappoport of racist hiring practices, paying BIPOC staff significantly less than white counterparts, not featuring black and brown cuisine as much as Asian, European, and American, and of false allyship by putting BIPOC on camera as just a display of diversity. Black and Brown people’s food is not seen as complicated, mainstream, or high cuisine as its white counterparts that have dominated the food industry, such as French or Italian cooking, when they are often just as complex, and honestly better tasting. Food is inherently political, especially when influence over it is filled with racism. 

Food is important for our health and culture, but when these areas are filled with racism and racist practices, it becomes hard to separate them. Food should be something created with love, not hate or intent to harm. Changing this is how racism can start to become less prevalent in our daily lives, as food and the practice of cooking is something people do every day. Dismantling individual ideas about food and food culture and the racism that is inherently a part of it is important as it will help us move forward.

How are you challenging yourself and the racism in your food system today?

The food system is not failing people, it is working how it was invented  

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Before I took Political Science 385, the relationship between the food system and racism was not an explicit connection I made. I was in a bubble of ignorance, clouded by my own privilege of being considered white passing, socioeconomically privileged, and cis-male. I asked myself, “how could the [United States] food system possibly be racist? – it’s food, right? It was not until I stepped back, flipped through a couple of history books, and put myself in a different vantage point that I connected the dots: the United States is built on oppression and systemic racism, the food system is just one of the many layers that it lurks.

Systemic racism can be traced back to the very creation of the United States. The brutal colonization of the indigenous population for their land, forced slave labor and unjust laws stripping people of color from land ownership are just the beginning of injustice that minorities have faced in our food system. The very backbone of our modern-day food system has been created by the very populations that are left behind.

Not only has the entire system been built on oppression, the very laws that are meant to protect people from harm has had a long history of dismantling Black and Brown empowerment. Before Jim Crow laws were enacted in the United States, African American’s owned 13 million acres of land in 1902, by the end of 1997 years of Jim Crow, they only owned 2 million acres. White land owners now pass on their externalities to people of color, while they reap the benefits of their new found land. Many working longer hours for lower wages than their white counter parts.

There is so much more happening behind the scenes than the average consumer might think. Buying something as simple as an avocado, a banana, or chocolate, it is easy to forget about the hundreds of miles, hours, and workers it took to get where it is now. The food system is not a farm to table concept like people may think, it is much more complex and inner connected.

One thing that I will always hold close to me from this class is that you cannot look at one part of the system and generalize about the whole. The history of oppression in agriculture cannot survive on its own, it is interdependent on a long and brutal history of colonization, institutionally racist laws, biased social norms, and labor.

The food system is not failing people, it is working how it was intended.

Work Cited:

Food Justice & Racism in the Food System

New Research Explores the Ongoing Impact of Racism on the U.S. Farming Landscape

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-15686731/cocoa-farms-in-ivory-coast-still-using-child-labour

Alien Land Laws in California (1913 & 1920)

Photos: https://communityfoodfunders.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/History-of-Racism-and-Resistance-in-the-Food-System-Visual-Timeline.pdf

Racism in the Food System

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Systematic racism is the basis of every aspect of the USA and the food system has no exception. In the 1600s, the first enslaved people were brought from Africa to America and were forced into labor. This included working on sugar, cotton, rice, and tobacco plantations. This brought on a sense of superiority to the white Americans, seeing anyone who is different from them as less than. The exploitation of many people of color were used to keep the social hierarchy going and it kept money in the white man’s pocket. This past of the United States has helped create the racist laws, actions, and institutions that are here today.

Now that forced labor is seen as immoral, even though it is still happening in the present, people have found a more covert way of keeping people of color oppressed. This is shown through wage gaps, the job market, the housing market, and so much more. A majority of minorities cannot find good-paying jobs with the only reason being simply that they are not white. Because of that, they find themselves working in factories, farms, and other jobs seen as undesirable and underpaying. This means that all the food being put on people’s tables are most likely being harvested or packed by people of color. While they are doing all of the hard labor, it is usually the white people that are in charge, gaining massive amounts of wealth.

Because of the unjust treatment of minorities, it makes it more difficult for them to support their families. It is harder to buy basic necessities, which can lead to a multitude of problems. This cycle continues on through generations because nothing is there to pass on to their children. However, most white people have the privilege and wealth to live healthy and have opportunities to pass onto generations of their families.

These disparities have magnified during the pandemic. For example, the wealthy have enough money to stop working while the poor continue to work in factories, farms or other underpaid jobs to keep food on America’s table and to keep their families afloat. Along with that, the systematic racism in the health care system keeps a lot of people of color from getting access to testing for COVID or getting treatment. 

Racism and oppression are at the very base of what America was built upon. With that, the food system cannot be ignored in this equation. It is often looked upon as a basic process of the way it gets to your fridges and pantries, but it is not that simple.

Food sovereignty in the Shellfish Industry

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In regards to action projects, I participated in working with the Center for Food Safety (CFS) on creating a sustainable shellfish scorecard. The scorecard can be utilized by restaurant owners, chefs, and consumers who are demanding to be knowledgeable of which shellfish producers follow sustainable procedures. CFS is a national non-profit public interest and environmental advocacy organization working to protect human health and the environment by curbing the use of harmful food production technologies and by promoting organic and other forms of sustainable agriculture. CFS also educates consumers concerning the definition of organic food and products. Producing a scorecard to determine shellfish producer’s level of sustainability with the help of CFS will certainly be a meaningful contribution to the larger community because it will be functional to exclude shellfish producers that execute practices that degrade biodiversity and the environment it surrounds it. 

What I learned through working with the CFS is the idea of food sovereignty and how important it is for consumers to be knowledgeable about the process of how sustainable the food is being produced. Included in the scorecard, are criteria based on the feasibility and sustainability of shellfish producers in the shellfish industry. The criteria includes; pesticide use, transparency over regulations and environmental legislation, seeding and harvesting methods, and lastly, processing methods. This action project promotes people’s right to to healthy and culturally-appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems which are all tested through the criteria we have generated.

Another thing I wanted to bring up is our capability of getting involved in projects like this simply in our homes, and through our computers. I find it amazing how we integrated elements of collaboration, grasping and creating ideas, and completing tasks without ever seeing each other in person. As Karen said, we really are working and living in unprecedented times, and yet we continue to strive for greatness. We continue to do as much as we can to stay involved, despite limitations. Then, I realized that this is the type of vitality we need to make positive changes within the food system. We have to keep educating ourselves, and work together to amplify what the system lacks and the assistance it needs.

Sovereignty and Shellfish

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Food sovereignty is no simple thing in today’s food politics discourse. The modern American, whether they like it or not, is deeply embedded in a global food network. When we ask ourselves what it would mean to become food sovereign people, we must determine what self-sufficiency can and should mean within our community. As Raj Patel argues in his article “Food Sovereignty Grassroots Voices”, food sovereignty must account for the power politics of the food system. In working alongside the Center for Food Safety, a national nonprofit group that works to protect human and environmental health by advocating for sustainable practices and curbing harmful food technologies, I developed a scoring system to grade the sustainability of Washington’s shellfish operations.

Through this work and Patel’s point on power politics, I built an understanding of the simple fact that food sovereignty must begin with knowing where your food comes from. To know where your food comes from must mean to know more than its location, but to know the methods and labor that went into its creation and the impacts of this production on people and the ecosystem. My contribution to the development of the shellfish scorecard is both a contribution to the transparency of the industry as well as to the normalization of consumer-facing food transparency.

“Shellfish Aquaculture in Washington: Pesticides, Plastics, and Pollution Impacts to Our Environment” Center for Food Safety. October 24, 2019.

Food sovereignty discourse often revolves around food and farmers. While these are significant aspects of developing and defining a food sovereign community, this approach ignores the larger economic and political systems that encase our culture of food. This multidimensional image, which is explored in-depth in part eight of “Introduction: Critical Perspectives on Food Sovereignty”, must include a notion of sustainability and justice that addresses these larger systems. In defining food sovereignty with the consideration the multidimensionality and the inherent need for consumer facing transparency, the creation of and use of the shellfish scorecard begins to take on a larger weight.

As my group approached the scorecard, we carried the lessons of food sovereignty and systems thinking into our research process. We developed a scorecard that grades the sustainability of a shellfish operation on how the operation relates to Washington’s ecological feedback loops and the policy positions of the operation. This scorecard reflects values of food sovereignty and will aid consumers in their ability to support sustainable businesses.

Turning Individual Action into Systemic Change

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During this course I had the opportunity to work with Citizens’ Climate Lobby on HR 763, the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend act. CCL is a national, bipartisan, grassroots lobbying organization that supports volunteers through online trainings and connects them to groups in their area. We started social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and learned how to lobby.

HR 763 would put a price on carbon that would reduce US emissions by 40% in the first 12 years. Economists agree that this is the most effective and cost-efficient way to reduce emissions which is why it has drawn support from Republicans and Democrats. Additionally, the Act is revenue-neutral which means that the government doesn’t keep the tax collected. Instead, it gets sent back to low- and middle-income American taxpayers who will be most affected by the higher prices of a green economy.

Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act. Effective, good for people, good for the economy, revenue neutral.

In working with CCL, I found that the politics of food and the politics of climate change are similar in many ways. People tend to be very opinionated on both sides, both issues are complex and affect everyone differently, and both require a combination of personal choices and systemic government change to be solved.

It is key that the Act is bipartisan because the only way that we can fight climate change is together. A resolution such as this is only the first of many legislation actions we will need to take, so it is important that everyone is behind it.

Systems theory shows us that everything is connected, and climate change is no different. A lifecycle analysis of any product shows the ecological impacts along the entire commodity chain. Ecological impacts are usually higher during the production/processing stages, so the externalities are often placed on low income communities. This is just one example of the Triple Inequality of climate change.

Scene of the Oncler's factory from the Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

Stories like the Lorax teach us that it’s okay to replace traditional citizenship duties with purposeful individual consumption, and it shifts the blame from producers to human nature (Maniates). When people are made aware of a dangerous product, they can make the individual choice not to buy it (Szasz). This protects them from the product but does nothing to address the problem for others. We need more than individual choices to combat climate change. HR 763 is one way of collective change, but people still have to make the individual choice to be politically active.

This is a picture from Environmental Lobby Day in Olympia, WA in 2019 that I went to with WashPIRG.

Salish Center and the Importance of Food Sourcing Education

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My work with the Salish Center was focused on establishing a PDO (protected designation of origin) for all seafood harvested in the Salish Sea. In effect, this would ensure that all seafood derived from the Salish Sea would be labelled as such, and that no non-Salish Sea seafood could be labelled as a product of the Salish Sea. The concepts that we focused on reminded me of Wendell Berry’s work on The Pleasures of Eating and Karen Litfin’s work on Localism. In this way, my work with the Salish Center highlighted the intersection between the legal classification of food and how this fosters community development and pride in local food production.

Salish Sea Certified designation

Sample medallion for Salish Sea Certified PDO. Image courtesy of: https://salishcenter.org/#mission

As our program director told us, one of the primary goals of establishing a PDO for Salish seafood was to foster community pride in what he considers to be a superior food product relative to other seafood. By identifying a superior product as Salish Sea derived, the Salish Center hoped that local populations would be driven to protect the sanctity of the product’s origin. This is reminiscent of Berry’s quote that “eaters… must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world” in order to contextualize their place in a larger food system. By stressing the importance of the health of the Salish Sea in bringing about its superior seafood, the Salish Center was essentially working to help consumers remember that their seafood and the quality thereof was contingent on a tangible, mutable part of the world.

See the source image

The Salish Center’s work helped remind consumers of the tangible source of their product’s origin. Image courtesy of Puget Sound Action Team.

Further, by identifying superior Salish seafood as a local product, the Salish Center  worked to incentivize consumers to reduce their “food miles” by buying local. The rationale behind this is that consumers would recognize and respond to the superiority of the Salish Sea’s products with increased consumption thereof, thus simultaneously supporting their own appetite and local food economies. As Litfin points out in “Localism”, “a local economy will have lower energy requirements and therefore be ecologically friendlier”. In this way, the Salish Center’s work contributed to environmental conservation.

My takeaway from this project is the power that something so simple as food labelling has in forming and protecting a community. Prior to working with the Salish Center, I could only imagine the corporate incentives behind labelling food as “organic” or “Walla-Walla sourced”, for example, but now I understand the importance that such labels have to protecting the source of the product and reinforcing pride in local food economies.

Racism in the Food System

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I’m taking the liberty to focus on the food system and farm workers in Washington State. COVID-19 has served to peel back the layers of an incredibly unjust system. Farm workers, who are largely foreign and undocumented, have now been deemed ‘essential’ employees yet are not afforded basic safety measures. Currently, labor advocacy groups Familias Unidas por la Justicia and the United Farm Workers of America are filing a lawsuit against Washington State’s Health and Labor departments demanding regulated support for these farm workers who are too scared to speak for themselves because doing so could result in their H2-A visas being revoked and/or their information being given to ICE. Washington Health was reported issuing guidance that temporary worker housing facilities with a single room “should assign sick occupants to one side and occupants without symptoms to the opposite side.”

Speaking of housing, simply getting a roof over their heads is a challenge for many foreign farm workers. Not all farms are required to provide housing for their employees depending on the visas issued, and as Benton City has demonstrated, many local residents in farming areas push back hard against supplying farmworker housing. Residents of Benton City were recorded stating that they did not want Benton City to become like Mabton, a mostly Latino community. That was during complaints directed to the US Department of Justice in 2002. To this day residents are fighting against farm worker housing.

Perhaps one of the most telling cases of foreign farm worker discrimination was during the infamous 2018 Sumas Berry Farm case. The farm manager was quoted saying about the foreign farm workers: “They came here to suffer,” and that they were expected to work every day of the week “unless they were on their deathbed.” Despite H2-A visas not having a production quota in WA State, workers on this farm were expected to harvest two boxes of berries every hour or face deportation and paying their own way home. The conditions that brought on the allegations w

Sumas Berry Farm Protests

ere 12 hour shifts in hot, wildfire smokey conditions that led to severe heat stress, poor quality or portioned food, not enough water, expired visas that had yet to be renewed, and the death of a coworker, suspected from aforementioned conditions, which caused 70 employees to go on a one day strike and subsequently get fired. The farm was expected to pay a lawsuit settlement of $149,800, but a judge later cut that settlement cost in half.

These are just three examples of severe injustice and racism faced by foreign farm workers in the US food system, but it’s a systemic problem that infects every part of the country. Until we can strictly enforce basic human rights and regulations in the farming system, these injustices won’t stop. It’s one of the real costs of cheap food.

The Root Cause of Our Mistreatment of Immigrants

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This is a response to Sydney’s post “Migrant Workers Have Always Been Essential, So We Should Be Treating Them Like It” found here: https://sites.uw.edu/pols385/2020/05/19/migrant-workers-have-always-been-essential-so-we-should-be-treating-them-like-it/

While I agree with Sydney’s point that migrants have served in essential roles throughout our nation’s history, I would like to challenge the idea that the migrant workers themselves are essential to those roles. Let me be clear: I completely disagree with the notion that immigrants are “stealing our jobs.” Most Americans are unwilling to fill those positions as they currently operate, and we absolutely should not blame the immigrants for seeking a better life. But I believe that calling immigrant labor itself “essential” only serves to excuse our luxury-obsessed culture and the costs it imposes on immigrant workers.

As Sydney points out, immigrant labor is used because they are one of our most vulnerable populations so they will accept dangerous conditions at low wages. The key point there is the low wages: agricultural work is not the most dangerous job out there, but it is certainly one of the lowest paying dangerous jobs. Looking at other, more dangerous jobs like garbage collectors or construction workers, their average salaries are considerably higher than agricultural work and they subsequently have much lower undocumented immigrant participation.

Source: USDA, Pew Research Center
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-jobs-economy-farm-workers-taxes/

It is not that Americans are entirely unwilling to do the work; they are simply unwilling to do the work below a certain salary. The way I see it, our agricultural industry has convinced us that immigrant labor is essential to our food system in order to keep payroll artificially deflated and dissuade investigation of poor working conditions. They are basically using slave labor to keep food prices low and profits high. 

As available undocumented labor goes down, wages must go up to attract legal citizens.

I worry that the discourse around this topic can easily become confused and subsequently counter-productive. Agricultural work is undeniably essential; without our food industry, we (along with many other parts of the world) would starve to death. And our immigrant labor force is essential in order to keep food prices low. But are low food prices essential? They are not only inessential but inherently detrimental, as argued by Michael Carolan in The Real Cost of Cheap Food. Thus, by calling immigrant labor essential in and of it itself, we perpetuate the idea that our food should be cheap and, to a certain degree, excuse the poor treatment of immigrants as a necessary evil to reach those ends.

Sydney calls on the agriculture industry to improve wages and working conditions for undocumented workers. In my opinion, this represents individualization of responsibility to a degree: it fails to address the larger systemic reasons for those wages and conditions, which include America’s love of ultra-cheap food, a difficult-to-navigate legal immigration system, and our willingness to look the other way when our industries abuse desperate populations. Solving this problem will require deep systemic changes to our immigration systems, law enforcement, the agriculture industry, and, most importantly, the way Americans relate to food. We will need to accept spending much more of our income on food, which will require far less discretionary spending: smaller houses, less luxurious vehicles, and significantly less entertainment consumption. We will need to fundamentally alter the typical American lifestyle.

Systemic thinking shows us just how complex the situation is, and reminds us that we cannot just expect the food industry to make things right on its own. We must act as consumers and citizens, as individuals and communities, as social and political entities, in order to institute the massive changes necessary to protect vulnerable immigrant communities and move towards a more ethical and sustainable food system.