Category Archives: Topics

Moving Forward

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My action group this quarter was given the opportunity to work with Our Climate. Our Climate is a non-profit organization that is working with young people to help put together a Green New Deal. This opportunity combined three things that I am incredibly passionate about: the climate, politics, and food. My group was able to integrate what we learned in this class into our work with Our Climate. The reality is that we cannot address climate change without making changes to our food system which will require political action. We were able to bring up our food system in our discussions with fellow interns and make sure that it will be included in the Green New Deal.

I often find myself focused on the personal changes that I make in my day to day life in order to do what I can to help reverse climate change. I recently convinced my family to try out a vegan diet after learning about the staggering effect that animal agriculture has on the environment. My sister and I have been sharing our cooking projects on an Instagram that we made together in the hope of spurring others into giving veganism a try.

Infographic from Cowspiracy

However, in working with Our Climate it was amazing to see what a vast community of people there is fighting for systemic change. My personal actions do make some leeway to combat climate change, but I was able to make a much more significant difference by advocating for policy change. Personal changes are the first step, but systemic and political change is necessary for large scale change. 

Working with Our Climate and taking this class helped shift my perspective towards understanding systems theory and looking beyond my personal actions and experiences. I do what I can in my own life to alter the course of global warming, but I’m also continuing to push for change at a systemic level. Moving forward, this class has shown me how interconnected our world is and has given me the tools that I need to enact change. 

Soil Conservation in Brazil & The World Food System Beyond

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Blue and Yellow Globe

Brazil is one of the largest agricultural exporters in the world. In my research group, we found that land rights and soil conservation are key issues within the context of Brazil’s agricultural production. If the trend in poor land management of degraded pasturelands and encroachment into the Amazon region continues, it appears soil erosion—and nutrient loss along with it—could increase by up to 20%, according to this study’s findings.

Trade, Self Sufficiency

In chapter 3, “Agricultural Trade Liberalization,” of Jennifer Clapp’s book Food, it’s clear that international trade in the food system is a marketplace rife with inequalities and contradictions, often at the expense of people lower on the socioeconomic ladder, and especially those in developing countries whose main trade output is agriculture. However, even for an industrial nation such as Japan, boasting one of the highest GDPs in the world, the nation’s reliance on food imports point to the fact that money alone cannot buy independence.

In a 2012 article from the United Nations University publication Our World, Japan’s low food self-sufficiency (60% of their calories are from imports) was discussed and ramifications contextualized. It’s notable that the goal to increase the self-sufficiency to 45% by 2020 have since been pushed back to 2025. What it means for food to be “Japanese” has changed over the decades alongside changing consumer preferences and decreasing domestic output. This is an issue the world over, as the Columbian exchange of the 21st century has seen hamburgers and big gulps from the U.S. in Mexico City, to Bangalore, to Riyadh, to Tokyo and beyond.

People Standing Near Restaurant chain

Once native to the United States, the seeds of McDonalds have now been sown across the globe thanks to the 21st century ship called globalization

 

In Brazil, food self-sufficiency, ecological damage, Indigenous rights, resource management, and economic concerns all come into consideration when we talk about food and agriculture. Perhaps, as has been suggested in the UK, farmers can be part of the solution. Something will have to change if Brazil is to remain ecologically viable for agriculture in the decades to come.

 

Person Digging on Soil Using Garden Shovel

Soils are both the lungs and the womb of our earth. They are responsible for the sustenance that comes out of them and our mistakes (C02) that go in

 

The Big Picture

In considering the food on our plates, Michael Pollan makes it sound simple. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.” While I don’t disagree with his prescription, the fact of the matter is that the food in the grocery store, and in markets around the globe, are products of, and tools in, the political ecology of the world food system. A system which is itself comprised of ecologies and systems.

The world has increasingly become a web of interconnectedness. Understanding it requires the ability to constantly look at micro and macro structures thereof. Our world food system is no different.

 

 

 

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.

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.

 

The Importance of Standing Together Against Injustice Anywhere

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“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” those are the now iconic words from the deeply moving letter from Birmingham jail written by MLK Jr. in 1963.

While those words are powerful by themselves, just as powerful is the sentence which follows it: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” While MLK Jr. was specifically talking about racism in America and the necessity of all people to stand up for injustice wherever they see it, I think that the idea presented resonates at a much deeper level. As we have learned through systems thinking throughout this quarter, we are all connected in many more ways than we think.

We are connected to the cacao farmers in West Africa who grow the beans that become our chocolate but who can’t afford the finished product,

We are connected to the meat packers in the Midwest who are dying of Covid-19 because of a lack of adequate protection,

We are connected to the communities who can’t drink their water because they live downstream from under-regulated dairy CAFO’s in our very own Washington state.

Global food system, Criminal Justice System, Contaminated Water Systems, all just different names for the same oppressive system fueled by the colonial legacy of institutionalized racism. We may have abolished slavery 155 years ago, but most of our food is still picked, packed, and shipped by black and brown hands. We are all part of a system which consumes marginalized bodies, and which leaves those who benefit from it confused, guilty, and angry; A system which has injustice as its very core.

So, what can we do? How we can possibly break out from these systems that entwine, confine, but hopefully won’t continue to define us.

Through my group project with the Center for Food Safety working on building a social media campaign to demand the stronger regulation of dairy CAFO’s within Washington communities, I got a glimpse of the power of the collective. Individually, none of us had the skills or the energy to create a platform on which this issue could be addressed, yet together through the synergy of our skills and knowledge we were able to create a comprehensive platform that included social media pages, petitions, lobby tool kits, and letters to the editor.

Society so often tries to divide us, because a people divided are easier to suppress, but when we awaken to the injustices which surround us and come together in the form of collective action we can challenge the very fabric of society. In the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” In these unprecedented times it is crucial we come together and use our collective leverage to make a difference because if we don’t, who will?

 

Alternative Milk, Our Earth, and Systems Theory

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I really valued what I took away from this course, as it presented new and challenging topics that I had never considered before. It also gave me the opportunity to conduct research on a topic I took a great interest in: the sustainability of alternative milk products. I was inspired by a previous blog post I wrote, about a climate change food calculator that calculates the ghg emissions, water usage, and land usage of 40 different foods.

With the massive changes in the dairy and alternative milk market, I decided to use this as a jumping point to look into three milk products: milk from dairy cows, almond milk, and oat milk. I researched and compared all three products with reference to water usage and GHG emissions. I was mostly interested in determining if alternative milks were actually more sustainable, and if so which was the most sustainable milk?

I looked closely at the sections about food systems and the effect of climate change. I determined that the ecological system and the food production system are incredibly intertwined and interdependent. The ecological and biological systems greatly affect how food is grown and produced, and the food production system has had very adverse effects on the environment.

My research only scratched the surface of sustainable food production practices, but it is a critical piece in the future of food production. This course gave me a deeper understanding of systems theory that allowed me to analyze a topic in a more meaningful way.

Works Cited:

Guibourg, C., & Briggs, H. (2019, August 09). Climate change food calculator: What’s your diet’s carbon footprint? Retrieved June 09, 2020, from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714

Image:

Lucas, A. (2019, November 13). 5 charts that show how milk sales changed and made it tough for Dean Foods to avert bankruptcy. Retrieved June 09, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/13/5-charts-that-show-how-milk-sales-have-changed.html

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.

ENVIR 385: A Reflection

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My group had the opportunity to work with Landesa; a non-profit organization that helps secure land rights for the world’s poorest. Although Landesa covers a more general scope, our focus was to bring awareness to the issue of women land rights in underdeveloped countries, and to learn more about how it connects to resilience-building within communities in the face of a pandemic. 

We learned that the women in the regions we researched make up the vast majority of the agricultural workforce, but due to the huge gender disparity, the lack of land rights puts women in vulnerable positions, especially when facing a health crisis. If the patriarch falls ill or passes away, there isn’t much a woman can do to support her family. At least not with the current system.  

Women’s Land Rights infographic. (Created by Ashley Wright)

This quarter we talked about systems theory. We are all part of a system(s). If a part of the system is changed, then the other parts will be affected– impacting the system as a whole. This impact could either be negative or positive. Through our research we found that by giving women legal access to land, it could be the latter. They have the ability to help their communities build resilience by making an economic and ecological impact; all they need is change. The current status quo is an example of an unsustainable system.

Unsustainable systems are everywhere. We don’t have to go to an underdeveloped country to see them. Our food system is a big one. 

Individual, institutional, and structural racism lives in our food system. In the reading, “The Color of Food”, Raj Patel concludes that racial disparity in wages and representation can be found in most occupations along the food chain. POC are often limited to low-wage food jobs in the food industry, leading them to experience high rates of food insecurity, malnutrition and hunger. But consumers are oftentimes unaware of these exploitations because there is a great disconnect between consumers and the food chain. 

The Color of Food, Raj Patel

With the BLM movement in full force right now, it is important to understand that racism goes beyond just police brutality. It lives in different parts of our society. 

As this class comes to an end and our projects wrap up, I can’t help but think about the systems I belong to and the impact I’m having on them. Raj Patel stated that, “consumers vote with their purchases”. As a consumer in this unsustainable system, my choices matter when it comes to food. 

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.