From a Food Writer’s Notebook: Broadening “Food Scarcity”
Gathering observations, questions, definitions
Today’s newsletter is a continuation of my investigation of food scarcity. Expect (monthly) notes and essays on hunger and the US mythology of abundance and interviews about how people navigate scarcity and practice self and/or community reliance in their local food system. The following are notes from my reading and thinking through these issues.
Last month I wrote Considering Food Scarcity’s Closeness, about being on WIC as a young mom. The reception was really kind and people shared their experiences of how government food assistance programs helped them. It was an emotional post to read, some said, just as it was for me to write. People echoed my mixed-up feelings of shame, gratitude, resentment. Since then the GOP tax bill has marched forward while proposing massive cuts to SNAP and the USDA will cut grants that feed children across the globe. There is evidence that being poor is being further criminalized.
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In Palestine, a food-scarcity-manufactured-by-enemies is used as a weapon. “Palestinian health minister reports 29 ‘starvation-related’ deaths in Gaza.” Globalization is only rosy if one can ignore the ongoing health and humanitarian emergencies in Gaza as well as Afghanistan, Northern Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. Perhaps there will be more attention paid when there are less people to make cheap goods that affluent people buy (a deeply cynical take). It’s jarring to move through spaces and see when attention changes – which circles of people ignore which crises. The crisis of attention span isn’t limited to people only wanting to watch short clips, but also connected to how brittle people’s sense of reality is – some can’t possibly consider that the country they love is actively aiding horrors elsewhere and some fold the horrors into their story as necessary for progress.
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I watched The Story of Arizona’s Good Food, a Phoenix PBS documentary about local food produced by Local First Arizona) and Rodney Machokoto of Machokoto Farms talked about surviving economic crisis in Zimbabwe: “It was really so bad you’d go to the store and the shelves were bare. There was nothing. What allowed us in Zimbabwe to survive that really difficult time was that most of our population knew how to grow, so when they lost jobs or other things they started surviving off these side projects where people grow their own food to feed their families.” Before I started diving into food writing and research starting in 2020, I think I knew one person who grew a portion of the food they ate. Most people I know would laugh if I asked them if they garden. I’ve definitely joked about not knowing how to keep plants alive, but I’m not finding it funny anymore.
And I’m not about to say the answer is that everyone must have a garden and produce all their own food. I used to be someone who would say ‘everyone should be able to cook for themselves’ and maybe a baseline of skill is something to consider. But rather than everyone becoming individually sufficient (they can cook, garden, etc all for themselves so they don’t need to depend on anyone!) I'm more interested in what it would look like to survive as a neighborhood. I volunteer to cook massive amounts of food and run a kitchen with a group of cooks. Hopefully there are people who would lead the gardening efforts, the safety efforts, the housing efforts.
I love this Tweet and also…I don’t know about romanticizing community roles. Working in community isn’t an idyllic opposite of capitalism. And the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that to be able to stay in community, being able to deal with conflict is necessary and, folks, we’re not very good at it! Myself included. We don’t know that we’re bad at conflict because modern life in the US is all about keeping things easy. Friction is immediately designated as a threat to life. There’s going to be no lovely community kitchen in our future if we can’t abide disagreements and come to understanding.
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Not knowing how to grow food or who is growing the food I’m eating has become normalized but is relatively new and still not the way everyone lives. This will sound obvious to some, but there are still people who grow their own food to survive. Living in the Phoenix bubble, going to farmers markets or otherwise participating in the local food economy is treated like a hobby. “What do you do on the weekends?” “I like playing pickleball.” “I like going to farmers markets.” There are many efforts made by grocery stores and restaurants and local organizations to support and encourage shopping locally. These efforts, though, can make what is a necessary part of creating a sustainable way of living and taking power back from mega-industry seem like a trend that can be picked up on a whim and cast off as easily. To most people where I live, shopping locally isn’t essential because the grocery store is always looming. Always open. Always “cheaper”and “easier” (though I’d argue the validity of these points! What does cheap and easy mean? Where does it get us?)
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I don't know what I don't know. No one can. I don’t know how to grow food. So I’m meeting people who do, asking them questions, growing small amounts of food. Becoming knowledgeable of the food system I inhabit. The landscape of food among people who think they’re safe from food scarcity is rife with a scarcity of knowledge. A successful life often seems to mean that one doesn’t have to cook – order food, buy prepped meals, go to a restaurant, hire a nutritionist. I don’t know anyone who has a personal chef, but it’s sighed about, dreamed of as some high bar of wealth and accomplishment.
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I don't come from preppers. Sometimes I have a small panic attack and research what I should have in a go bag. My people are proudly anti-conspiracy theory and very religious. Why worry about some of the big issues of the day if there’s heaven waiting? Well what if there isn’t? And also, what about the people left here dealing with this world after I'm dead?
I was listening to the episode of The Cutting Room Floor with Brandon Maxwell and he said that as he sat by different family members as they died, they didn’t talk about what they did for work. He said he wants to be more than his job. I agree and I also thought, immediately, that I might talk about writing (or definitely think about it) as I die. Does that make me ridiculous? Or is it different because writing occupies a space of work and love for me?
Not only do I want to be more than my job, I want to think and live bigger than the job/hobby divide. Embedding myself into my truly local food system seems necessary. I may not have a go bag, but I know many people who grow and make food. My concerns are bigger and smaller than when I was younger: I want to live and help people around me live, and write about it so that it becomes more and more possible for more people. But in a world where being poor is criminal and food accessibility is dependent on the whims of the government, survival is no small thing.
Dying with dignity, with time to talk about what I loved, to share stories, that is the dream. A dream that feels increasingly tenuous and also inaccessible to many, many people. Someone dying of starvation in Gaza – can they talk? If they have a loved on at their bedside, what would they talk about as death arrived?
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