Leaders of Color Discuss Structural Racism and White Privilege in the Food System
This first article asks "leaders of color in the food justice community for their thoughts about how they think the “food movement” might come together on the issues of race, equity, and access." Their varying answers offer a variety of perspectives and starts to uncover the ways that systematic racism cannot be understood as separate from the food movement. I was especially struck by the quote prompting us, “to truly understand one’s role as a perpetuator of racism even within liberal thought and action.” I like the way that it doesn't allow for so-called liberal activists in the food movement to allow their actions to go unexamined.
Building true allies: Nikki Silvestri at TEDxManhattan
This is a TEDtalk that Amy shared with me that I think does a really good job of examining the role of allies within food in a particularly nuanced way that I hadn't considered before. I am especially interested by Nikki's reflections on shame as an ally.
*WARNING: The following two articles, especially the last one, involve content surrounding bodies, weight, and food, if these are subjects that are challenging or harmful for you do proceed with caution or opt out if you need to. I think and hope that the tone both articles strike is body-positive and critical of hurtful "normal" rhetoric about such topics but I don't want anyone to be made uncomfortable!*
The racism in healthy food: Why we need to stop telling others what to eat
This article is the commentary of a McGill student problematizing traditional 'healthy food' rhetoric as "elitist, classist, racist, and fat-phobic." It also makes some important points about choice and who can make ‘healthy choices’ about their food as well as who decides what makes a choice ‘healthy.’
Food Shame
This last article focuses on individual manifestations of food shame, food policing etc. while not letting 'the system' that creates these phenomena off the hook. It talks about how the different facets of a person's identity shapes how they experience food, the relationships they create with food and their bodies, and it addresses how the food movement often fails to acknowledge the difference and nuance these identities create.
For your reflection this week I want to leave it pretty open. You could talk about your own identity and how it has structured your relationship to food and your interactions with our food system. If that's too personal and not something you're comfortable sharing feel free to reflect on barriers you see within the food movement and how we can begin to break those down. You could talk about how you could be a better ally to the movement or how the movement could better serve you and the people you care about. Or if something else from the above articles struck you as important and thought provoking, explore that!
I'm looking forward to a critical and constructive class on Thursday, see you all then!
Food is very important to my culture just as anyones is. But there are negative connotations to the food that is in my culture. With health issues of diabetes, high blood pressure, and stroke it is sometimes hard to enjoy the food from my culture. It is also hard as well now that I am a vegetarian to eat food from my culture since many dishes have meat or meat byproducts in them. As regarding the food system with my identity it's a bit frustrating. On one end I'm very privilege to be able to go to any store and buy what I need but I know others do not have this same opportunity. I also note that other people of color are being mistreated to put food on my table. I can see that people of color are being mistreated and used in order to support the society we live in. I also see barriers in the food movement as not being inclusive to everyone. It is usually for those who have education, money, and time. For now I don't see a system for my people to help in the food movement when we are still fighting to be see as equals in society. I think me as an individual since I am privilege to have and education and some economics gains I can effect the people I connect with and try to show them how our food system works.
ReplyDeleteI want to thank you for bringing up this topic, Annika. These articles (and the TED talk) point to some of the issues that I’ve been having as we’ve moved through class so far.
ReplyDeleteMatlak’s food shame article stood out to me, as I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the ways in which we police other people’s food consumption. In past responses, I’ve written about how healthiness doesn’t really play into my own food choices. I tend to “listen to my body,” meaning that I eat whatever foods I’m craving, in whatever quantity feels right. While I do end up eating lots of yummy fruits and vegetables (because I like them!) this also means that I end up eating a lot of food that might be considered unhealthy. It’s always been fascinating to me to see how often people question my eating decisions. I eat a lot of carbs (I love bread and pasta), and it’s almost shocking how confident people are in commenting on this. In my mind, what I choose to consume lies with me. Yet, we live in a culture that is so completely built around the concept of deprivation. I often feel like I’m being told I don’t eat “right.” To eat right always seems to mean counting calories, avoiding certain “bad” foods, and to produce a discourse around health that frankly, makes me uncomfortable. I find myself wondering what it would look like to produce a vision of eating right as listening to oneself.
Something that was not explicitly discussed in these readings, but that the articles made me think about, is the intersection of mental health and discourses surrounding “eating healthy.” As someone who struggles with pretty severe anxiety, I have days where cooking or eating a “healthy” meal just isn’t going to happen. Producing these kinds of meals takes energy, both physical and mental. If I can’t manage to leave my bed, I’m certainly not going to produce the kind of “healthy” meal that I’m told I need to eat. So often, our conversations assume that people not only have the resources (money, transportation, availability of fresh produce, sufficient free time, access to kitchenware, etc.) to produce “healthy” meals, but also that they are in a mental space where this is doable. For many of us, this isn’t always true. I’d like to see more conversations about how mental health is connected to and complicates our understandings of food and health.
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ReplyDeleteMy interaction to food: I was born in Nanjing (Where the Nanjing Massacre took place in WW2) and lived in that city for 6 years until going to elementary school in Shanghai. During these years, I cannot remember exactly what food did I eat except one thing, rice! Why is rice? Because people in Nanjing eat rice as main course (about 60%) for a meal, while in Shanghai rice usually only account for 30%. At that time, I was really impressed when I was eating in my elementary school classmates’ house and found this difference, because these two cities are pretty close to each other (around 300 miles). When my body entered the adolescence phase, my parents (actually most parents in my city) believed that eat more meat can make body grow taller. So I had been feed many chickens, beefs and pork during my junior-high school. When I entered the high school, teacher form biology class told me fast food is bad for health, because there are too many calories in it. As a result, I quit eating fast food for many years. Until recently, I read some articles about nutrition, which state that compared with fat, sugar is more harmful for body health. Thus my current diet is, no soft drink, no rice, no potatoes, vegetables, meat and few fast food (because I don’t think there is too much sugar in the burger). So in brief, my food choice is greatly affected by my culture in the childhood, and scientific theories when I grow up.
ReplyDeleteSomething interesting to share: In my city, girls with bad appetite are more favored by male. So when girls eat with male, they usually eat very little, and when girls eat with girls, they usually eat much more.
There’s a lot to respond to here! There are several ideas in these texts that evoke strong reponses for me—but I think what I want to write about is about feelings.
ReplyDeleteRe-watching Nikki Silvestri’s talk reminded me of an important teaching that I was on the verge of forgetting in trying to make this class solution-oriented. It’s the necessity of being present with the problems in all their ugly painfulness rather than rushing toward a temporary bandaid solution that allows us not to feel so bad for awhile but doesn’t truly lead to change. When we talk about resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental disasters, I think we need to include emotional resilience. In order to be able to face our problems and not “tune out” we need to be able to be present with all of the grief, shame, fear, and anxiety that are normal biological reactions to difficult and dangerous situations. We need to be able to feel those feelings and let them guide us toward healthy solutions rather than paralyze us.
I find it interesting that Silvestri ends her talk talking about celebration and that Matlak ends her article by talking about pleasure. It seems to me that these can be antidotes to despair, apathy, and paralysis. We evolved emotions as tools to help us evaluate situations and surroundings. Rather than reacting blindly in an attempt to escape what we don’t want, perhaps we can find moments of pleasure, create moments of celebration that will help guide us toward what we DO want.
I wonder if there are ways that we as a class could explore celebration and pleasure as tools for change in these last couple of weeks we have together?
I want to start by saying thanks for choosing this topic, although it definitely is a heavy set of questions to think about. For this response I think I’d like to mostly talk about the first thing you mentioned, being my own identity and how it has structured my relationship to food and our food system. I grew up, for most of my childhood in a single parent household. My mom worked as an Ed-tech, and later as a teacher, and we lived in a variety of small apartments throughout my elementary school life. Earlier in her life my mom was pretty much a hippie; she followed the Grateful Dead on tour, she lived for a winter in a teepee in the mountains in Colorado, and she was pretty vegan. She tried really hard while I was growing up to provide me with the healthy food options she had loved earlier in life, but because of financial reasons (teachers are paid annoying low wages) we weren’t able to eat as healthy as she would like. Despite that, she always tried to make eating a fun thing for me and she would always ask me what I wanted to eat or would give me options. My grandfather always yelled at her and told her that she shouldn’t be giving a five year old options, she should just give me what ever she was making and that was that. If I didn’t like it I didn’t have to eat it. However, my mom did not listen to him and as a result I had a pretty decent relationship to food growing up; I wasn’t adverse to vegetables, and I ended up knowing how to cook quite a few things for myself thanks to all the meals my mom fed me growing up. However, as I was mentioning earlier, although we weren't able to buy “all-natural” or “organic” products, my mom still made an effort to always have vegetables in my meals, and tried to keep me away from too many junk foods. Now as a young-adult, shopping for myself, I am learning how hard it must have been for her to do that. As I go grocery shopping I’m trying to follow her lead and buy vegetables and other relatively healthy foods, and its hard as a college student, not only with money but also with time for preparation. It makes me realize how much she must have had to budget and plan in order to give me that food experience growing up. In a sense, everything she did has shaped the way I have come to understand my identity and my relationship to food.
ReplyDeleteJust want to start off by saying that I very much enjoyed reading the articles and watching the video that you posted. They have made me examine my place in this food movement and, my place in my culture’s food. I was extremely happy when reading the leaders of color discussion article and watching Nikki Silvestri’s TED talk. They tied together a lot of things that I have been thinking about these last couple of months. Mainly dealing with the intersectionality between racism and the agricultural movement. Both are linked as we cannot have a true agricultural revolution without thinking about how our most underrepresented populations are affected by these systems. I had similar feelings as Silvestri when she mentioned not having many people in the agricultural movement that looked like her. I could think about Cesar Chaves, as he worked to improve immigrant rights across the country. I also liked the comment about trying to be conscious of our own racism and privilege so that we can build relationships that will lead to productive change. From the work that I have been a part of in the community I have come to value the relationships that I have built with the people. I can confirm that things happen at a faster rate and more efficiently when a relationship has been established between the participants. Similarly, for the ally’s out there, including myself, trying to create these reciprocal relationships are essential for community and growth.
ReplyDeleteI have always had access to food, both good and bad. Overtime I learned that process foods high in sugar leave me feeling very yucky (like how most bodies react to this food). I started thinking about why people eat food that is highly processed or not as nutritious. It is about who has financial access, which is an issue of race. The food movement is a big movement. It’s rethinking agriculture practices from fertilizer to farm workers wages, it’s restructuring how consumers interact with the agriculture business, and it’s getting back to the core of what is wholesome and nutritious for all bodies. I really appreciate having this topic me brought up. I look forward to our discussion about it.
ReplyDeleteI think that in most cultures, food plays a huge role. I grew up in a family where food was and is continued to be celebrated. Behind every event, such as holidays, birthdays, funerals, weddings, graduations, and parties, food is always involved in family functions. Food brings together my family and is a big part of our lives. However, within my family, there was not much discussion and education on where exactly food came from and who it was created. Pertaining to farming within a food system, I’m not really aware of any family history relating to that specific subject. Pertaining to the food system and education within and outside of the school community, I try to talk to my family as much as possible about eating healthy andI try to talk about what I learn in my current Farming class. A lot of times, many people are confused as to why I am taking the course and what I am learning. When I talk to others about how we plant vegetables and fruits and what we discuss in class, I think that allows for improvement within the food movement is helps misunderstandings.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up I always had a very easy relationship with food. I have experienced the privilege of being a white woman from a white family with two parents that have a stable income. Therefore, food was never really a topic of stress. We have always had good food to eat and I was in the dark about the majority of farming issues (such as food accessibility, poor working conditions, exploitation, sustainability, etc.) for so much of my childhood. When I did start to become aware of sustainability and organic issues, it was mostly through a concern for farm animals and the environment. I feel baffled and scared that I made it so long without being introduced to these ideas (It was freshman year when I did start hearing about food deserts, produce accessibility, and farmworker maltreatment). I have found it so so crucial to learn about the human side of things and how to support farms with fair employment conditions.
ReplyDeleteMy two most obvious identities are Asian and woman (I’m non-binary but I pass as woman and does not mind she/her/hers pronoun). Food Shame spoke to me the most. So much of me trying to reclaim my identity as a Korean involved reclaiming the food of my people, essentially. Even now my parents ask Are your housemates ok with you cooking Korean food? Do they ever complain about the smell of Kimchi? Are you sure you aren’t being a burden with the spices? when my housemates will do many things for me to cook Korean food for them. However, I also recognize that it is part of my privilege to be at an institution that does a semi-good job of recognizing racial discrimination and to be surrounded in friends who does an even better job of recognizing discrimination and supporting me.
ReplyDeleteAnd my second identity – passing as a woman. When I was a little kid, I would eat a lot to be the “girl who’s not like other girls”. Except… then came the realization of “Oh, I’m channeling internalized misogyny”. So I just ate however much or however little as I wanted to. But I still observe this narrative around food and body where whether you eat a lot of you eat less, you are still judged for it, immensely. You eat a lot with a bigger body, you are judged for not being healthy. You eat little when you are very thin looking, you are also judged for not being healthy. There’s no win here.
Shameless late make-up post #2
ReplyDeleteIt’s still a mystery to my parents how I have come to like “white people food”. Growing up in Korea meant that most meals were rice and ‘something else’. Lunch thermos with multiple compartments for rice plus alpha was the norm. There was this somewhat quaint notion that you haven’t really had a meal unless you had a bowl of rice- and that anything other than rice-based meals was somewhat unhealthy.
But there was copious supply of “white people food”- anything from pizza, burgers, to pasta. Because these “white” foods are regarded “unhealthy” there was some level of shame around them. It was a sign of neglect from your parents.
As a child, I preferred a lot of Western food to Korean food, which made the transition over to Canada a bit easier- I had no food related problems in the new country. I didn’t miss ay Korean dish, and I found all the new food very easy to approach.
Now that I a bit older, I am starting to appreciate my people’s food more. I wish to continue eating the food we ate, the way we used to eat them, in order to preserve that knowledge. I want to remember what plants my dad and I would forage together in spring time, so that one day I can teach others.