Food for Thought
by Joseph Heathcott
We live in a decisive moment in the history of our species.
We have to make profound choices about how we will sustain
ourselves into the next century. In most cases, the choices require
that we take a close, intense, and introspective look at
ourselves and our world. What kind of lives are we living? What
sort of world are we fashioning? What legacies will we leave for
those who come after? These questions are more than philosophical;
indeed, tough and realistic answers to these questions
could mean the difference between a healthy world, utter catastrophe,
or a slow strangulation of the planet’s biosphere.
Of these options, the slow strangulation appears as the worst
and most plausible outcome. In this scenario, human pillaging
of the Earth’s natural resources proceeds unabated, unleashing
great tides of erosion, cascades of toxic effluent, plumes of choking
soot and smoke, armies of superviruses, and a cacophony of
industrial noise. Typical of our global capitalist system, the elites
of the First and Third worlds will be among the last affected by
these developments, while the world’s “superfluous” peoples already
feel the stranglehold of environmental destruction. Axiomatically,
poverty itself the maldistribution of resources is the
precondition for severe destruction, from the rainforests of Brazil
to the fragile seas of the Eurasian plateau to the rapidly expanding
Sahel.
While resource extraction proceeds apace, “advances” in biotechnology
threaten to contravene 15,000 years of horticultural
wisdom. Mass production agribusiness, rooted in the relentless
pursuit of profit through artificial scarcity, whittles away at plant
and animal diversity while poisoning the world with chemical
inputs and toxic run-off. Bioaccumulation of most major toxins
insures that those of us on the top of the food chain will absorb
the full brunt of an overdeveloped industrial ethos.
Of course, settled agriculture has always made possible the
extractive logic of surplus on which human hierarchies are constructed.
Control over food the most vital means of reproduction
has shaped human societies like nothing else. This is why
the politics of food has long lain at the heart of poor people’s
movements, from the Winstanley Diggers to the Russian Revolution
to the anti-colonialist Mau Mau rebellion to the American
populist revolts. Likewise, the struggle for democratic and egalitarian distribution of food resources (and in-deed
all the means of reproduction) should be at
the heart of our search for just and sustainable
human relations.
That settled agriculture lies at the root of inegalitarian
social relations is by no means reason
enough to reject it out of hand unless, of course,
your vision of utopia includes a mass human extinction
which only the well-placed and privileged
could hope to survive. It is not feasible whether as
a utopian goal or revolutionary strategy to call
for a return to the pleistocene, an age long gone.
Most human societies are based on some form of
agriculture, and “radical” solutions that turn on
a rejection of agriculture also reject the future for
the mass of humanity who toil under the bootheel
of the privileged, resource-rich North. Agriculture,
like technology, like sexual relations, like the family,
must be made to serve just, humane, and ecologically
sustainable ends.
Sustainability, to be sure, is a term so overused
in discussions of food and natural resources that
it is difficult to recover a core meaning. Third world development
is now “sustainable.” Petrochemical exploration and ex-traction
is now “sustainable.” Timber harvests are now “sustainable.”
Perhaps human societies will never be able to maintain
a purely and endlessly balanced relationship with the natural
world; but clearly there are far better balances to be struck
than our current system so radically out of whack that we in the
developed North have lost nearly all conception of our daily
bread as the staff of life. Indeed, we purchase highly processed,
nearly unrecognizable food products, molded and packaged in
a bewildering variety of shapes, colors, and sizes, retailed through
mass corporate industrial supermarkets and fast food chains.
We pop trays of “food product” into microwaves because we are
so rushed and stressed by our workplaces and schools. Worst of
all, we construct elaborate, calorie-obsessed diets that plunge
us into sick, mechanical relationships with what we put into
our bodies. Food becomes a calculated roster of nutrients, vitamins,
minerals, proteins, fats, carbohydrates. Even vegetarian
and vegan diets, steeped in narrow moral confines, threaten us
with a loss of what is deeply and truly important in the way we
eat.
The anarchist community has done a better job than most
political groups in placing food close to our hearts, probably
thanks to a strong infusion of environmental activists and social
ecologists into the anarchist rank and file since the 1960s.
Or, perhaps, anarchists just love to eat. At the same time, vegetarianism,
veganism, and bioregionalism have made important
inroads within the anarchist community, forcing us to con-front
our individual choices about food and to act with greater
degrees of responsibility. In many ways, the intensely personal
focus of these varied eating commitments made them especially
ripe for absorption into anarchist politics a politics that, like
feminism, recognizes that the personal is indeed political.
Yet the limitations of these diet choices have become increasingly
evident, and mirror the limitations of anarchist politics
more generally. While no one should denigrate people’s “lifestyle” choices, there is a real urgency to move forward with
a synthetic political agenda that brings together personal choices
with broader activist commitments. Merely being “vegan” is not
enough. Not even close. In fact, strict and orthodox moral commitments
to a particular diet may actually contravene responsible
ecological food choices (using cane sugar as a sweeteners,
for example, instead of locally produced honey; eating mass-produced
and packaged egg-replacers produced 2000 miles away
instead of a free-range egg gathered within shouting distance;
refusing to eat a fish caught from a nearby stream while having
no qualms about motoring through the Taco Bell “drive-thru”
for corporate vegan burritos). Moral orthodoxy, whether in religious
or dietary conviction, shuts down more studied and complex
understandings of the world around us.
Practical Anarchy is a magazine devoted to heterodoxy rather
than orthodoxy. Since this issue of Practical Anarchy is devoted
to Food Politics, we will explore a range of critiques and alternatives
to the current corporate capitalist food system. Our interest,
as always, is to move beyond simplistic debates over
“lifestylism,” to reject narrow confines and useless labels like
“workerist” or “reformist,” to complicate narrow political choices
about what we eat and how we come by it, and to bring a practical
dimension to our political choices as an antidote to orthodoxy.
We will look both at “negative” activism (activism pitched
primarily against some component of the corporate capitalist
food regime, which tends to be issue-oriented) and “positive”
activism (activism which seeks to build alternative or parallel
institutions). We see each of these activist approaches as important
and mutually reenforcing.
Most of all, we at Practical Anarchy want to provoke more
informed, nuanced, and pragmatic conversations about food
and food politics, with the hopes of facilitating stronger activist
projects dedicated to food issues. We want roadkill gourmands
talking with vegan reichsters. We want environmentalists talking
with labor activists. We want libertarian-leaning anarchists
talking with social anarchists. Call us naive, say that we are
Polyanna-ish, but we believe there is everything to be gained
from supporting diverse approaches to food politics and food
activism...and everything to lose by ignoring each other and
miring ourselves in orthodoxy.
Email: editors@practicalanarchy.org
Updated: January 6, 2002
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