The futility of 'food writing' through the apocalypse
Acute starvation within the context of the global food wasteland, and what it says about us as a species in a capitalized hellscape.
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I assume that many of you know me through my work as a cook, or, as an artist that often uses food as a medium to talk about everything else…see this post “about” webs.
Over the 5+ months of horror that have somewhat predictably passed without stoppage, the last thing I’ve wanted to write about is food, though it is clear that the majority of my culinary peers do not share this sentiment. I have continued to watch as the most popular POC, identity politicking, “trauma-informed” foodies continue on with their bag-grabbing ways, regularly writing about the most basic of empty nothingness, just to keep churning out content, maintain brand partnerships, or offer recipes as if the world isn’t continuing to crumble around us at an alarming rate of acceleration.
For months, I’ve felt cognitively bloated as my eyes have glazed over innocuously tasteless bylines and newsletters from people in the food world who have built careers off of proximity to others’ work around “food sovereignty”, or story posts of aesthetic plating, or some navel gazing text professing some kind of commitment to “re-examining their engagement” with the suffering of world, overlayed on images of beauty, immediately followed by countless photos of a branded fashion event & joyful selfies. Sure, happiness and joy is what we as humans are essentially all hoping for at the end of the day, but there is something to be said for tact, no? Or in the last few days, watching certain food people decide to voice their lopsided outrage because some foreign nationals volunteering for the WCK (3 of whom turned out to be British spies) were killed by a targeted “israeli” air strike, never mind the 40k+ Palestinian bodies they hadn’t felt compelled to say a word about for almost 6 months…
What is the cost of the complicity of acting as the scaffold that props up this facade of normalcy, through the toxic veneer of self-absorption, as the world around us continues to be burned alive?
This isn’t a takedown, I won’t be naming any names. If this feels like it’s about you, it is. If you feel like this applies to someone you are thinking of, it does. I know most people who could use these reflections won’t ever see these words, and that’s ok, if anything, they can at least be a lens for you, the reader, to expand your discernment as you engage with the world. The ongoing dearth of critical thinking continues to kill us and expand the frameworks that allow what is happening to happen. I’ve heard that shame isn’t useful, but god knows a lot more people could explore the boundaries of self-awareness beyond the panacea of marketing self-care as “resistance”. While there are Palestinians dying every minute from bombing, starvation, dehydration, untreated infections, lack of sanitation, aid packages being dropped on them, run over by tanks, snipers…not to mention all of the ones actively engaging in armed resistance…THAT is resistance. The resistance IS resistance. Enough with the co-optation, it is truly so embarrassing. Enjoy your lives, but no need to rebrand it as “resistance”.
I will not be using this essay to focus on these disappointing artifacts of neoliberal exploitation and capitalism repackaged as a “win” for the gods of representation and humanizing the subhuman Other, but I remain constantly fascinated and sickened by those who continue to sell the lie of changing the system from within.
And of course, this behavior extends far beyond just the culinary world. But anyway…
These days, I myself cannot write about food. I can hardly even think of food without the whiplash of recalling all the conditions currently connected to the concept of food for so many of our people, especially during the holy month of Ramadan, typically a time of joy, family, fasting, and prayer. My people are still being starved, violently, and with horrific intention. Palestinians are being murdered in countless ways and no one is doing anything sufficient or meaningful enough to stop it. Including me.
2 million Palestinians are being forced into famine by “israel”, the so-called united states, and countless other complicit governmental regimes worldwide. I will not solely blame the west, though I do believe that their framework of capitalist corruption and extraction has infected the cultures of the global south, who are now colluding with and following the lead of the imperial core, in service of their own geopolitical interests. While they starve our people, they are already starving millions of other people globally. “They” refers to all parties mentioned above, because the burden of responsibility falls upon oppressors and occupiers, under international law.1 In this context, I extend the designation of occupier far beyond “israel”, in my opinion, it is logical to consider the so-called united states an occupier of most places on earth, considering the 750 (that we know of) military bases worldwide, spread throughout 80 countries. This is aside from economic and resource occupation, and to a further extrapolation, the mental occupation that exists in the minds of many who have been brainwashed into believing that capitalist gain, and the ability to consume on a scale that mirrors that of the west, will be that which “fixes” their lives or allows them to achieve true happiness and freedom, finally.
I started working with food because if its’ versatility and universality as a form of sustenance that doesn’t inherently preclude anyone, theoretically. Of course, in this anthropocene, hundreds of millions of people are being starved worldwide; it is projected that 943 million will be facing severe food insecurity by 2025.2 Yes, we still live in a world and a time where people are suffering from what can only be considered human-made hunger, on a daily basis.
Over 900 million tons of food go to waste each year.3 The US is 3rd in the ranking for food waste per capita, after China and India: “In 2020, Americans threw away more food than the citizens of the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and Sweden combined, amounting to 1/3 of the food it produces (valued at $1 trillion), enough to feed 3 billion people. Food waste is the single most common material landfilled and incinerated in the United States, comprising 24 and 22% of landfilled and combusted municipal solid waste, respectively, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”4
Hunger, malnutrition, starvation, calorie deficits, and famine, have long been facts of life on earth, and primarily for the populations of the global south, they continue to be, as seen in the statistics above. Is this not a constant violence worthy of revolt, of intifada, of uprising, of revolution? Have people not done more over less? How can anyone truly assess us to be an evolved species? Does anyone actually believe that the use of starvation as an exacting weapon is a vestige of the past, that we have somehow collectively progressed beyond that?
I have my answers, I hope you continue to search for yours, and that when you find them, they possess you with so much conviction and refusal to live in a world that makes itself in this image, that you act beyond your perceived means, and that you do so constantly and consistently.