Food politics are fookin’ strange, mate.

July 20, 2022 

Food politics are fookin' strange, mate.

So I spied with my little eye on the inter-webs today, this generalized political spat. Person A said "Right wingers in 12,000 BC be like I don't want to eat the grain. I won't live in the hut. I will not become friends with the small domesticated predator." I'm paraphrasing. Person B responded, "what's so wrong about not wanting to eat bugs."

OK. Completely absurd on its face, I admit. Not to mention completely erratic argumentation. It does summon a whole host of issues, and I won't lie about it - some of those feelings are very vaguely racist or at least racialized. Racialized to what level? To roughly the level that it's vaguely racist that in the computer game Civilization you begin your conquest of the world by beating up on generically defined "barbarians". I digress. It's a vaguely racialized tête-à-tête in so far as any conversation about agricultural civilization itself smells vaguely of superiority. 

I'm not opposed to "eating bugs" in a very generalized sense… As long as it's safe. Entomophagy is sort of generally accepted in Australian indigenous/aboriginal cultures. I have eaten food–safe crickets as a novelty, and a worm on a bet. I don't make a habit of it. (The worm was in an omelette. My Asian mom was genuinely disgusted. I was about 10. I think that she threw away the pan. That book How to Eat Fried Worms had something to do with it.) Eating bugs has a strange other set of political connotations to it. Novels from Africa (Achebe, I'm sure, mentions it) illustrates how if there are locusts on the grain crop, people have just trapped and roasted them and eaten them with honey. What are you going to do? At some level, you have to believe that Mother Nature will provide.

This is of course not all there is to the conversation. If you've seen that movie Snowpierceryou'll remember that other side of the argument. If you haven't, I'll briefly explain: imagine the only humans left on the world are on a train, segregated by class: poor in the back, rich and powerful in the front. They're all refugees from some disaster, but the rich are oppressing the poor. Anyway, there's an insurrection, and the poor find out that the "food bars" they've been eating are actually made out of bugs, and everyone ahead of the "food"-making train car are eating, you know, "real food." So there's that part of that argument too. Not unconnected to this is the third part of this "bugs" argument, which is those rumors about how Trader Joe's "Two Buck Chuck" was apparently made by the cheapest method. They throw everything in the masher, so the rumor goes: cheap grapes, bugs, rats… You get the picture. No one wants that, but they'll do the "let's not think about it" when they want to get sloshed on cheap wine. Okay, that's all true. But no one will contest that they want the tequila with the worm.

There's this metaphysical tension in this food politics conversation that's sort of tangentially about "progress run amok" but when you investigate it more closely it is really that we want to fix more of these problems we have, that have have been tabled and taken for granted, but the reaction side treats that like we pulled the problem out of thin air. Let's be honest: it's not like the wildest and freest - range food is all that much better either. 

Snowpiercer is also that movie where people are getting high on sniffing industrial waste. So there's that to consider too. I don't know why I and we are eating so many petroleum products in our yummy, flavored and colorful snacks. There is the simplistic interpretation of that other movie Soylent Green that is "do you know what's in your food?"

...There's also the deeper interpretation of Soylent Green, which is the idea that maybe we should start asking if society is actually socially planning for whether each person in the population actually has a supply of actual food that can feed them: or are we actually condemning some marginal populations to eat the scraps? This sounds like I'm flipping the script on the physiocracy–mercantilism dynamic in favor of mercantilism but that's far from the truth. We've had a long period of mercantilist policies, and that's what you get for trying to wring that rag dry for so long.

Food insecurity was essentially planned in that the farm is essentially planned. So we wanted through mercantilist policies to make the food system so very "efficient ". Grow less, but make sure it gets to everyone, is the argument. But for what hidden reason? To sell farm equipment, I suppose. And food insecurity is the result, I contend. The picture of this mercantilism is basically the opening sequence of that other movie Interstellar, if you remember that. A totally mechanized farm. Why do those on top of the social pyramid want that? Because Big Ag is acquiring all those small farms... 

One final point. Why do we want to count everyone on the Census counts even if they are undocumented or unauthorized immigrants? For simple reasons like this. They are going to be eating food too, it's not only that they're using essential services and so on. We don't want anyone to hide, or lie, because we do have to plan for everyone to be able to feed themselves.