Local Sustainability is More Important Than Global Scalability
Issue 194: What it really means to live sustainably. How to overcome the perceived frivolity of food. The queerest alternative milks.
Heyo! Nosh Box is back and more Midwestern than ever. We’re coming to you live from Minneapolis with a two-day-a-week format and a focus on solutions, on making-do, on moving beyond discussing the problems and into (an attempt at) analyzing what we can do about them.
Monday Nosh Boxes (that’s today!) will be reading lists of sorts — articles I’ve found interesting, good tweets you’ve probably already seen, things worth paying attention to in the world of food this week. And on Thursdays, I’ll be sending original reported essays that focus on evaluating solutions to some of the problems in the food system.
Through interviews and criticism, I’ll try to continue asking some of the future-oriented questions I’ve raised so far in Nosh Box — what is the value of stopgap or band-aid solutions without policy initiatives to fix the root causes? Is the food system broken or was it designed inequitably all along? How optimistic should we be about claims that technology will save us? (Maybe I’ve shown my hand on this one with the title of today’s newsletter…) There are so many problems in our food system, and there are so many people trying to make it better. Sometimes those solutions are on the right track, and sometimes they fall short or address the wrong issues or are grounded in problematic assumptions. My hope is for NB to praise and criticize while pushing back against the idea that everything is hopeless; I think relentless demands for social equity, fair living and working conditions for all people, and true locally rooted food sovereignty are all profoundly optimistic.
Of course, I am just one person with a specific viewpoint — a largely degrowth-oriented, anti-capitalist one, just to lay it all out on the table — and no matter how much food studies literature or conversation I synthesize, it’s still being filtered through one brain, one white person’s lived perspective. So needless to say, Nosh Box is not here to give dogmatic mandates (OK, well, wear a mask; support local farmers; don’t call the police. There’s a baseline here, people). But if you want to contribute to Nosh Box or weigh in on solutions you’re seeing or kindly let me know that I’ve vastly misunderstood something, leave comments on these posts or shoot me an email at jaredhkaufman@gmail.com.
This Thursday, I’ll be talking about the new Regenerative Organic Certified standard, feat. a conversation I had over at Food Tank with Elizabeth Whitlow, the director of the Regenerative Organic Alliance. Spoiler: cautiously excited.
Alrighty, let’s get down to bees-ness.
>> The USPS crisis is affecting the food system, too: “‘Like Armageddon’: Rotting food, dead animals and chaos at postal facilities amid cutbacks”
>> “Milks, ranked from straightest to queerest,” courtesy of my fav alt-weekly, City Pages. Prime content.
>> This audio story from BBC World Service’s The Food Chain
The beginning is grounded in rehashing some of the Bon App drama with Tammie Teclemariam, and in the second half, Alicia Kennedy (one of the most must-listen voices in food right now) diagnoses how we’ve landed ourselves in this situation.
“The way that power has been distributed has given precedence to people who want to keep food as a kind of fashion, as a kind of trend-driven way of making people feel cool or feel not-cool,” she says.
She points out that food writing is often relegated to the lifestyle section, which can cause it to feel trivial or disconnected from business, politics, economics, labor — when really, food is an integral component of all these sectors. And why might that be?
“Food writing was originally part of the women’s section of a newspaper or magazine,” she says. “It wasn’t considered serious business because it was the women who were doing the cooking, so it became frivolous the way fashion became frivolous, though neither of these things are actually frivolous.”
(Fashion is an interesting analogue to food, actually, in re: the sociology of conformity and deviance (see: Georg Simmel) and something I’d like to dive deeper into in a future NB.)
My solution? Make food its own vertical! Put it on equal footing with the business pages, the economic reports. Hire food reporters, not just restaurant writers or critics. Editors: Require food reporters to consider labor and power in their storytelling.
>> Speaking of, Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter this week is SO good
She argues that sustainability is not an end-point, it’s a practice. Not a one-time action, but a mindset shift.
“We’re trained to understand local impact as not enough impact. Common, mainstream sense over the last few decades has made sure that scale is the most important concern, not sustainability. Something that isn’t grown or produced to feed the whole world is of little worth, or only of peculiar concern—a human interest story. Well, we are humans, and it’s quite clear that the earth has not been able to withstand our obsession with scaling industries ever upwards.” (!!!!!!)
“To be a bit weird, to be sustainably-minded: It means taking the long road. It means seeking out what supports balance between the earth, humanity, and animal life.”
>> The Indigenous Food Lab has a physical space now!
The Indigenous Food Lab, the initiative of Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman (aka The Sioux Chef), is now housed at Midtown Global Market, an international food hall in Minneapolis. Per their Facebook page, they’ll have “a production/training kitchen, Indigenous Education Studio where we will produce a ton of video to share, and an Indigenous Market for our community to have a place to pick up Indigenous produced foods and gifts.”
>> R.I.P. The Growler, Long Live Heavy Table 2.0
This one’s a Minnesota-centric update, but as the pandemic claims one stellar Twin Cities food magazine, James Norton (former Growler food editor and once and future Heavy Table founder) announced he’s relaunching the upper Midwest food storytelling hub. Super stoked. Support them here!
>> “In a Wistful Age, Farmers Find a New Angle: Chore TV”
On the rise of the farmer-influencer: By turning “farm life into reality TV,” some farmers are making orders of magnitude more money by streaming their farming successes and failures than they make on the actual food itself.
So as I mentioned, on Thursday, I’ll be expanding on my conversation at Food Tank with Elizabeth Whitlow about regenerative organic agriculture and the new Regenerative Organic Certified standard. See you then!
— Jared
