Why Food Sovereignty Is Going To Be More Of A Thing (So What, Who Cares, May 23, 2019)
Hello!
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Before I went to Hawaii last year, I read the Lonely Planet's Hawaii: The Big Island and this caught my attention:
A whopping 85% to 90% of Hawaii's food is imported, and food security (aka 'food sovereignty') is a hot topic. Small-scale family farmers are trying to shift the agriculture industry away from corporate-scale monocropping (eg sugar, pineapple) enabled by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
Any time we were anywhere near food, I wondered where the food came from. The clearest answers I got were at the Paradise Meadows farm, where it was evident how much work goes into trying to balance stewardship of resources against a varied menu.
I thought about food sovereignty a few months later when driving across the country. I already knew that California's approximately 24.3 million acres of farmland produce much of the U.S.'s fruit and nuts, and about a third of its vegetables. California farms are smaller than typical U.S. farms -- the average farm size in California is 328 acres, 26% below the national average of 444 acres -- but higher-yielding. I was used to driving past rolling fields of spinach and artichokes, strawberries and broccoli; I can tell you where the cherry, almond, apricot and peach orchards line I-5, and where you'll be stuck behind big trucks piled high with tomatoes or onions or watermelons.
Driving through endless rolling fields of sorghum in Kansas was a whole new way of understanding American agriculture. Not in terms of local or seasonal ingredients, but in terms of commodity crops moving through vast global markets. U.S. farmers are now grappling with grain tariffs. U.S. consumers are facing tariffs on imported food from Mexico and China, and that's going to affect domestic diets.
The news demonstrates that the global trade which enlivens our menus is also vulnerable to things both in our control (politics) and outside it (floods in the midwest). I wouldn't be surprised if a victory garden movement rises as a response to the times.
Perhaps more of us should pay attention to Hawai'i's food sovereignty movement and the people examining what it means to live with finite resources. Earlier this week, Adventure Journal ran an interview with director Nāʻālehu Anthony, whose new documentary Moananuiākea: One Ocean. One People. One Canoe is the story of the Hōkūleʻa canoe and her three-year, 40,000-nautical mile circumnavigation of the globe.
Anthony said:
In Hawaii’s case, there was not one container ship that came here for 2,000 years when it was under the rules and regulations of Native Hawaiians. They found a way to sustain close to a million people on the same set of lands that we now occupy. Now, at any given time, we have six days of food on Oahu. Container ships come every day, again and again and again, and replenish to allow for people to survive here, even though we know that there were people who survived in this place without any of that external resource coming in.
All of that’s to say that this is really just a matter of choices and how it is that you utilize whatever resources you have available to you. And it seems to me that the Native people around the planet have had to do that for thousands of years, so when you’re starting to look at some of the solutions and some of change in how we do things, why not start there and look at some of the ways in which we treat each other, some of the ways in which we treat our land and our resources, to be able to allow for a different perspective on how we value all these things.
For further reading on food sovereignty and Native efforts, I strongly encourage anyone who's interested to dive into Civil Eats' indigenous foodways archive.
Food sovereignty isn't just a Hawaiian issue -- Alaska imports 96% of its food, which makes it vulnerable to food-security issues (see also: the Amazon Prime situation in remote towns). Hurricane Maria and its aftermath have added a sense of urgency to Puerto Rico's food sovereignty movement. Food sovereignty is an everyone issue.
For more reading:
How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr. I read this in a day, no lie. It's an excellent survey on how racism, island acquisitions, military strategy, agriculture and more racism blurred the legal and cultural lines of what constitutes the U.S. Particularly relevant to civil rights and food sovereignty for our fellow U.S. residents who live outside the contiguous states. Here's a preview of the book.
The Quarter-Acre Farm: How I Kept the Patio, Lost the Lawn, and Fed My Family for a Year by Spring Warren. It's charming and relatable and a fun foray into the whole "I'm growing my own food" genre.
The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table by Margo True & the staff of Sunset magazine. What's going on with Sunset magazine is a topic for another time, but when this project was conceived and carried out 12 years ago, there was a blog and now a book detailing all the skill and labor involved in sourcing your own food. I like the book for its mix of aspirational and informational content.
Sarah Taber's Twitter thread on the x-factors that explain U.S. west coast agriculture.
Until next time!
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