Eating Alabama and the White Farm Imaginary

 

Last night, I finally had the privilege of viewing Eating Alabama, a documentary by University of Alabama professor Andy Grace (shown above right: image via al.com). Since seeing the trailer, I have been anticipating screening it for months. It struck me as a sort of anthem for one section of the Alabama's alternative agriculture movement, and I was curious to see if Grace departed from well-traveled terrain and promoted any new views of alternative food.

Eating Alabama Trailer from Moon Winx Films on Vimeo.

In the film, Grace (a filmmaking professor) and his wife Rashmi (now an urban farm educator) eat the way their grandparents did for a whole year, consuming only locally grown, non-GMO and seasonal foods. While trying to support small farmers with their project, they find that many are struggling to survive.

Though I thought the film was artistically sound, quite stylish and funny, and included a very important critique of industrial agriculture, Grace fails to depart significantly from what Alison Alkon and Christie McCullen call the "white farm imaginary" in a 2011 Antipode article. To make the meaning of this term clear, I quote from their article at length:

"For many customers in farmer's markets we study, the markets are more than just a place to procure food.  Customers are motivated to shop at farmer's markets by ethical imperatives to 'support your local farmer' or 'buy directly from the people who grow food.'  Such phrases are common not only in the everyday conversations of market shoppers, but in the work of food writers and celebrity chefs that has made alternative agriculture so increasingly popular.  In this section, we argue that these common slogans produce what we call a white farm imaginary.  This imagery romanticizes and universalizes an agrarian narrative specific to whites while masking the contributions and struggles of people of color in food production (see also Sackman 2005).

"The white farm imaginary holds that small-scale, yeoman farmer as an American agricultural icon.  Only whites, however, were historically able to farm this way.  This imaginary ignores the justification of Native American displacement by white homesteaders, the enslavement of African Americans, the masses of underpaid Asian immigrants who worked California's first factory farms, and the mostly Mexican farm laborers who harvest the majority of food grown in the USA today (Allen 2004: Guthman 2008b).  Therefore, it is quite possible that the romantic notions of yeoman farmers and rural culture do not resonate with many people of color whose collective history recalls the racism and classism of America's agricultural past and present."

Eating Alabama reproduces this white farm imaginary quite clearly.  To begin with, there are very few blacks in the film, and the ones that do appear, appear incidentally. This alone should strike us in a state that is over one quarter black and also has a significant population of black farmers (compared to non-Southeastern states). There are also no Hispanic or Latino people shown in the film - again, striking in a state where local food depends on migrant workers and the agricultural landscape was rocked by the sudden shortage of Hispanic and Latino laborers after HB56 passed last year.

To further bolster this white imaginary, Grace romanticizes our rural agrarian past by repeatedly calling our grandparents' way of living a "simpler way of life." Certainly, in highly segregated rural areas, often policed by the Ku Klux Klan and controlled by politicians determined to institutionalize white supremacy, Alabama's agrarian past was not a "simpler way of life" for blacks, but was rather oppressive and exploitative. Sharecropping, in which both black and white farm laborers received a share of the crop for working the land for planters, can only be seen as a marginal improvement from slavery, and almost as oppressive. The film makes no mention of segregation or Jim Crow, even though many of those battles were fought in rural areas.

Grace does acknowledge that our agrarian past is associated with slavery, but then disassociates his idealized family history from it because, he says, his ancestors were too poor to own slaves. This is a trick of rhetoric used by many whites to distance themselves from the institution of slavery. Grace's ancestors may not have owned slaves, but we can be fairly sure that they supported the institution of slavery. At the time almost all poor whites did, and it directly benefitted them by placing them higher in the racial and class hierarchy.

Eating Alabama therefore has the unfortunate quality of erasing history in order to promote a romantic, whitened notion of how the food movement should organize based on a mythical past.

"An unsustainable model for sustainability"

Grace knows all this, or at least, has reservations about the romanticization of rural culture and yeoman farming. Throughout the film, he constantly asks himself "am I being naive?" and "why am I romanticizing?"

While Grace's film depicts his year of pursuing this white farming ideal, he remains ambivalent about its viability as an alternative to the current industrial food system, leaving it up to the viewer to decide whether he is, indeed, romanticizing. At one point he asks whether his lifestyle experiment is "an unsustainable model for sustainability."

Unfortunately, Grace fails to pursue his doubts to what could have been a different conclusion - that while his year of "living sustainably" may not be viable for most people, it is also not the only alternative to industrial food out there. Grace and many other local food advocates fail to see that many of the people who have always been systematically excluded from industrial agriculture have already evolved alternative institutions to aid and promote the well-being and economic security of small farms.

Viable alternatives

Blacks have never been included in industrial agriculture.  The recently concluded Pigford v. Glickman settlement says as much.  As I mentioned in a previous post, black farmers have therefore developed alternative institutions to bolster small farms. Tuskegee University, founded in 1881, has been aiding small farmers for over a century.  Alabama A&M, a historically-black land grant university and one of the so-called 1890 schools, has also been at the service of the small farm for many years and is the host of the Small Farms Research Center.  And finally, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) has been fighting for small farmers since 1967.

A cooperative is a method of organizing farmers which allows them to build economies of scale to ensure economic security and sustainability.  Basically, in a cooperative, groups of farmers come together to market collectively, all sharing equal ownership in the business.  Instead of just serving local markets, they can access regional, national, and even international markets, all while preserving the viability of the small farm.  This is a more practical, real-world alternative to industrialized agriculture than the white farm imaginary, and should serve, at the least, as an organizing principle for the alternative food and agriculture movement.

I recently had the pleasure of attending the FSC's 45th anniversary celebration. What was clear to me throughout the evening was that the members of the Federation have a deep and abiding sense of social and economic justice. They serve limited resource and minority farmers to keep them as viable business entities.

The white faction of the alternative food and agriculture movement can learn a lot from this practical, pragmatic, and serious dedication to the oppressed and exploited. The FSC grew out of the Civil Rights Movement, and they see themselves as carrying on that tradition. Isn't that a better story to tell about food and agriculture?

White Heroes, Racial Purity, and the Media

A previous version of this blog post stated that no blacks were interviewed.  This was incorrect, as Mark Bowen is African American.  The error was regrettable.

Apologies to my few readers for not posting sooner, but I'm 5 of 6 chapters down on my dissertation and we have a paper ready for publication.  I have been working.

But, something caught my eye today: an article in Grist on local food in Alabama.  I found this to be amazing piece that really captures how whiteness is reproduced in the media.

First of all, one of those interviewed and none of the organizations covered are black.  This gives one the impression that local food is a solely white affair in Alabama.  But, this is clearly not true.

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which saves black land and organizes mostly black cooperatives of small family farmers, has been in operation since 1967, and grew out of the Civil Rights Movement.  Alabama has not one, but two HBCU agricultural universities, Tuskegee and Alabama A&M.  So, clearly the fight for the small farm has been in existence far longer than Jones Valley Urban Farm, the Front Porch Revival, or Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network.  In a fine example of how whiteness distorts reality, a fight that has been led for over forty years by black-run organizations is transformed into a fight led by trendy white heroes.

Furthermore, the claim that somehow the white side of the local food movement doesn't appeal to the white bourgeois is suspect at best.

Food has always been a way to affirm and reproduce identity. During Jim Crow, food practices acted as a way to reproduce white racial purity.  In her dissertation To Live and Dine in Dixie: Foodways and Culture in the Twentieth Century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that because food was ingested and literally became to body of the consumer, it was strictly policed by racial mores.  Eating the right food was paramount to reproducing a healthy, pure, white body, and therefore part and parcel to the culture of Jim Crow.

Today's healthy lifestyle justification for local food is a similar purity narrative.  Propagated by elites and cultural producers, healthy lifestyle similarly reproduces white purity by relegating alternative food practices to marginal status.  As one member of the Health Action Partnership stated to me, "even when (black) people have access to good food, they don't know how to cook it.  They cook it with too much oil, and it cooks all the nutrients out of it."

The healthy lifestyle argument for local food is more about reproducing the status of those consuming it than about the actual health of the consumers. (One thinks of the numerous fundraising dinners with Frank Stitt or Chris Dupount and how their highly unhealthy food all of the sudden becomes healthy because it is fine dining).  Under both Jim Crow and modern food ways, the "pure food" is backed by the perceived legitimacy and objectivity of science, with whites using science to validate their foodways as objectively superior.  The white side of the local food movement, with its overarching focus on health and purity, is absolutely an elitist endeavor.  (I love how they talk about it not being elitist and then talk about Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings as the "original local food revolutionaries" three paragraphs later.)  Anyone who argues otherwise is selling something.

So what does all this mean?  Well, it means that there are deep racial divisions within the local food movement, divisions that are reproduced by media outlets, and which are reflected in the broader culture.  There are divisions in the local food movement because there are divisions in the local culture.

What can be done about it?  One thing is to hold media outlets like Grist accountable for their product.  What Grist did was simply lazy, but it had the unfortunate quality of marginalizing the groups that have led the fight for the small farm for decades.

Another thing that can be done is to host anti-racist workshops like the one Magic City Agriculture Project is hosting beginning next week and continuing for six months.  This Allies training will focus on cultivating resistance to white supremacy and building community around this resistance.

A review of Weighing In (Julie Guthman, UC Press, 2011)

As anyone in the food movement can tell you, obesity has become the singular issue of the movement. In her new book Weighing In, geographer Julie Guthman of the University of California, Santa Cruz, sets her sights squarely on the singularity of this issue, arguing that "Those who want to redress the problem [of obesity] put a great deal of effort into educating people to make better choices rather than into reforming the policies that allow bad food to be produced or mitigating the consequences for those harmed."

She does not stop there.  She goes on to lambast BMI (body mass index) as a blunt instrument and to skewer obesity alleviation programs that focus too much on individual choice.  Guthman argues that something called "healthism" - the attachment of a moral or ethical component to decisions made regarding health, and especially food - has turned the food movement into a sort of evangelical effort to influence the lifestyle of individuals.  That lifestyle, Guthman argues, will have very little effect on obesity, because the most likely culprit for the increase in obesity is not overeating and lack of exercise, but obesogens - environmental toxins and other substances thought to cause obesity by disrupting the endocrine system and stimulating estrogen production.

Her arguments hold together thus far; it is convincing that individual choice is much too central in the food movement today, particularly with the dearth of policy oriented work, and her arguments for environmental obesogens are backed by convincing evidence.  However, her assertion that the creation of alternative food institutions should be abandoned in favor of policy and anti-capitalist work rings of the ivory tower, a quality unfortunate in much Marxist critique.

While Guthman is correct to attempt to move the food movement away from individual choice and towards more traditional social movement interventions, she fails to see the wisdom in creating the alternative institutions necessary to replace capitalist agriculture.  Both anti-capitalist and policy work need to be a central focus of the food movement, because the institutional context in which food is produced creates obesogens and other types of toxic food.  Guthman gets this right.  However, it is also necessary to create an alternative institutional context that can eventually replace the existing ones.  Together, these are the creation and destruction of social change.

Guthman's book is a necessary read for anyone in the food movement.  It tackles the cutting edge questions of the day, undermines much of the institutionalization (and probably co-optation) of the local food movement, and provides a strong anti-capitalist vision for the future of the movement.  Hers is a timely and profound voice calling the movement back to its justice-oriented roots. Listen to her.

Why Health is Really a Stand-in for Class

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reveals in his seminal text Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste that lifestyle is a function of an individual's position in society.  In "America's Fittest Cities," Atlantic blogger Richard Florida shows how those lifestyles are a function of uneven economic development in the US. In the rankings of the fittest Americans, "fitness" tracts roughly onto the division of labor between American cities.

Working class, poorer cities are "unfit," while wealthy cities with heavy knowledge industries are "fit."  The lifestyle dubbed healthy by the CDC and others is the lifestyle most appropriate to the labor market best characterized as post-industrial, information-oriented, and "creative," while the least "fit" lifestyles are associated with heavy industry and manufacturing, remnants of an older economic paradigm.

Think of it this way: the assembly line nature of fast food is more congruent with vertically integrated heavy industry or Fordism, while farmer's markets are more in line with creative, flexible, knowledge-based industries.  Foodies are more or less producing the food system of neoliberalism and flexible accumulation.  In other words, the people who have the "healthiest" lifestyle are the most affluent and they use the notion of health to legitimate and generalize the culture and lifestyle associated with affluence.

Simply put, the idea of an objectively healthy lifestyle serves more to legitimate the wealthy than it does to actually address the health needs of the exploited.

As I have said in previous posts, good food is a human right, and what counts as good food or a healthy lifestyle should be determined by those living that lifestyle - not by technocrats at the Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control.  These organizations base the assumptions of fitness for their research on the lifestyles of the elite.

For instance, the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (creepy name), on which the AFI is based, opens the exercise section with the question "During the past month, other than your regular job, did you participate in any physical activities or exercises such as running, calisthenics, golf, gardening, or walking for exercise?"  So the activity of an auto mechanic or construction worker during their regular job doesn't count as exercise?  Obviously, the question is remarkably biased in favor of those who do sedentary work and exercise for leisure - biased in favor of the lifestyle of the wealthy.  By the very structure of the survey, a working class person cannot be as fit as an elite.

Of course, there are negative health effects to not being wealthy, such as lack of adequate food and stress, but food activists should connect these to the unevenness associated with economic development and not try to generalize one, elitist culture of health and fitness for everyone.  At its root, food injustice is economic injustice.  This should be the starting point.

Let's stop talking about obesity.

I'm glad Eric Schlosser has publicly adopted the food justice paradigm in his recent Washington Post op-ed, Why being a foodie isn't 'elitist.'

I'm saddened that it took criticism from industrial food advocates to finally gain acknowledgment that food justice is the only acceptable paradigm for the food movement, and that years of criticism from food justice advocates went ignored.  Unfortunately, because of this, Schlosser appears to wield the poor as a political tool instead of having a true dedication to the plight of the oppressed. Anyone with any significant involvement with the food movement (I have been involved in both Alabama and North Carolina) should recognize that the movement has absolutely no answers for the poor and that most movement interventions are targeted at the privileged-lifestyle left.

Leaders like Schlosser may finally be understanding the necessity of addressing injustice for a movement to be successful, but the practices of the rank-and-file in the movement only reinforce its elitist status. Farmer's markets in trendy neighborhoods, $800-a-year CSAs and cooking demonstrations are no substitute for a robust policy agenda that genuinely remakes the food system.

While I'm glad Schlosser is on the right side, I'm cynical about his motivations. I wonder how much work he has actually done in poor neighborhoods and his argument seems like one of political convenience. Furthermore, to suggest that the food movement has any workable answers (i.e. empowerment not charity) to issues of hunger and food insecurity is to either be completely naive or outright lying.

The fact of the matter is that the industrial food system produces affordable food, and the food movement does not. Industrial food advocates are right - the food movement is elitist, but Schlosser's arguments are a step in the right direction. I have another step to suggest.

Let's stop talking about obesity.  Medical professionals have long branded the poor and oppressed as deviant, alternately disciplining that deviance with punishment and working to change that deviance through medical intervention. All the talk about obesity serves the purpose of branding the poor as deviant because they are poor - it further "others" them. Moreover, the BMI was developed using white bodies as the norm, meaning as usual, whiteness becomes the standard by which all others are judged.

The poor deserve good food because they are human beings, not because it is our ("the privileged's") job to ensure that they meet some standard of bodily normality. They also deserve the option to be allowed to choose bad food.  In fact, this line of reasoning calls into question whether largely white leaders like Michael Pollan and Schlosser (and myself for that matter) should have any say at all about how food is produced, distributed and consumed among the poor. Food sovereignty should be the goal, not technocratic fixes to bodies constructed as deviant by medical science.

Schlosser's op-ed is a step in the right direction. Now the question is, are the poor going to serve as a political volleyball, or is the movement going to bend towards a real justice paradigm?

The Allen Plan and Ways Forward

Will Allen's Plan: Providing food, jobs  

Until very recently, the typical strategy for a local faction of the alternative agriculture movement included farmers markets, subscription plans, institutional purchasing and distributorships.  This approach appealed to high end buyers, supported small family farms, and focused almost myopically on market-based solutions to the small farm crisis.  However, this path can go only so far as the high capital turnover times in agriculture, stemming from high production times, make agriculture a poor investment.  

Consider an investor looking at an investment in steel production or in agriculture.  Since turnover times are much shorter in steel production than in agriculture, it makes good sense for the investor to invest in steel. Investors are more likely to invest in steel than agriculture because it takes longer to make a tomato than to make steel. This is why American agriculture is subsidized to the tune of 16 billion dollars a year, subsidies which allow large farmers to market at below the cost of production and make farming a lucrative investment. With the current structure of subsidies, the small family farm and urban agriculture will never be a good investment because of the natural limitations to agricultural production and the lack of government support for these enterprises.


While national level subsidies are unlikely to change in the near future, subsidies for local agriculture can be developed by state and local governments. In fact, fiscal sustainability and growth for urban and local agriculture hinges on the ability to leverage support from governments. 

I want to next outline a simple, but effective policies and arguments to push local governments towards subsidies for local and urban agriculture.

• Argument: The region has a legacy of agricultural production, and that legacy should be protected by the government.  

Policy tools: land trusts, tax abatement, agricultural zoning

• Argument: Local agriculture produces jobs and economic development (see Allen Plan).  

Policy tools: direct payment, land trusts, tax abatement, agricultural job training programs, increased availability of public land for agricultural production, "sin" taxes on high fructose corn syrup and other bad foods earmarked for ag. 

•  Argument: Local agriculture relieves food insecurity through economic development and providing access to healthy food.  (The single most important item for addressing food insecurity is economic development.  People have little to eat because they are poor and eat bad food because it is cheap).  

Policy tools: direct payment, land trusts, tax abatements, agricultural job training programs, subsidized farmers markets (municipality pays farmers to provide fruits and vegetables at a discounted price), institutional purchasing, increased availability of public land for agricultural production, "sin" taxes on high fructose corn syrup and other bad foods with proceeds earmarked for ag.

While this is not an exhaustive list, the strategy is markedly different from previous strategies in that it focuses heavily on government-subsidized economic development and relief of food insecurity. 

It also operates on the assumption that food is urbanizing quickly, a reflection of urbanization processes across the globe, and attempts to develop a strategy appropriate for that urbanization.  Even many farmers who may consider themselves rural are in fact in metropolitan areas, and, clearly, they are utilizing urban markets.  

Ultimately, the goal is to eliminate the food system that produces, primarily, hunger, food insecurity, and bad food, and replace it with an urban-based food system that distributes good food fairly and sustainably.