The Systemic Changes Needed to Combat Hunger (During a Pandemic)
If there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it’s to appreciate the two most essential aspects of life: food and shelter. More important than the opinions of billionaires and deranged world leaders is our right to live, and it turns out that it's not old white men that are paramount to our survival. “Developing" countries, because they “haven't reached a point yet" where access to food and shelter is widespread, are bracing themselves for when the pandemic reaches them in full force. In Brazil, movements have been fighting to ensure these rights to the population for decades, and now that the initial panic died out, I feel confident in the ability of these long-standing initiatives to adapt in this bizarre set of circumstances.
Maybe it's our “underdevelopedness" that makes us equipped to handle a crisis without proper resources or government support, finding creative ways to survive in the most barren of landscapes. Maybe we are born with the ability to make gambiarras. “Gambiarra" is a uniquely, untranslatable, Brazilian word that “basically means to use improvised methods / solutions to solve a problem, with any available material." (Urban Dictionary). We have, for instance, improvised solutions to distribute food to people struggling with homelessness, broadened our network and repurposed our budgets.
There is one aspect of food distribution, though, that has always been inflexible and difficult to tackle — what do people want to eat?
According to the 2014 Food Guide for the Brazilian Population, by the Health Ministry, nutritional deficiency must be addressed alongside diseases caused by excess of sodium and animal fats. In other words, poverty-stricken malnutrition cannot be mitigated with an unbalanced diet that revolves around meats and canned/processed foods. These can cause a whole new set of problems such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and even cancer. So, the whole “feed the world" campaign really needs to reassess what going hungry means in late stage Capitalism, where food has become accessible, but kills you.
One of Brazil's most iconic dishes is Feijoada, a black bean stew accompanied by either rice or cassava flour. It comes from colonial times, when settlers would eat the most ‘valuable’ parts of the animal with rice, while enslaved people would be given the rests of the meat, feet and ears, in a dense stew with grainy flour. This was a time when enslavers didn't want the people they considered to be their property to die.
Today, feijoada is for everyone, from the favela to the high-end restaurant, most families have their own cooking traditions around it, and even vegans are making it their own. But the poor are still getting the leftovers from the wealthy. Hotdogs, for example, served in watered-down, processed, salty tomato sauce in white buns are a new favorite. It's the left-overs of the pig, cow and chicken industries blended together with preservatives, antibiotics and dye, then pasteurized, packaged and distributed to the lowest income households. In these households, social ascension is generally and subconsciously still linked to the colonial model of resource distribution, where having a taste of the “good life” means eating the good meat. This means that the “good parts” of the animal are generally sent abroad, while the remains are fed to us disguised as the American Dream, an image from Hollywood movies, which we can’t even properly pronounce without inventing vowels: “hochi-dogui."
There was another change in the past few centuries, though, which is that the über rich no longer want the poor to survive.
It has become acceptable to allow poor people to die of diabetes, tuberculosis, heart disease, overdose and so on. There are no heart-breaking videos of violently skinny people that, with your help, will be spared the torture of starvation. There are “fat poor people" who are sick or abusing drugs because of their own “bad choices," and will silently die by the millions without sparking the slightest discomfort to the rest of the world.
Now that the gyms are closed, what's the point of taking selfies for the dating app if we can't go out with a complete stranger? Who are we when we aren't constantly running around trying to make ends meet? 2020 is overflowing with existential angst, understandably, since way more people than usual now feel hunger and homelessness (and death) creeping up on them.
We can make a gambiarra of mutual aid initiatives, organize our community, redistribute some funds, and feed those in need. If they ask for hochi-doguis, though, just respond with a weary face emoji.
Collective mapping: Coping with the coronavirus
Shifting deeply-rooted ideas about the role inequality plays in our lives is much more difficult than accessing much-needed resources. We do have the means to effectively produce a lot of healthy and diverse foods, what we haven't been able to do is control the growth of ineffective monoculture directed at heavy processing and animal feed. Ultra-processed foods are made to be cheap and last a disconcerting amount of time, and we've known for years how nocive they are. Why do so many people still prefer these foods when given an alternative for the same price?
The instinctive response is to claim that additives that enhance flavor and preserve food are addictive, and there is quite some evidence of that (Stop Calling Food Addictive by Kima Cargill). But I'd like to focus on the social side of bad diets, because there is also research to show that “progressive social exclusion and marginalization" is a “common feature of human addiction" (Time to Connect: bringing social context into addiction neuroscience, by Heilig, Epstein and Shaham). If the additives put in cheap food are addictive, being marginalized makes a poor person more susceptible to this addiction than the lack of financial access to healthier foods.
Ultra-processed foods impact our culture, making fresh food uninteresting, especially to young people. On page 46 of the Food Guide for the Brazilian Population, the impact is described as:
“a consequence of the desire to consume more and more as to create the sensation of belonging to a more modern and superior culture."
This consumption is the manifestation of the ideology of Consumerism, a United-States-way-of-life that creeps into our psyche as much as it creeps into our bodies. We ingest new additives the same way we regurgitate new sounds. Big Macs, for instance, are as awkward to eat as they are to pronounce; these open consonants inevitably transform into “Bigui Mehki," as the ritual of having a meal transforms into fast, individual portions to be consumed on the go. There is no longer a need for a kitchen, a companion, basic cooking skills, or time. There is just a quick fix for a low price.
Trying to show that foreign processed foods are not as good as local produce is more difficult than just offering this local produce to the poor. On a National scale, our agricultural production is directed towards sustaining the traditional eating habits of northern people (and incorporating them as our own), as if we could “eat" foreign money. This doesn't take into consideration that our land is propitious for way more interesting crops than what tiny and cold European countries have been historically able to produce and are currently interested in buying. We don't have to live off of sausage and white bread like an 18th century butcher from Frankfurt.
This is Brazil, we have fruits most northern people don't even know exist. We have at least half a dozen widely accessible types of bananas, avocados the size of American footballs, and traditional knowledge of sustainable relationships with the land that are thousands of years old. At least in this country, claiming ultra-processed foods are cheaper than fresh local produce has no basis in reality — yet. The only way this can become true is with more aggressive marketing by these companies, which will increase demand for their products, making other products less available.
One of the main suggestions in the Food Guide is to not perceive marketing as educational. The “function of publicity is essentially to increase product sales, not to inform or, even less, to educate people" (page 121). More often than not, the massive sales of seemingly affordable food is perceived as Development, as progress for the most needy communities. This Development doesn't have the best interest of the population in mind, if it did it wouldn't be feeding us sickening additives. It has stock market profits in mind.
Addressing the toxic culture capitalism has shoved down our throats is the most difficult thing to tackle in anti-capitalist mutual aid initiatives. More difficult than fund-raising, resource distribution, learning a new skill, pulling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. It's that thing hidden in dark corners of the psyche, that subconscious pattern that years of therapy may never reach. It whispers “I don't really want things to change that much" and gives way to inconspicuous publicity to continue to change us.
In midst of this pandemic, we have to reassess our priorities, whether we like it or not. Is the stock market really keeping afloat an economy that exists in our best interest? Does this economy provide us with the jobs, loans, homes and foods we need to live healthy and fulfilling lives? There is no choice but to hit the brakes and take the time to remember what we really need. We need food and we need shelter.
The same way shelter does not equal the mortgage industry, food does not equal the ultra-processed industry. It may sound obvious, but somewhere deep we struggle to disassociate these concepts, and they inform our daily decisions without us noticing. Change is already here, the question is whether we will allow ourselves to drown in the fear of it.
MIRNA WABI-SABI
is a writer, political theorist, teacher and translator. She is an editor at Gods&Radicals, founder of the Enemy of the Queen megazine and of the Plataforma 9 media collective. Her work orbits around Capitalism, White Supremacy and Patriarchy, and the proposals involve resistance to Eurocentrism and Western Imperialism.