Streetcars for British Columbia, a report produced for Patrick Condon and Sam Sullivan in 2014. Unfortunately my calls for affordable housing to be zoned along and nearby arterial streets was edited out of the final document. The need for it hasn’t changed, as Patrick Condon details in his frequent, thorough urban commentary on The Tyee.
Mineral Nectar
I eat the ocean and the ocean eats me
Recorded September 4, 2019.
Meandering To Truth
Everything is everything
What is meant to be will be
After winter must come spring
Change it comes eventually
-Lauryn Hill
The Salish Sea flows around the southern tip of what is now called Vancouver Island and stretches the length of the Georgia Straight and Puget Sound, to lap shores of sandstone, shale, and sand. These waters, in the ocean and the water cycle, nourish my habitat too: the city alive with nature. My personal geography of the area reaches chronologically from the cove at the fingertips of Indian Arm to Commercial Drive, to the Sunshine Coast and the sandstone alcoves on the Gulf Islands, and from Squamish to UBC to my most frequented space near home, at the angular jut of Kingsway in Vancouver. My mental map and the vault from which my dreams are drawn is composed of experiences from the paths taken to finding home and belonging, to having learned and failed, sought out and been nourished on Tsleil-Watuth, Squamish and Musqueam ancestral lands.
Beyond the creeping edges of mountain berry meadows and dense forests of cedar, douglas fir and hemlock, speckled with their thriving native species, the urban areas of the temperate rainforest are some of the many places where the human and the more-than-human interface. The Wild doesn’t strictly end where civilization begins — and civilization is itself deeply woven into Wild nature. In Vancouver and other cities on the Pacific Northwest, weeds flourish and bees burrow, buzz and bring about fruit and flowers. The dandelion (Taraxacum officionale) is prolific, and she is a resilient herb, spreading her seeds abundantly and taking root easily in ecosystems disturbed by urbanization. The yolk-yellow inflorescence attracts bees, who nourish themselves and their hive of sisters with pollen and nectar from the dandelion, proliferating life as they go by immersing themselves in flowers and carrying their genetic material from bloom to bloom. What can we learn from the dandelion?
For local forestry veteran and poet Derrick Stacey Denholm, the world offers up to us ecological truths, truths of the practical lived interactions between and within human and more-than-human systems. (2015, 13). These ecological truths are fundamental and material — at times wet, salty, scaled, orange, innumerable shades of green, permeable, dead or alive — and they provide parables on how to live. If only we give our attention and agree to learning, the living environment has millions of years of experience to draw from in her teachings. (Denholm, 2015 12). For indigenous story-tellers, this is not a new idea.
In thought and through engagement and experience, I seek out truths. You and I can wend pathways to truth together on the following pages, picking up from work done by indigenous scholars, feminists, ethnobotanists, and herbalists, as well as those who study the more-than-human in Western laboratories. The life of an urban dandelion and other nature stories provide for us a glimpse of interconnectedness that is — like the tip of the iceberg — just the fruiting body of a vast underground fungal network. These ecological truths stir up new concepts and inquiries, and possible answers to pressing political, social & ecological questions that we’ll consider as we go. I’m specifically interested in the interstices of class, environmental and indigenous issues, and in considering relationship to plants & animals — the myriad ways we are tied to the land. As a project of limited scope, with an author of limited perspective and settler ancestry, I can only humbly brush the surface. I start by considering the ways nature is understood which produce and are produced by human action, and then narrow my focus to food sovereignty and the nomadic/agricultural ways of gathering and producing food on the Pacific Northwest, as it is through our food that we connect most intimately to the earth every day. I end with an homage to two non-profit organizations that have facilitated my connection to the earth and to other people who marvel at the diversity of life.
But no truth is free from distortions, and I bring my own brand. I am, of course, a mere blip in geological time — a blip with the capacity to remember, to pore over history, encounter ancestors, and project visions of the future. (Denholm, 2015, 12). I am a settler, making my home here on the west coast thanks to an environmentalist mom wed to the wild diversity of mossy, wet, warm forests and a dad newly past the bar and moving with the law firm where he worked, the rain forests and the ocean awe-inspiring bonuses. I grew up in a single-family home on Tsleil-Watuth traditional territory (back when parts of North Vancouver were more modest, read: less gentrified) spending most of my time split between backyard and books. Hours of this springtime of my life went into the careful creation of fairy houses, roofs thatched with moss. The future I long for and put effort into is one where, like a child finding reverence in the earth’s diversity, a sacred bond is understood to join humanity and the more-than-human world on which we are so dependent for sustenance of all kinds. Like my child self, I can offer something small.
We know that humanity and nature are inextricably intertwined, no longer understood in the mainstream to function in discrete systems. From the mutation of the peppered moths that blackened their wings for camouflage in the soot-choked skies of the coal-powered Industrial Revolution, to the advent of human-caused climate change, our hominid species is involved in interchange with the earth. Yet, it is not all pollution — though it may not seem like it right now, humans contribute to earthly flourishing, too. For renowned soil scientist Elaine Ingham, we are the “gardeners of the earth.” (2016). This is a relationship formed through acts and teachings of stewardship. Our involvement on the planet continuously connects the infinitely-faceted world of nature and the human physical, social, political and metaphysical. For me that means a person participates in ecological evolution, and that plants, comprising our food, drink, clothing, medicines, pages and the land on which we work, struggle and play — the plants participate actively in our evolution, too.
For Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Anishnaabe scholar, land is pedagogy, land is teacher. (2014, 1). She tells the parable of Kwezens, named for the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg word for “little woman,” who goes on a walk in the forest to collect firewood for her Doodoom (mother) and decides to listen to her desire to rest. (Simpson, 2014, 2). In this passive state, she is still actively sitting, listening and experiencing. She sees a squirrel and engages it in dialogue, expressing her wish for a prosperous winter of feasting on squirrelled away nuts. Present to the animal, Kwezens observes and finds her behaviour, a gnawing and suckling on tree bark, to be new to her. (Simpson, 2015). Following her curiosity, and trusting squirrel, the little woman begins to chew on a piece of bark herself. Her discovery is sweet: water infused with maple sugar fills in her mouth. (Simpson, 2015). Bringing it back home, she is celebrated by her family for her ingenuity rather than scolded for abandoning the task of gathering firewood, and the sweet water is cooked down into maple syrup. (Simpson, 2015). So the squirrel contributed her teaching, and so human intelligence grasped the lesson. This mode of education encourages experiential learning, centres nature as the source of lessons, and connects Anishnaabe to a culture deeply embedded in the natural world. Nature offers knowledge, skills and values that can nurture Anishnaabe political resurgence. (Simpson, 2015). The connections run deep.
As plants and animals evolve in concert, the Gaia hypothesis argues that the Earth is one single organism, tending towards self-regulation. (Park and Alliby, 2017). It is a proposition “that the responses of living organisms to environmental conditions ultimately bring about changes that make the earth better adapted to support life.” (Hine and Martin, 2015). All of the spheres are involved: hydrosphere (water), lithosphere (tectonic plates), pedosphere (soil), biosphere (everyone else alive in this great mystery). This is a positive evolutive process, where interactions between organisms enrich and proliferate life. Changing endlessly in time, the Earth and all of her offspring move continuously towards balance — equilibrium. Where the Earth finds equilibrium is dynamic, always responding to positive planetary feedbacks. (Park and Allaby, 2017).
However, human exceptionalism has upset systems that regenerate and harmonize life. The actions individuals and the systems they participate in (the scaffolding of colonialism, capitalism, environmental racism) extract from, exploit and dominate the Earth. This relationship, setting humanity apart from and above the multiplicity of beings on Earth, is a violent interference with planetary reproduction. Conventional ways of living and reproducing social life actively lay waste to the biosphere, despite the appearance of separation. Which has us where we are now. “We are in the throes of a mass extinction event that is anthropogenic,” says Eileen Crist, Virginia Tech Department of Science and Technology in Society professor. ”This is not something we can fix. If we lose 50 to 75 per cent of the species on the planet in this century — which is what scientists are telling us will occur if we continue to operate as business-as-usual — if this happens, this can not be fixed.” (Mortillaro, 2017). Species are becoming extinct at a pace “a thousand times faster” than the rate over the last 65 million years, as capitalism sucks, blasts, bores, fracks, fells and pollutes its way forward, externalizing its impacts into the environment. (Hansen, 2016; Dawson, 2016). Though Barbara Streisand may be cloning her dogs in America, raising the dead only happens in the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and holy scripture.
How is total environmental destruction a common-sense progress narrative for some, and environmental respect the guiding narrative for others? Ideas compose ideology, and they’re disseminated tacitly or explicitly in the stories we share. These stories are helpful to consider when trying to understand human relationship to nature. Compare a Christian to an indigenous origin story, and consider the “the hold, the power” of ideas: (Kateb, 2002, 321)
In the story of Adam and Eve, Eve felt compelled to taste the sweet, crisp apples hanging low and ripe in the Garden of Eden. She was punished for drawing the fruit to her mouth. The first woman was banished from paradise for partaking, and forced to fend for herself in a hostile environment. Her cautionary tale makes a virtue of dominating the dangerous wild rather than gratefully receiving its gifts. (Kimmerer, 2014, 7). Milton’s Adam, ejected from the garden, happily went to work. (Federici, 2004, 135).
In distinction, the original peoples of the Great Lakes tell in oral tradition of Skywoman, who fell from the heavens and was received by the animals; carried by geese to land on a great turtle’s back. (Kimmerer, 2014, 3). The creatures dwelled in a vast ocean, and they knew that Skywoman would need land on which to make a home. In turn, the hosts of this new place dove to look for earth for Skywoman. (Kimmerer, 2014, 4). Weak but determined Muskrat eventually gave his life to the cause, his body rising up on the surge and his gift held tightly in one palm: soil. (Kimmerer, 2014, 4). The great turtle offered to hold the territory on his back, and Skywoman set about spreading the earth, dancing and scattering the gift of seeds that she brought from the Sky World. (Kimmerer, 2014, 4). In this way, she co-created the Earth with the animals to the rhythm of the universe.
Skywoman’s story is one of many in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s collection of “old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with the earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.” (2014, x). Storytelling reveals and generates the world-views of our societies that teach collective and individual identity, thought and action. (Kimmerer, 2014, 6-7). What narrative will we tell, or retell? Do we choose the story of banishment, scarcity and domination, or the story of co-creation, belonging and mutually good medicine, where all give and all receive? (Kimmerer, 2014, x).
In the traditional thought of numerous indigenous groups globally, the larger-than-human life on earth is connected to the human directly, through relationships of kinship, friendship, and always respect. (Turner & Spalding, 2013, 29). Life is lived in direct communion with the earth. (Abram, 1996, 15). Nature offers the living materials for “identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us.” (Kimmerer, 2014, 7) And so, for Crist, the “mandate is that we take care of Earth and earthlings and human beings because we’re all family.” (2017).
Additional modes of thought express and emphasize the interconnectedness of life. The Gaia hypothesis, mentioned above and first submitted by British atmospheric chemist and inventor James Lovelock in the mid-20th century, suggests that earthly systems act towards autopoesis — self-reproduction, self-nourishment. (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974, 2). As Merriam-Webster defines the word, a living system will “maintain and renew itself by regulating its composition and conserving its boundaries.” This aligns with what T’uy’tanat (Cease Wyss), Skwxwu7mesh/Sto:Lo/ Hawaiian/Swiss ethnobotanist says she found in indigenous plant medicine: what we need to heal our wounds metaphysical and material is already growing plentifully, within us and all around us. (2008). Winona LaDuke speaks of life without empire, where harmony is the priority instead of conquest and domination. (2017).
I write this thinking of the salmon, that have spawned and run in rivers to the Salish Sea in Canada’s western-most province. The rivers are said to have surged with salmon, so thick in number that the shíshálh Nation, the Muckleshoot Nation and more say you could walk across the water on the backs of the fish. (May, 2014, 41). The salmon, coming every season and writ in the First Nation’s calendar, are central to life. (shíshálh Nation, 2018). For over 10,000 years, indigenous societies on the Pacific Northwest co-existed with the salmon. (Turner, 2008, 180). Receiving the gift of sustenance, a cultural teaching passed down from generation to generation instructed the receiver of the salmon’s flesh to honour the fish with a blessing and an offering, and to take only as many fish as were needed. (Kimmerer, 2014, 183).
By engaging this ecologic paradigm of regeneration over time, it becomes evident that true sustainability depends on being organized around the earth’s self-sustaining regenerative cycles, which play out uniquely and collectively for each organism and the ecosystems in which they participate. Rather than aspiring to the constant growth paradigm of capitalism, think of the absence of salmon in the winter as they fulfill their life course and the eating of dried salmon from the previous year; the anticipation of the salmon run, who fill Sakinaw Lake from the end of July to the middle of August; the honourable harvest of the sacred fish, taking only what is needed; and its preparation and storage until the next season. (Dawn Morrison, Vancouver Food Summit, September 28, 2017; shíshálh nation and Fisheries and Oceans Canada, 2017). Under this paradigm, the surplus isn’t the focus: what is needed by all is provided by the earth, and everyone participates. Under present day capitalism fishing quotas exceed environmental recommendations — Fisheries and Oceans Canada is responsible for both the protection and the sale of marine species, and the first mandate is deeply compromised by the second. (Brown, GEOG310, 2013).
Capitalism
Founded on ceaseless expansion, capitalism has its roots in environmental destruction, colonialism and slavery. (Hance, 2017). Since the 16th century, capitalism has developed continuously and spread its geographical reach. Capitalism “must grow at a compound rate or it will experience convulsive economic and social crises. The contradictions of this system are.. self-evident: an economic system based on infinite expansion must inevitably crash into the natural limits of finite ecosystems.” (Hance, 2017).
The degrading impact of capitalism — prioritizing the survival of corporations over the existence of humanity and nature — is a social fact too, as lack of access to traditional foods, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, burn-out and mental illness pervade in the present day. (Monteiro and Cannon, 2012; Waitzkin, 1981). On an international scale in the form of structural adjustments and on a local scale, those who lose under capitalism (their land taken, their ecosystems and ways of life destroyed or devalued) are those who are the most marginalized. As Silvia Federici has documented, capitalism depends on the subjugation of the body, and exerts its influence differentially for men and for women. (2014, 15). Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa put forward the perspective that women’s reproductive labour is the hidden engine that allows for the continuation of capitalism by producing the wage-earning subject. (Federici, 2004, 7). The labour of childbirth and rearing remains outside of the sphere of capitalist valuation despite its absolute necessity to the system; this unpaid labour is naturalized. (Federici, 2014, 8). A longtime activist in and scholar of the feminist movement, Federici launches a criticism of the objective of allowing women access into the world of work. Focusing on the incorporation of women into existing forms of waged work, the women’s movement abandoned the domestic sphere. (Federici, 2013). Federici herself joined an effort to give monetary value to the domestic work that reproduces the labourers necessary to the capitalist economy. (2013). Certainly, it is mothers who are worthy of exaltation, not CEO’s.
While taking up ideas of alienation and expropriation from Marxism, in “Caliban and the Witch,” Federici argues against the usual Marxist teleology. (Federici, 2014, 21). She demonstrates that capitalism is not an inevitable, necessary step in the dialectic of history that ends in utopia. (Federici, 2004, 21). Instead, capitalism was the reaction of bishops and nobilities to the surging of anti-feudal movements that sought a more egalitarian and emancipated organization of society. (Federici, 2014, 22). Capitalism was enacted and enforced violently to suppress these movements in the service of protecting the interests of the patriarchal ruling class. (Federici, 2014, 21).
Federici draws a line of continuity between the colonization of the Americas and the expropriation of land and subjugation of women which took place in medieval Europe during enclosure and the 300 year period of the witch hunt. (2014, 219). Marxist terminology is useful. Primitive accumulation strips away the commons and privatizes land ownership, making participation in the alienation of one’s labour necessary for survival and eliminating subsistence forms of agriculture — for food must be purchased and rent must be paid. (Glassman, 2006, 608). Salient today, Encyclopaedia Britannica tells us that during the Protestant Reformation, “[e]conomic inequality was justified on the grounds that the wealthy were more virtuous than the poor.” (2008). Similar to the witch hunts, in the Americas primitive accumulation was paired with symbolism that rendered indigenous peoples as monsters and cannibals who needed to be violently “civilized.” (Federici, 2014, 221). Including millions of bodies, the attempt to destroy indigenous societies has also been an attempted annihilation of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing the world. In the sciences, local knowledge is often considered inferior and untrustworthy. (Sundberg, GEOG395, 2012).
The reality is that indigenous knowledge and philosophy is essential to the sustaining of life on Earth. Relating to plants and animals as if they have personhood, indigenous wisdom offers an ethic of stewardship and reciprocity with the world. (Kimmerer, 2017). The knowledge of the gifts offered by plants in terms of food and medicine is humbling. These gifts, as they are offered freely by the planet, are to be shared freely with the other beings who live alongside us. Indigenous knowledge recognizes the abundance provided by the Earth, and the responsibility to protect the beings that support human existence. (Kimmerer, 2015). Harvesting only what is necessary, the idea of the surplus to sell is moot — for the preservation of life for the sustenance of generations to come that takes precedence over the individual acquisition of goods. The complex societies that were violently overtaken by colonial capitalism offer a different form of economy, that is organized around the cycles of the local environment and articulated through sustainable interaction with the world. (Turner & Spalding, 2013, 29). Respect for the earth takes planning and acting with consideration of ecological cycles — possible through the passing down of teachings wrought from experience. (Turner & Spalding, 2013, 29).
In the forestry, fishing, mining, oil and liquified natural gas industries with interests on the Pacific Northwest, these cycles are disregarded, and instead concern for more short-term profit and exploitative resource extraction drives policy and commercial decision-making. Take for instance Trudeau’s Trans Mountain pipeline, point-blank (though profits from the pipeline are insecure almost as much as ecological hazard is certain, so even short-term gains are dicey). (Dimoff, 2018). The gifts provided by this planet are assaulted daily, intentionally, accidentally, with great attempt to justify it and through systems that are so far-reaching and pernicious they demand collective action.
There is much and powerful resistance from the people. Close-by, the Unist’ot’en are engaged in a multi-pronged resistance effort, defending their territories to prevent ecological disaster wrought by corporate interests. Their diversity of tactics includes a legal battle with Coastal Gaslink and the occupation of space on the front-lines to physically prevent the construction of the gas line. The slogan “Heal the People, Heal the Land,” and a clarion call to stand up to protect land, water and air have earned the hereditary leader of the Unist’ot’en the label of “aboriginal extremist” in a federal Canadian document. (Brake, 2018). Fighting for the essentials of life, the group has been deemed a threat to Canada’s “national interest.” (Brake, 2018).
“From the very beginning of the world, the other species were a lifeboat for the people. Now, we must be theirs.” (Kimmerer, 2014, 8). The environmental movement is now dependent on indigenous groups, whose unceded right and title to the land is powerful leverage for the protection of water systems as well as broader ecosystems and the biodiversity that comprises them. Hand in hand with respect for indigenous ways of knowing goes a willingness to fight for indigenous governance. In Canada, native art is highly prized; but solidarity goes far beyond the aesthetic, beyond purchasing jewellery, and demands structural changes. Respect for traditional indigenous ways of knowing the world and of organizing societies also includes understanding that indigenous peoples are modern, and works against the projection of indigenous peoples into the past.
As Povinelli understands it, relationships between knowledge, people and places are those of mutual obligation. (2011, 112). The organization of society around collective well-being and reciprocity is key to building a world beyond ceaselessly extractive, exploitative and degrading capitalism. Currently, barter and collective ownership models are often used to prop up capitalism, rather than offering an alternative to it — apps and businesses that operate this way are considered to be a part of the “sharing economy,” which serves to justify the suppression of wages and the distance between workers and the means of production. The narrative that everything is incorporated into colonial capitalism (“all that is solid melts into air”) is a critical cautionary tale; and yet, it denies the reality of the persistence of resistance. (Marx, Engels and Hobsbawm, 1998, 35).
An epithet of herbal medicine tells us that plants that grow alongside personal geography are brought to that landscape specifically to address a human need for healing. (Lori Snyder, How Deep Are Your Roots herbal medicine walk, July 17, 2017). This could be understood as an anthropocentric belief, but it is not — instead, it conceives of nature as having an interest in human well-being, for nature’s own sake (humans are nature, too). Healing is a collaboration. The propensity to heal through engagement with ecology is expressed in the human capacity for physical and mental healing and transformation through contact with the living environment. (Frumkin et al, 2002). In a reality where just seeing a screen saver of green roofs boosts focus and mood, it is clear that human health is fundamentally tied to the health of nature despite the all-too routine disconnect. (Lee et al, 2015; Mooney, 2015). In line with people in Silicon Valley micro-dosing on psychedelic drugs to go to work at Facebook, there is often an instrumentalization of the healing properties of nature for the sake of capitalist extractive, surveillance, and consumptive activity — to be a more effective subject under capitalism. This differs dramatically from the use of these ingestible and experiential medicines for the strengthening of efforts to build a meaningful, spiritual life beyond the demands of the status quo. Of course, we need psycho-somatic wellbeing to endure. Part of what this gets at is the distinction between what is curative and what is healing. A cure is applied to act at turbo speed to eliminate physical and mental distress. Healing is longterm — it gets to the root cause rather than simply providing relief from the symptoms.
This brings us back to the concept of ecological truths. Consider the dandelion, fair weed with sunshine head. Dandelion, root to flower, has documented, potent healing powers, including in the treatment of certain cancers. (González-Castejón, Visioli & Rodriguez-Casado, 2012, 534; Ovadje et al, 2016, 73080). Despite that, the dandelion is known for being where it isn’t wanted, and is thought of commonly as a pest and dealt with with a gardener’s hori hori blade. In reality, the dandelion’s taproot creates room for other plants’ roots to grow by aerating the soil, and all the while increases its neighbours’ uptake of nutrients. (Lake Forest College). Though we pull it and slice it back with lawn mowers month after month, year after year, the dandelion returns with its head of parachute seeds, offering its medicines without restraint. She radiantly receives her nourishment from the earth’s cycles of sunlight and water and from the micro-organisms in the soil; the sunshiny perennial the dandelion thrives on road sides, and to survive takes in carbon dioxide and, like all photosynthesizing plants, transmutes it into the oxygen that sustains us through our breath.
Toxic, commercial products the likes of Killex Liquid Herbicide Concentrate aim to exterminate the plant, to meet the aim of maintaining the monoculture that is the manicured green lawn. (Canadian Tire). The lawn is fodder for critique, a human expression of an obsession with uniformity; a desire for social acceptance and the superficial thresholds for rejection; the bourgeois priorities written in city by-laws and policed. Locally, an abundance of these weeds, considered noxious by the proponents of industrial farming, contribute to the ecosystem, human and more-than-human, in many ways as they face onto concrete streets. (Wyss, 2008). The streets are impermeable; and from the sidewalks — between squares of pavement — weeds poke up, lively, triumphant, always in the spirit of regeneration. (Wyss, 2008).
Notions of interconnectivity and reciprocity between the human and the landscape are addressed by Bateson (1973) as what he calls the “wider eco-mental system.” (Denholm, 2015, 83). The eco-mental system consists of the fundamentally connected lifeforms that make up ecosystems and the avenues of communication between them — the network of mutual support that collaborates to generate health and proliferate life. This is a concept within science that reaches towards a conceptualization of more-than-human beings that populate the world as kin, as worthy of the same love, regard and respect as family members. (Denholm, 2015, 83). In this view, the mental landscape is an isomorph of the physical landscape. I leap off from this to include both the emotional and spiritual fabric in this interweaving. This all adds up to a process of “interbeing” a globally extensive and locally intensive interpenetration of beings, through being. (Denholm, 2015, 57).
Ecological examples of interbeing on the Pacific Northwest are multitudinous. Let’s return to contemplation of the salmon. Bears catch salmon in their paws and maws and carry the carcasses into the forest, leaving the half-eaten fish to the eagles and the martins. (Reimchin, 2001, 13). Microorganisms consume and break flesh and bone down into their constituent nitrogen, that seeps into the forest floor and nurtures the tree; the sacred salmon lives again in the rings of our temperate coastal trees. (Reimchin, 2001, 14). Dendrochronology — a forensic measurement of an individual tree’s age — is based on these growth rings, which signify the spring growth and summer dormancy of the tree’s lifecycle. (Shona Ellis, BIO343, 2015). The cyclical nature of life on Earth is revealed. The linkages are endless.
In the piece “Taking care of everything that belongs to us,” Alexie McHalsie speaks of the interdependence of species, and the responsibility taken on by the Sto:lo nation to care for one another and to act as stewards of the land. (Miller, 2007). There is no such thing as an untouched landscape. (Boivin et al, 2016, 6388). In British Columbia, indigenous societies have participated in the evolution of the landscape, humanizing it through sophisticated care-taking methods, for more than 10,000 years. (Johnson, 2013). Ecology is cultivated, stewarded, selected; “pristine” nature (terra nullius) is a myth that evacuates indigenous peoples from the landscape and erases the effort it takes to care for the land that takes care of us. (Soutar, 2017).
Just like the forest functions as one macro-organism rather than a loose collection of independent individuals, human health is interdependent too. Humans are always already in relationship with one another even when operating ideologically as though they occupy separate spheres of activity. The settler property owner depends on the continued exclusion of indigenous people from sovereignty over their territories; the bourgeoisie depend on the annihilation of land kept in common, forcing the expropriated to sell to them what they have: their labour. These relationships are embodied, and oppress subjects into particular forms of embodiment. Federici is in a lineage — or more accurately a movement — of feminists who have focused on the subjugation of the body under capitalism. Capitalism results in the submission and wearing out of the body, rather than its healing, strengthening, and affirmation. (Berlant, 2011, 95). It is deeply suspicious of animal embodiment and seeks to contain and sanitize it. “We should not hide from the precarious, leaky, relational aspect of our bodies, but rejoice in them.” (Herring, 2016). This porousness opens humanity onto one another and into engagement with the earth.
Still, our governments abandon our extensive human family on the streets and in inhumane circumstances, and prioritize meetings to push through pipelines and approve high-end developments. In Vancouver alone, according to the most recent homeless count, there are 2,223 homeless people. (McElroy, 2019). The number generated in the homeless count does not account for those who are homeless but couch surfing, staying with friends or family. This is up from the 2,181 counted in 2018; although numbers for 2019 have yet to be released, in 2018 a full 40% of the homeless population was indigenous. (Urban Matters CCC and the BC Non-Profit Housing Association, 2018, 1). Truly, for indigenous people in Canada, life has been a question of assimilation or death.
Legal and legislative changes need to be made to reorganize society around a reverence of life and the capacity for mutual care instead of a colonial obsession with property acquisition. Social relations could be shifted so that individuals are not in relationships of such deep asymmetry, brought about by racist, classed and sexist histories, but are rather involved in reciprocal relationships of care. If we treat each other with respect and dignity, and fall in love with the ways the human is open onto the world as a witness and a generative force, we could value every individual for their perspective and their intrinsic embodiment of life. Valuing difference and caring for life itself, society could collectively build supports instead of seeking to continue practices that bend to the bottom line and widen the social divide (no matter the liberal ideology, which claims to be socially progressive while functionally generating deep inequalities). “…[W]e make a grave mistake if we try to separate individual well-being from the health of the whole.” (Kimmerer, 2014, 16).
Food Sovereignty
There are 198 First Nations bands in the province of British Columbia, more than 60% of the bands in Canada, with 203 First Nations languages. (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 2010). First Nations have lived in these regions for more than 10,000 years. (Turner, 2009, 180). By foot or by canoe, indigenous groups traversed the land, engaging in the sacred practices of storytelling, weaving, painting, carving and woodwork, marking the winters with feasting and dance. Pre-contact, nearly 300 foods were eaten in the Coast Salish diet. (Morrison, 2017). This is very different from the Westernized and superimposed diets many indigenous folks consume today, which consist of anywhere between 13 and 20 different foods per year. (Segrest, 2014). The colonization of the Pacific Northwest has had a punishing ecological impact, as unsustainable harvest practices in mountain berry meadows and the disregard of traditional, ecological land management practices has resulted in a loss of what was once flourishing habitat for plants and animals. (Segrest, 2014). Climate change has also diminished the viability of native food systems. (Power, 2008, 95). In addition to the genocidal loss of life due to colonialism, the human impact has been “a loss of land, rights, knowledge.” (Segrest, 2014). Toxins in the environment, the oppression of culture and the encroachment of a modern lifestyle are all impediment to traditional food access. (Segrest, 2014).
The foods we eat have profound historical, ecological and social ties. There is an “ancestral memory of stewardship” on lands whose scope and scale are much more broad than that of the agrifood system. (Morrison, 2017). Indigenous hunters and gatherers are at the bottom of a cultural hierarchy that has agriculture at the top, and they offer a contribution of distinct cultural heritage to the food system. (Morrison, 2017). To think that there exist these two distinct food systems is to engage in thinking dualistically. Always in collaboration with nature’s cycles, in the pre-agricultural food system the people are not producers as much as stewards, and food is a way of life and not a product. These cycles are non-linear, based outside of the production-consumption-distribution matrix. (Morrison, 2017). “We have a bond, one that is woven right into the social fabric of who we are, and that is with the land..” (Segrest, 2014).
Canada is a rich country because of its land and resources. (Soule, 2017). Reserves represent just 0.2% of Canadian land. (Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, 2010). The range of hunter gatherers was considerably farther than the boundaries of these reserves. Conceived of by indigenous peoples, the land and its fruits are more than a resource. Segrest of the Muckleshoot Nation speaks of the ecology and the land forms with respect and reverence, noting the “large mountain ranges that produce these fast running rivers that… flow to the… Coast Salish Sea… rivers [that] nourish our ancient food forests, our mountain berry meadows, our lily bog prairies and our rich shellfish gardens.” (Segrest, 2014). In her words, for the Muckleshoot Nation, “…this [is] a teaching of diversity and abundance.” (2014).
Across Turtle Island, the garish orange and brown sign for A&W pronounces that is the “home of the burger family.” What is the burger family but yet another euphemistic assertion of settler-colonial, industrialized capitalism? This wholesome slogan ignores, denies and erases the violence of colonialism and the rich history of practices that sustained indigenous peoples. Tracing the supply chain of the A&W mama, papa, grandma, grandpa and baby burgers clarifies the linkage to colonial, industrial agriculture and the mythologized hard-working settler homesteaders who work in animal husbandry. This system distances consumers from the cruel realities of enclosure and the slaughter houses that feed production.
In the 1990’s, La Via Campesina coined the term “food sovereignty,” which can be understood as “the right of a community to define its own diet, and therefore shape its own food system.” (Segrest, 2014). The concept of food sovereignty addresses the ontological distinction between the right to consume food and the right to produce it. (Whitman et al. 2012). True food sovereignty has been fought for by groups like Via Campesina, who demand that the right to food go above and beyond the right to generic calories and nutrition to include cultural and place-based concerns, asking for the means to grow culturally specific foods. (Whitman, 2012). The right to food alone is inadequate, as it is articulated as a legal claim that creates a dependency on a government body to provide food. (Whitman, 2012). Food aid is effectively an undermining force in local economies. (Whitman, 2012).
Culturally important foods and medicines, on the other hand, are an organizing tool. Take for example the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty, and the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project. A project that inspires hope and represents on- and in-the-ground change, the Muckleshoot Food Sovereignty Project provides a collective space for meaningful and collaborative work, cultivating self-worth and mental health in a broader sense among members. (Segrest, 2014). It also organizes workshops — platforms for members to share their gifts. For Segrest (2014), the profound meaning of indigenous food sovereignty is an indigenous group “upholding its right to practice culture.” Access to traditional foods means access to a way of life, and in Segrest’s tribe this means the opportunity to hunt game, fish shellfish, and harvest roots, berries and the cedar tree. (Segrest, 2014). Food in practice, connecting people to the land and to their ancestry, is a medicine for body, mind, emotions and spirit.
Avenues of Connection, Reciprocity with the Earth
From the moss up, I learned the joys of experiencing the earth’s vitality. As a kid in the dirt at the base of Mount Seymour and an adult in the classroom, what I am seeking is communion. The process of finding it involves reconciling human and more-than-human concerns, and learning that I could not engage one impulse without the other. Turning my senses to the call of the environment, like a kind of heliotropism, I have sought channels of engagement with nature in human society.
This call eventually led me to the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA). EYA was created in 1991 for just that reason: to create opportunities for young people to directly engage with the Earth. The organization is currently run by three women, who provide space for education without stringent rules or rubrics and with delight and astonishment at what grows and buzzes. I was one of those growing beings in their programs, and learned an on-going lesson that people can be trusted — to gently carry a bee to safety on the tip of a finger, to see the strengths in one another, and to see weaknesses as points that call for nurturance. I was a mentor with the wildlife stewardship program, and had the opportunity to work (play) with native youth in the garden, guiding the planting of indigenous species to create habitat gardens. With all of its miraculous complexity, life in the garden is simple: curiosity, camaraderie and care are at the centre of the workshops that the EYA provides.
Hives for Humanity has created low barrier volunteer, mentorship and employment opportunities on the Downtown Eastside. They offer training in bee-keeping free of charge, with the ethos of offering space for apitherapy — the therapeutic effects of keeping bees. I can attest to the transformative effect of closeness with the bees that is provided through their low-key programming. The women who run the organization calmly and openly share their knowledge, wisdom and joy with all. Those who come forward as aspiring bee-keepers, primarily from the Downtown Eastside, are welcome to go on to be employees of Hives For Humanity as bee-keepers for hives around the city that the organization has been hired to caretake. These non-profit organizations have been created to step outside of the conventional paradigm that makes nature accessible only to the leisure class, providing spaces for marginalized youth and adults. These truly represent an intersectional environmentalism.
“And we ask ourselves how we might live so the story of our life is told as a teaching for those to come in the future.” (Segrest, 2014). A key to living, from the teachings I am so grateful to have received, tells us that “all flourishing is mutual” (Kimmerer, 2014, 15, 20, 21). I experience far greater connection to the land in its grandeur, and the embodied spirits who populate it, than to political names and boundaries. Feeling joy in the sensuous reality of earth under my fingertips and in the sight wriggling earthworms, my heartbeat pulses a warm percussion of vitality that can only ring out because it is shared.
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pretty pedestrian pdf
hi everybody (hi dr. nick)
this is a slim volume of poems. i wrapped this up today and the filetype extension .pdf is the bow. i hope you find it diverting, therapeutic, cathartic and whatever else you need. i can assure you that it will not meet all of your needs. maybe it’ll stroke a few underused metaphysical muscles? or those that i feel are underused, that’s why i piled these words onto pages. need to massage those spots that our present reality leaves aching. pining, you know.
with adoration ❤
hit me up for a physical book if you like it like that
k doggy
A Social Way of Thinking 2.0
Preface: What follows is an excerpt from a sprawling half-cooked work of memoir/critical theory/political ecology. The full piece is in her gestation period.
St. Catherine’s St., 2016
A Social Way of Thinking
Jack Spicer understood himself analogous to a satellite. He was no creator of content, but just its interceptor and transmitter, like a radio, the translator mediating between frequencies. His writers were extra-terrestrials with long-rage thought waves.
I turn outwards for insight, too. Sometimes I intentionally quote people, and I relish in the propelling of their words into the present. It is by intercepting them and carrying them forward that I keep ideas and language alive. Passing through mind ideas are ever shifting, growing in scope, considered at different scales, re-contextualized, critiqued and parodied. I refuse to deny the wisdom of my elders. So far, I have been gifted names for my first two public endeavours into social media. I consider these gifts to be markers of the contributions to my life given out of generosity by two of my closest friends at this time: Esteban and Richard.
Back to Jack Spicer. He wrote the following, section IX of XV in Fifteen False Propositions Against God (1958):
“After you have told your lover goodbye
And chewed the cud of your experience with him
Your bitter experience:
What else?
Perhaps trees. Slippery elm. Birch.
That knows no thankless nights. Oaktrees and palm
Ready to start a revolution.
No you should stay there with your roots in the ground
Ready to drink whatever water
The rain is willing to send you. The rain
The cow
And my true body a
Revolution.” (199)
This poem and its broken clauses offer me an incomplete conceptualization of the world. In the breaks between stanzas and the indentation between words on one line, there is room for a historical reservoir. “Your bitter experience:/ What else?” The break is a silence that defers to an archive of experience. The space suggests that reflection upon the constitution of the present is always already conditioned by an individual’s personal history.
En route to Tofino with Mama-D, 2016
More-than-human
Drinking “whatever water,” (199) the volume and type of nourishment is variable. What is available as a resource to growing, individual entities is a product of contingent social, geographical and temporal plains. Each growth is a singularity, developed at its genetic metabolic rate and in concert with the material and metaphysical landscape of the era. Materially, the language of Spicer’s poetry grows out of the poet’s own lived experience in the world. The more-than-human environment he interacted with in the Pacific Northwest is a lush surround. There is resonance between the experience of being at the whim of the weather, perhaps facing a storm, and being abjectly vulnerable to simultaneous structures of human power. One is overcome by, but also acting decisively in reference to one’s framework.
Spicer’s Pacific Northwest gives the reader access to a scale at which life is being lived that is beyond the human. In the poem above, the trees have a materiality that can be reached to for stability. It is a political act: Reaching out to ecology, Spicer holds the roots of a different kind of life, one that can’t be undone ideologically: the biological life of the green plant. He writes of processes of decay, renewal and change. The Earth’s ecology is key to any materialism. My childhood has outdoor resonances, memoire involuntaire with a personalized replacement for the realist cookie. (Berlant ).
Mossy. Sticky resin and the lemony bite of ants on the tongue. Raspberry leaves crushed with mint. Chive flowers and cherry leaves, clovers and spiky, verdant buttercup seeds. They were succulent under the tooth. It is a way of living, to live with the Earth. I like to think of the way I am with nature by way of Butler and Gregory’s account of a social movement taking place: “collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture.” In this way I moved twigs into fairy houses, insulating them gingerly with spaghnum. So I co-created with the irreducible materiality of minuscule pine limbs.
The materials of the Earth are “[r]eady to start a revolution.” (Spicer 199). Medicinal flora, the water cycle, the resilience of the dandelion and the clover and their kin that grow in disturbed ecosystems, the symbiotic brilliance of bacterial cultures. I would call this intellectual moment Political Ecological, a point iterated by Nancy Fraser. The foremost world crises involve the environment: climate change, air pollution, chemical waste, desertification, salinization, algael bloom, fish species collapse, the diminishment of biodiversity, the endangerment of apex species, to name a few. Environmental factors become impossible to separate from human circumstances. The paradigm of that interrelationship: global warming has been linked irrevocably to human activity since the Industrial Revolution. The ramifications of our relationship as a species to nature are unfolding. At present date, August 30, 2015, there are 340,000 refugees fleeing horror in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Eritrea and Somalia, and crossing into European borders to seek asylum. Major world news outlets have published titles like “Mass migration is no ‘crisis’: it’s the new normal as the climate changes” (Ellie Mae O’Hagan, The Guardian), “Global insecurity and refugee crisis linked to climate change: expert” (Chris Arsenault, Reuters) and “Call It What It Is: A Global Migration Shift From Climate, Not a Migrant or Refugee Crisis,” (The Huffington Post); they are reporting on the refugee crisis as a crisis induced by climate change. In the same week, the Atlantic covered it with the haunting article “The Black Route of Death From Syria.” The Syrian conflict was provoked in part by a drought that lasted from 2006-2011, causing waves of displaced rural labourers and their families to relocate to urban areas; this was a precursor to intense public discontent with the government in power. On the topic of climate change, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) makes the following projection:
“…for many this will mean a conscious move to another place to survive. Such moves, or the adverse effects that climate change may have on natural resources, may spark conflict with other communities, as an increasing number of people compete for a decreasing amount of resources.”
The interplay of geopolitics with natural resources impacts the lives of billions. In Alberta, for example, applications for employment insurance (EI) have risen by seventy-four per cent in the last year, increasing over eight consecutive months, and Alberta now leads Canada as the province with the most people collecting EI. The development of the tar sands ground to a halt as a result of the Saudi Arabian glut of the resources market. In addition to resource conflicts, the impacts of natural disasters are managed differentially by human systems of oppression. Environmental hazards the likes of Hurricane Katrina and the poisoning of the Athabasca River and the Chipewyan peoples, inordinately touch the lives of indigenous people, racialized communities, the working poor, and the Global South. Keeping a critical politics of the way we co-exist (within the institution) has traditionally been the the domain of political ecology. Political ecological approaches, which stress the role of ideological and social stratification in the access to and legal definition of “nature,” have contributed to discourse and decision-making processes in British Columbia.
That what is “natural” is effected by human activity is no news to a staples economy. Resource exploration does benefit from a Judeo-Christian mindset about the natural world, which centres the perpetuation of the human and seeks human dominion on Earth. At this time in history, the environmental genocide of indigenous peoples to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry is its most publicized in the media, and yet persists. Water located in British Columbia is sold to a transnational corporation, Nestlé, for $2.25 per million litres. It is being resold for the systematic generation of economic capital, to animals exchanging their labour for currency, whose basic biological function depends on the constant availability of water. Although the legal system would call Nestlé an “individual,” all of the actors who carry out the mandate of the company are part of the reproduction of this system that depletes reservoirs. In order to afford and maintain their lives, they reproduce systems of exploitation in which they are embedded daily, directly and indirectly. (Latour). The corporatization of resources, and corporate capitalism more broadly, are deeply entangled with the material world and highly questionable. That is the terrain of political ecology. (Fraser, Crisis). The market does not operate within the same system of our biosphere: there is no natural self-regulation of abstract finance; the “invisible hand” is a myth. The rain has agency, too, and its process is distinct from us humans. It’s part of a world that persists even when you are dead.
That world is populated by a diversity of entities, some electronic. Spicer figures himself a radio, and the technological content of his work lives in a similar era. The writer died in 1965, long before Web 2.0. This is part of what makes us unique, not as one species but as individual humans: the personality and physical interface of the machines we are raised in the midst of. (Benjamin 218). Haraway calls us “chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids.” (1991). The more-than-human is a discussion of the world and those objects/inventions that mediate between humans and the Earth. As technology is invented at an exponential pace, the technological moment that overlapped with my childhood was truly a blip in household media. I have had a long presence on the internet, in one guise or another. I can add Google, Ask Jeeves and Rollercoaster Tycoon to the “vanilla process of socialization” I underwent in the years of “mommy-daddy-and-me” being the central unit of my life. (Berlant, Desire/Love 2, Cruel Optimism). In my teens, my iPod was one of my closest companions. Donna Haraway wrote the Cyborg Manifesto in 1991, the year of my birth. It is a work of socialist feminism and “blasphemy,” and both a conceit for human heterogeneity and a materialist account of the transformative effects of relationships with technology. For Haraway, Michael Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.” As it turns out, my relationship with my desktop PC, through which I engaged with hobbies such as downloading music, accumulating Neopoints, messing around on Photoshop, group chatting on AIM and writing melancholic fan-fiction, has prepared me well for adulthood. That two-foot deep desktop computer almost crushed my dad when he was walking it down our grey carpet staircase in North Van. He was wearing old leather slippers with worn soles, a frictionless match. Technologies shape our lives in numerous ways.
seeing capitalism in an avocado
Preface: From a few years back. Real academic style but hopefully with enough pizazz to keep it compelling. Avocados are so sexy, curvaceous. Mother Nature’s butter.
Kathryn Mandell
GEOG395: Sundberg
Seeing Capitalism in an Avocado
Wintertime is here in Vancouver. While kale and arugula are still growing tall in nearby garden plots, the diet that I am accustomed to is reliant on imported food. The connection of my metabolism to the livelihoods of people in other regions of the world is fascinating and unsettling. (Sundberg, 2012). I eat their labour, but see and taste only its outcome: the commodity. In order to better understand how I have come to have a relationship with these material objects, I have undertaken the project of defetishising a commodity that I consume on a daily basis: the Hass avocado, supplied by Calavo Growers (a Californian corporation). My methodological approach is a commodity chain analysis. I have referred particularly to the work of Tanaka (2008) and Romero (2006) to inform my approach theoretically, and have relied on the latter’s highly detailed examination of the avocado industry in Mexico. Tracing a commodity chain is a useful framework for probing, within the limits of this paper, the geographical and social processes that are crystallized in the fruit. My investigation has found that the social relations contained in the avocado both secure exploitative relationships and provide space for resistance. A commodity chain analysis allows for an examination of the political and economic contexts for these outcomes. The Mexican state, and the economic models it has deployed, has been necessary to the facilitation of large-scale avocado production and export. (Romero, 2008, p. 67). Moreover, the exertion of power by the imperialist United States, in concert with Canada, have skewed the financial benefits to these two states while skewing the consequences to be mainly felt across the border in Mexico.
Unfortunately, a language barrier makes the defetishisation of the avocado difficult – the bulk of literature that deals with the socioeconomic context and intimately experienced impacts of the avocado industry in Mexico is in Spanish.
A Brief History
Archaeological studies have found evidence of avocados in Mitla, Oaxaca, from 700 B.C., as well as in Tehuacan, Pebula, from approximately 7,000 B.C. (Stanford, 2002, p. 295). The presence of avocado orchards in Michoacán contributed to the Spanish Colonial perception of “The Paradise of Michoacán,” a vision of the region as bountifully productive of food and warm in temperature. (Buchenau, 2005, p. 119; Stanford, 2002, p. 295).
A plant breeder in California developed the vigorous and resilient Hass variety of avocado in the 1920s. (California Avocado Board, 2012). By 1957, it was imported to nurseries in Michoacán, and from there the bud wood, a shoot of the plant from which avocados can be propagated, was made available to Michoacán growers. (Stanford, 2002, p. 296). It only took a handful of years for Hass to be recognized as the most productive variety. Hass soon supplanted other breeds on a great number of crops. (Stanford, 2002, p. 296).
Hass avocados are now the single most recognizable cultivar. Contemporarily considered the generic variety, Hass represent an estimated 85% of global avocado production. (Litz, Gómez Lim & Raharjo, 2007, p. 170). Mexico is the world’s primary producer. (Ashworth, Chen & Clegg, 2007, p. 325). Their production is concentrated in Michoacán, where 6000 avocado orchards cover approximately 90,000 hectares of land. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189). The heterogeneous landscapes of the region create a variety of microclimates, which together allow for year-round avocado production. Thanks to the unending growing season, Michoacán is the world’s largest producer of avocadoes, and is responsible for 40% of world avocado production as of 2005. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189).
The Commodity Chain
This list of steps reveals that the avocado supply chain is built into countless identities – it requires the labour of and makes contact with bodies in distant geographical, social and economic contexts. By following the avocado from an orchard in Michoacán, Mexico, to the Mount Pleasant Buy-Low where I purchase the fruit, the involvement of humans and non-human actors in its supply chain become visible. The information in the next paragraph, detailing the steps in the commodity chain, is sourced from an informal interview that I conducted with the avocado buyer employed by Western Produce, a fruit and vegetable wholesaler based in Langley. His name is Craig McCullough. I have supplemented the information that he courteously provided with corroborating pieces of the story, from alternative sources – these are noted appropriately.
The commodity chain begins on the avocado orchard. Here, they are harvested by male Mexican employees, who use hooks with nets to gather the fruit and place it in clean boxes, which are transported by covered trucks to a Calavo packinghouse. (Salazar-Garcia, 2005, p. 4). The company’s regulations state that they must not touch the ground at any point during the harvest. (Salazar-Garcia, 2005, p. 4). Orchard owners will have signed contracts with Calavo, to secure their payment and the company’s supply of avocados. (McCullough, 2012). In the packinghouse, predominantly female employees inspect each individual product as they roll by on mechanized conveyor belts. (Salazar-Garcia, 2005, p. 32). The avocados are sorted according to size and level of ripeness, hot-dipped or fumigated to remove any microbial hazards and pests that could make contact with other countries, and then packed onto pallets. (McCullough, 2012). Twenty-two pallets, carrying eighty 25lb cases, are placed on a truck that is then sealed, again to ensure that no unwanted substances make their way into the United States. (McCullough, 2012). At this point, Calavo maintains responsibility for transporting the product from the field to the wholesaler. Avocados are highly sensitive to temperature, and are damaged by refrigeration; the interior of the truck is kept at 55-56 degrees Fahrenheit. At no time is the load unsealed during the trucker’s trip north across the United States, until, upon reaching the border, customs agents open the seal, unload and inspect the order. From here, Westcoast Produce picks up the supply chain. (McCullough, 2012). A Canadian employee transfers the pallet to a branded truck, and will continue up to Langley, where Westcoast Produce is located. Westcoast Produce is a wholesaler for Buy-Low Foods. (McCullough, 2012). Their warehouse is equipped with humidity and temperature-controlled zones, too, to maintain quality and appearance. Another employee, based out of their warehouse, consults the orders that have been placed by retail outlet buyers. This employee will build Buy-Low’s order, which would include produce from elsewhere in the world: bananas, kiwis, potatoes will be consolidated with the avocados in the requested quantities, and delivered on yet another truck. (McCullough, 2012). Once the avocados have been unloaded at Buy-Low, a staff member may put one case on display and keep the remainder of the shipment in a temperature-controlled zone. (McCullough, 2012). In the fruits and vegetables section of Buy-Low, avocados will be arranged next to produce with complimentary colours, and organized to suggest food combinations to customers – typically, avocados will be placed beside tomatoes. From the time an order is placed by Buy-Low, it takes approximately ten days before the requested avocadoes are delivered. (McCullough, 2012). The chain culminates with me, the consumer, and the many others like me who shop at the big-box store. Browsing the aisles, we pick up the food that we will make into our sustenance.
Avocados and Land Reform
75% of avocado orchards are located on private property, while the remaining 25% are on ejidos, or communal property. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189). Agricultural plots in the communal sector tend to be between 1 and 5 hectares in area. Conversely, individual commercial operations may cover a tract of land as wide as 500 hectares. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189).
Land tenure and economic systems are organized by the state, so the political context for the demarcation of space for the supply chain is of interest. The present state of avocado production is in part a result of generations of political and economic upheaval. (Romero, 1998, p. 67). Agrarian reforms have taken place many times over, as presidents have been pressured to follow contradictory mandates. (Assies, 2008, p. 34). Both the peasantry and business sector have been vocal in demanding that the government respond to their respective needs; in acting in the interest of one party, the interests of the other must go unrealized. (Assies, 2008, p. 45). Presently, the economic viability of small landholders is low. (Romero, 1998, p. 108). In order to create context for the current state of land tenure and productive ability, I utilize the work of Assies (2008) to detail a few critical moments that have been the result of government policy.
The use of land for large-scale private agriculture was encouraged by state policies in the first half of the 20th century. (Assies, 2008, p. 58). For Assies (2008), this is especially true under the consecutive administrations of Camacho, Valdés and Cortinez. (p. 45). As landownership became increasingly concentrated in agribusiness, the ejido sector was utilized as a source of inexpensive wage labourers. (Assies, 2008, p. 45). That division of land and the valuation of commercial agriculture over subsistence production is foundational to the present configuration of the avocado industry. (Assies, 2008, p. 43).
Decades later, in the 1970s, national programmes advocated for the aggressive expansion of avocado production. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189). As a result, surpluses of the fruit saturated the national market, and profitability declined for much of the 1980s. (Stanford, 2005, p. 189). Under president Miguel de la Madrid (1982-1988), the state transitioned towards an export-oriented economic development model. (Anonymous, 2012). Liberalization of the economy was furthered by the following president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, under his “Liberty and Justice for the Countryside” program. (Assies, 2008, p. 48-52). Part and parcel of this rolling out of neoliberalism and rolling back of the state was agrarian land reform in the 1980s and 1990s. (Assies, 2008, p. 48-52). The current land tenure systems in Michoacan are the result of these land reforms, and adjustments made to the Constitution in 1992. (Assies, 2008, p. 33)
In line with this neoliberal regime, the expansion of exports was considered crucial to economic stability. Having penetrated the European market in 1982, the US was the next major export opportunity. Major commercial avocado operations supported negotiations of a NAFTA, and organized meetings to bring together government representatives and growers. (Stanford, 2005, p. )
Avocados faced unique obstacles in the US market: Mexican avocados were perceived by California growers as rife with invasive species, and unfit for entry into the country. Mexican agribusiness and government collaborated to design a campaign that would fight avocado insect pests banned by the U.S. This phytosanitary campaign was highly involved: technical surveys of pest populations were coupled with eradication strategies across Michoacan. Testing for pests demonstrated that a number of large avocado orchards were free from unwanted organisms. (Stanford, 2005).
In the 1980s, two economic shifts at the national scale had immense impact at the scale of the individual. First, the sharp decline in oil prices in 1982 spurred the “Mexican Crisis.” In response, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) installed austerity policies in Mexico, and demanded a shift from previous economic models to a free market model. (Romero, 2006, p. 41). Second, in order to play by the rules of the NAFTA, the Mexican federal government was forced to reduce agricultural subsidies. Most avocado producers rely on bank loans and loans from major avocado producers, if they can acquire them, and are burdened with high debt. (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2004, p. 54; Stanford, 2005, p. 199). For avocado producers, the lack of available subsidies is compounded by the phytosanitary campaign and its associated regulations, which together opened the US to Mexican avocados. These state directed systems have impacted all avocado producers, including those who do not grow for export. Regulations dictate methods of maintaining orchards, harvesting, and transportation to packinghouses. Additionally, all orchards must be registered with SAGAR. This strict state regulation is predatory: its requirements are unaffordable to many small landholding farmers, who are uninterested in exporting the fruits of their labour. Regardless, state regulations that were created in order to satisfy the United States are applied to all avocado farmers. Barred from participating in the sale of avocados in the national market, they are forced into wage labour in order to provide for themselves and their dependents. (Romero, 2006, p. 81). Sometimes, the lack of available capital leads to an alternative choice, which increases the linkages that comprise the commodity chain. This is the case when male adults leave Michoacán for the United States and send remittances home to their families; Romero (2006) documented that remittances have enabled small landholders to take control of their avocado orchards and enter the export market. (p. 84).
This discussion of US trade policies is foundational to my commodity chain, as it is a US corporation that handles and delivers the avocados I eat. Calavo invested in the construction of a branch plant in Michoacán, in 1998. (Hogeland, 2004, p. 1271). The capital accumulated by the supply chain is disproportionately allocated to Calavo, due in part to the vertical integration of their supply chain.
Figure 1. Map of the distribution of Calavo avocados from Mexico. (Calavo, 2012).
Calavo was able to establish itself in Michoacán because of the NAFTA. Former President of Mexico Felipe Calderon stated that high export sales of avocados are proof that NAFTA, “in general, has been beneficial for Mexicans.” (Avila, 2008). This sentiment is corroborated by radio broadcasts that are funded by the government. The advertisements feature avocado farmers, who publicly praise the NAFTA. One of these broadcast slots quotes farmer Benito Camacho of the Uruapan region of Michoacán, who says that, because of NAFTA, “there are low-income producers who now have a tractor… now we have our little pickup truck.” (Avila, 2008).
Unsurprisingly, the advertisements hide alternative assessments of the NAFTA. The expectation that the free trade agreement would result in job creation and income increases was not met. (Romero, ). This is especially true for the peasantry, who instead of experiencing improvements in living standards, suffered the most severe implications of the NAFTA: …. () The commodity chain reveals the powerful actors in the industry, and the political and economic histories that have endowed them with influence. In this case, the IMF, the government of the United States, the Mexican government and a Californian corporation are intimately involved in a global production network that has supplanted small landholders, replaced the cultivation of staple crops with crops for export and increased reliance on expensive, imported food products. They’ve also given me access to abundant, cheap avocados.
However, power is not entirely exclusive to those influential actors. Those with less capital have acted back within the framework of the production system for their own benefit. Thus, while the majority of wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small number of elite producers, there is some opportunity for resistance.
The Eye of the Consumer: Aesthetic Requirements for Export
Whether or not an avocado will make it to the market depends on physical characteristics that signify quality. This part of the supply chain – the methods used to meet standards and the assessment of each individual product – reflects the aesthetic preferences of consumers, or at least their interpretation by retailers and buyers. (Stanford, 2002, p. 294). In order to meet these criteria, avocado growers have formally agreed to postpone harvesting until the fruit reaches a particular stage of growth. (Salazar-Garcia, 2005, p. 32).
The End of the Supply Chain: Consuming the Avocado
Personal and social identities are cobbled together through actions. The consumption of food is meaningful to any identity-building project, and the reasons behind eating or not eating particular foods are an important part of this process. (Tanaka, 2008, p. 2).
No avocados are grown for commercial markets in Canada. Eating a fruit that is definitively from another country helps to create our definitions of “here” and “there,” solidifying an imaginary of Mexico in a physical and consumptive act. (Tanaka, 2008, p. 2). However, Tanaka (2008) reminds me that we can completely detach a commodity from its cultural traditions. (p. 93). Thus, although I often see an image of Mexico when I eat a fruit that was grown there, it is (was, perhaps, after taking Sundberg’s Geographies of Latin America class at the University of British Columbia, and after writing this paper) a mainstream imaginary of Mexico that I envision. The “Paradise of Michoacan.” (Stanford, 2002, p. ). Thus, my connection to Mexico through this consumptive act has more to offer through an Occidentalist analysis than it has to say about Mexico. (p. 94).
I typically consume half of an avocado a day. Three of my four roommates covet the buttery green fruit. We have expressed to one another the sense of anticipation we feel, knowing that the next meal in the day will incorporate avocado. It is an important, ritual act. Eating them makes each of us feel well physically and mentally. This feeling of well-being that we associate with avocados is partially due to the constructed idea that avocados are a healthy food to eat.
In Canada, avocados are advertised for their health benefits. Canadian Living Magazine included avocados in its “Glossary of Healthy Fruits,” stating that eating the fruit can lower cholesterol levels. (Rosenblum, 2008). Featured in the fruit section of Canada’s Food Guide, that half avocado that I eat is recommended by a division of the Canadian federal government, Health Canada. (Health Canada, 2007). Images of the fruit are often employed on advertisements for spas. I first ate avocados as a snack provided by my Caucasian, Canadian mother. Since then, as I have sought out information on personal health, popular websites, magazines and books on nutrition have encouraged me to consume them. While I eat an avocado, I am aware of their benefits to my reproductive system, my heart, my skin. The fetishization of avocados allows for this connection to them as a functional product for health.
Fundamentally, consuming fruit connects our metabolisms to Michoacán landholders and employees, as well as to those who have been displaced by its production. (Sunberg, 2012). Although all actions are inevitably political, I was ignorant of the political nature of my avocado consumption. Perhaps it was inevitable that, having completed my research for this paper, I should feel a heightened sense of unease about eating avocados. Cherry, DeSoucey, and Ellis (2011) investigated the ways in which research on consumptive practices influences the behaviour of the researcher themselves. Now, I see myself as an active participant in a system that is highly polarizing. However, I understand in spite of that knowledge, I will continue to eat avocados. I might not eat half of one every single day. Although I am embedded in the lives of those at the beginning of the chain, the parts of the narrative that are problematic to me are outcomes of the interaction of powerful corporations with state legislated land tenure and subsidy programs. My consumption fuels this system. Still, I feel infinitesimally small in the commodity chain.
References
Anonymous. (2012, April 3). Miguel de La Madrid; President of Mexico who came to power in a financial crisis and tackled the country’s economic woes. The Times (London), p 46, 1, National Edition.
Ashworth, V, Chen, H, and Clem, M. (2007). Avocado. Genome Mapping and Molecular Breeding in Plants, 4, 325-329.
Assies, W. (2008). Land Tenure and Tenure Regimes in Mexico: An Overview. Journal
of Agrarian Change, 8(1), 33-63.
Avila, O. (2008, January 30). The “green gold” of Mexico. Chicago Tribune.
Biénabe, E., Berdegué, J., and Peppelenbos, L. (2011). Reconnecting Markets. Gower Publishing, Burlington: VT.
Buchenau, J. (2005). Mexico otherwise: Modern Mexico in the eyes of foreign observers. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.
Calavo. (2012). Availability. Retrieved from http://www.calavo.com/store/availability.html
California Avocado Commission. (2012). Hass Mother Tree. Retrieved from: http://www.avocadocentral.com/about-hass-avocados/hass-mother-tree
Cherry, E., DeSoucey, M., and Ellis, C. (2011). Food for Thought: Consumption, identity, and ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 40(2), 231 258.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2004). Avocado: Post-harvest operation. Dorantes, L, Parada, L, and Ortiz, A. Retrieved from: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/inpho/docs/Post_Harvest_Compendi m_-_Avocado.pdf
Guerrero, G., Mas, J-F., and Masera, O. (2008). Land use / Land cover change dynamics in the Mexican highlands: current situation and long term scenarios. Environmental Science and Engineering, 57-76.
Hogeland, J. A. and Stanford, L. (2004). Designing Organizations for a Globalized World: Calavo’s Transition from Cooperative to Corporation, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 86(5), 1269-1275.
Litz, R. E., Gómez Lim, M. A., and Raharjo, S. H. T. (2007). Avocado. Biotechnology in
Agriculture and Forestry, 60(Transgenic Crops), 167-187.
McCullough, C. (2012). WestCoast Produce Director of International, personal comm..
Pack, MM. (2008, August 1). An Avocado Story. Austin Chronicle.
Rosenblum. (2008, March). A Glossary of Healthy Fruits. Canadian Living. Retrieved from http://www.canadianliving.com/health/nutrition/top_25_healthy_fruits_ blueberries_apples_cherries_bananas_and_21_more_healthy_picks
Salazar-Garcia, S. (2005). Update on the avocado industry of Michoacán, Mexico. California Avocado Society Yearbook, 87, 31-44.
Stanford, L. (1998). Mexico’s Empresario in Export Agriculture: Examining the avocado industry of Michoacán.
Stanford, L. (2002). Constructing “quality”: The political economy of standards in Mexico’s avocado industry. Agricultural and Human Values, 19(4), 293.
Stanford, L. (2005). The binational integration of the US-Mexican avocado industries: examining responses to economic globalism. In G. Otero (Eds). Mexico in Transition: Neoliberal Globalism, the State and Civil Society. Winnipeg, MB: Fernwood.
Tanaka, S. N. (2008) Consuming the “Oriental Other,” constructing the cosmopolitan Canadian: Reinterpreting Japanese culinary culture in Toronto’s
Japanese restaurants. (Doctoral Dissertation). Retrieved from Proquest Dissertations and Theses. (NR37108).
interpreted imaginaries
Kathryn Mandell
Oct. 10.12
Geog395, Sundberg
Interpreted Imaginaries
I have never been able to erase myself from mind, remove it from my body, and so act as a value-neutral observer. A result of this inability is the filtering of information through my particular positional lenses: my gender, ethnicity, class, geographical location, and affiliations. Information is reinterpreted and re-personalized at every point at which it is learned or rewritten, (re)producing geographical imaginaries and inequalities. (Sundberg, 2005). Whether or not those imaginaries and inequalities become persistent is hinged on the power and prestige of the interpreter. I support this argument with examples from Sluyter (2006) “Humboldt’s Mexican Texts and Landscapes” and Mills, Taylor and Graham (2002) “Two Woodcuts Accompanying a 1509 German Translation of Amerigo Vespucci’s Letter to Pietro Soderini (1504).” I have also referred to Raffles’ (2002) “Intimate Knowledge,” as the work contributes to a dialogue on dominant interpretation.
Figure 1. Illustration from a German translation of Amerigo Vespucci’s letter to Pietro Soderini, Strassburg, 1509. (Mills & Taylor, 1998, p. 67).
My own perspective, that all acts of understanding are interpretive in nature, led me to a body of work called hermeneutics. Although I do not have the space to incorporate hermeneutics into my argument, it is related to critical and feminist geographies; specifically, it acknowledges the impossibility of a “[g]od’s eye view,” and seeks out the ways in which knowledge production and knowledge are situated. (Kinsella, 2006). In other words, “once we accept the notion of vantage point, we become aware that no one has a total vision from any place in the world.” (Greene, 1995b, p. 18, from Kinsella, 2006). Certainly, my vantage point provides less than a total vision of Latin America. Regardless, I am also a producer of knowledge. Some of my prominent conceptualizations were made in educational institutions, within the limiting structure of a curriculum. What was taught in the classroom was, therefore, grounded in the situated knowledge of my teachers, all of whom were white, multiple-generation North Americans, themselves likely taught in Eurocentric institutions; all of whom, at least by the time they were writing on a blackboard in front of me, were middleclass. In the classroom, the conquest of the Americas was taught in broad brushstrokes. To me, a thirteen year-old who dreamed in historical fiction, Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the “New World” and the following colonial project were exhilarating and romantic adventures. Now, I reflect on my younger perceptions of Latin America as being Orientalist, and sympathetic to the colonizers. Through layered interactions within the locales I occupied – school, home, friend circles –, I interpreted the conquest as the benevolent encounter of hardy pioneers with colourful Indians. From my interpretations, the narratives I engaged in school and on the playground were bound up in a civilized/savage binary. On a small scale, I reproduced Eurocentric conceptualizations of history.
Working briefly with Raffles’ text, I found another site of interpretation in the translation of information from non-scientific, “local” language to scientific, “universal” measurements and terminology. Raffles learned that Amazonian anthropogenic rivers, the object of his research, were nothing new or exciting to the people dwelling in close proximity to them. Still, their knowledge of the manmade rivers would not be considered legitimate until recorded by a scientist, and the research submitted through the appropriate institutional channels. In this example, the asymmetry is clear: local, experientially learned knowledge was inferior to the hegemonic scholarly belief that river-dwelling Amazonians could not intervene in nature for their own purposes. Raffles suggests that the rivers went unseen by scientists for so long because the questions that would bring them to light didn’t need to be posed. A dominant conceptual framework of the way a forest works already existed, and research questions primarily remained within the confines of this framework. Following a science/nature binary, the power and the prestige of the academic discipline of ecology made their narratives persistent. (2002, p. 326-327).
The second form of interpretation is made on more epistemologically equal ground, the interpretation by one person of work put together by others. This is a process of emphasizing particular sentences, findings, and thoughts, and de-emphasizing others. The interpretation retains only pieces of the original text. Sluyter argues that Humboldt was selective in his research, at times appearing to have made only cursory glances at relevant manuscripts. It appears to Sluyter that he highlighted evidence that corroborated his findings, while neglecting to incorporate contradictory analyses. Indeed, Humboldt did not incorporate specific, telling works into his depictions of Latin America. An eyewitness account of Mexico’s Gulf lowlands, in Historia verdadera dela conquista dela Nueva Espaia, by Diaz del Castillo (1632;[1632]1986, from Sluyter, 2006, p. 371), describes the author’s encounter with a major population centre that Humboldt makes no mention of: “…on seeing such a large city, and having seen no other larger, we greatly admired it, and how it was so luxuriant and like a garden, and so populous with men and women…” With his supporting evidence, he was able to maintain his position that the Gulf lowlands were relatively undeveloped. Although the degree of honesty and rigor in his research is questionable, Humboldt’s popularity and reputation gave his arguments weight enough to revive the “pristine myth” of the Americas. (Denevan, 1992, Sluyter, 2006). The influence of his work is debated, but it is widely considered to have freighted motivation for past and present economic development strategies in the Gulf lowlands. (Sluyter, 2006, p. 379).
Making sense of material observations is also an interpretive act. Though maps of Humboldt’s exploration show that he traveled through agricultural lands in Mexico’s Gulf Lowlands, and at a period of the dry season during which stone vestiges of terraces should have been visible, he makes no mention of major human interventions in the landscape. Reminiscent for me of the way teachers galloped through a history of Latin America, the amount of time available for study can determine the depth of analysis. The speed with which Humboldt traversed the Gulf Lowlands – spending two days there, in contrast to his six months spent taking field notes in the Lower Basin of Mexico – must have influenced the amount of terrain he crossed. Indeed, he refrained entirely from visiting Zempoala, the precolonial city noted in the previous paragraph. Such a sight may have unseated his observation that the Gulf Lowlands were relatively unpopulated. Additionally, interpretation is mediated by personal affect, in Raffles’ words the “mediator of rationality.” (2002, p. 332). Citing the role of affect in Humboldt’s observations, Sluyter states that the potential for contracting yellow fever “seems to have negatively influenced his judgement” of the Gulf Lowlands. (Sluyter, 2006, p. 377, 369).
Another site of interpretation is the translation of words across languages, where there is a high potential for differing, personal understandings and the mistranslation of text. In Colonial Spanish America: A Documentary History, the authors state that translations of Vespucci’s “Letter to Soderini” (published 1505-1506) magnified enticing parts of his writing. What is memorable to the interpreter is often emphasized in its reproduction. His depictions of the people he encountered on his journey to the Caribbean framed them as primordial, sexually unrestrained and brutish. Vespucci’s vantage point here is notable. Mills et al note that Vespucci wrote to satisfy certain agendas – to continue the funding of his voyages, to appease and tease European curiosity about newly charted territory – shaping his own interpretations. From his own social location, he depicted Americans in contrast to Western Europeans, and in holding customs familiar to him as the standard, found they were wrought with “deficiencies.” (1998, p. 60). The stratification of power is clear here: just as Vespucci interpreted the landscape of Latin America, those translators and artists, as well as an audience of Western Europeans, interpreted and his work to make his ideas persistent. Meanwhile, the narrative of those Caribbean peoples, cast as inferior to Vespucci’s, went unheard.
The artist who created woodcuts to accompany a German translation of the letter visually interpreted Vespucci’s words. He infused the pieces with his own perspectives on the “New World,” a place he had not traveled to himself. In doing so, he reinterpreted the traveler’s textual representation of Americans. In their distance from European societal structures, they are made out to look unhampered, the image of intimidation. This narrative was reproduced with Vespucci’s, each functioning as affirmations of inequality, deftly placing native peoples closer to nature in the nature/culture binary.
Figure 1. Illustration from a German translation of Amerigo Vespucci’s letter to Pietro Soderini, Strassburg, 1509. (Mills & Taylor, 1998, p. 67).
By situating knowledge, and attempting to make visible the personal texture of interpretation and production of thought, it becomes possible to look critically at commonly held conceptions and the binaries that ground them. Certainly, my own biases have made it into this short work. “Fundamentally fostering an attitude of vigilance rather than denial” is a dynamic and constant project. (Hooks, 1989, p. 164, from Kinsella, 2006). Neither prestige, nor power, nor the enduring nature of an idea or a worldview gives it resounding merit. Instead, the reproduction of either can result in the exaggeration and obfuscation of alternative bodies of knowledge.
References
Denevan, W. M. (1992) The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3) 369-385.
Kinsella, E. A. (2006). Hermeneutics and Critical Hermeneutics: Exploring Possibilities within the Art of Interpretation, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7(3) article 19.
Mills, K. R. & Taylor, W. B. (1998) Two woodcuts accompanying a 1509 German translation of Amerigo Vespucci’s letter to Pietro Soderini, Colonial Spanish America, A Documentary History (65-70). Wilmington DE:SR Books.
Raffles, H. (2002). Intimate knowledge. International Social Science Journal, 54(3), 325.
Sluyter, A. (2006). Humboldt’s Mexican texts and landscapes. Geographical Review, 96(3), 361-381.
Sunberg, J. (2005) Looking for the critical geographer, or why bodies and geographies matter to the emergence of critical geographies of Latin America. Geoforum, 36, 17–28.
follow the yellow, slick road
Preface: Trevor Barnes. Love him. Nothing about climate in this piece.
Kathryn Mandell GEOG361: Barnes
November 19.2012
Kraft Dinner: Follow the Yellow, Slick Road
Ingredients: ENRICHED PASTA (FROM WHEAT), CHEESE SAUCE [CHEESE (MILK, BACTERIAL CULTURE, SALT, CREAM, LIPASE, MICROBIAL ENZYMES, CALCIUM CHLORIDE, COLOUR), MODIFIED MILK INGREDIENTS, SALT, SODIUM PHOSPHATES, COLOUR (CONTAINS TARTRAZINE), FLAVOUR, CITRIC ACID].
I don’t eat it often, but when I do, I can guarantee you that a night has tapered to its close, and the walls of my stomach are wet with booze. My roommate, on the other hand, fills her cupboard with Kraft Dinner, one among many Kraft products neatly stacked on her shelf. She finds the brand comforting, and loyally consuming Kraft gives her a feeling of being situated in her home. Tara isn’t alone: Canadians eat more Kraft Dinner than does any other country. Its sales outstrip all other grocery products in Canada. (Rock, McIntyre, & Rondeau, 2009, p 167). My interest in the gooey, shiny product lies in its reputation as the paradigm of highly processed foods. It takes only nine minutes to cook – or more accurately, to assemble – a package of Kraft Dinner. What processes go into providing that expedience? I tend to shop for packaged products at a Buy-Low Foods in Kingsgate Mall, so that is where my search down the supply chain began. Peter, a manager, told me that I wouldn’t believe how much KD they go through. My curiosity lies in the geographical paths that Kraft Dinner passed through to land on Peter’s shelves.
The product – 225g of dried macaroni noodles, packaged with a sleeve of powdered cheddar cheese – is moved along the supply chain by farmers, transportation employees, processing plants, storage warehouses and retail outlets. Its nascence, however, is in its development. The macaroni and cheese was conceptualized in a lab in Glenview, Illinois. The way that a bowl of Kraft Dinner tastes is the product of chemical and flavour analysis at this lab, where the goal that drives research is to “Make Today Delicious” for most common denominator. More than 2000 Kraft employees work as scientists, chemists and engineers. (McTigue Pierce, 2011). The research then stretches beyond these Kraft personnel in the form of capital investment: the company funds wheat research at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Ontario; at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan; and through the United States Department of Agriculture.
More Kraft employees, based in Toronto and Chicago, are involved to make connections with suppliers, communicate with them over the course of their relationship, and ensure that they are following minutely detailed Kraft procedures. (Glenview Classifieds, Jan 17, 2012). These sourcing and global supply chain managers link the company to the product’s essential ingredients.
In order to procure these raw materials, the company signs contracts with indirect suppliers in Canada and the United States. This distance between Kraft and the farms they work with makes it difficult to render a complete supply chain, and a receptionist at Kraft’s headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, did little to assist me in my endeavour. While she insisted that my call would be returned, I have had no luck determining exactly which farms supply the company with the dairy and grains that are necessary to the manufacturing of Kraft Dinner. It is only occasionally that a relationship between an agricultural producer and Kraft is revealed – and often, only in circumstances of extreme dysfunction or marketable success. I was able to locate a dairy farm in Idaho that supplies Kraft thanks to a media storm over animal rights abuses that occurred there. In the case of grains, uncertainty over the suitability of Ontario soft white wheat to Kraft products made it possible to glean that Ontario wheat farms are engaged in the supply chain.
Searching the internet for a more exact answer, I found that questions identical to mine were asked by an elementary school student, and proved to be equally fruitless: upon asking where Kraft’s macaroni noodles come from, an e-mailed response told the inquirer that the information he sought was “considered confidential.” (Rosenblum, 2006). Even without precise information, an investigation of typical cereal farming practices in Canada makes it possible to see additional connections in the supply chain. Production of the fluorescent orange noodles is linked in the dirt to chemical manufacturers of pesticides and fertilizers, as well as to producers of agricultural machinery.
So, how to turn the wheat into flour? 80% of the grains used in Kraft’s North American grocery products, including those from Ontario, are transported to and milled in Toledo, Ohio. (Innis, 2006). An additional Kraft flourmill is located in Mississauga, Ontario. Recently harvested Ontario soft wheat does not cooked up into just the right, standardized noodle that Kraft demands. In order to achieve a consistent texture from box to box, ad infinitum, Ontario wheat is combined with U.S. breeds. The milled and blended flour is then moved along to a processing plant, where it will meet the other components of the recipe.
The ingredient responsible for the cantaloupe colour is one of the last on the list: tartrazine. This yellow dye is derived from coal-tar, and its procurement is not as easy to imagine. Coal-tars are remnants of coal carbonization, a process that produces natural gas and coke. The coal-tar is then chemically distilled twice: first, to produce pthalic anhydride, and then to produce chemical pigment and dyes. A major supplier of coal-tar substances is Ruetgers, a company based out of Castrop-Rauxel, Germany, that has a branch plant factory in Hamilton, Ontario. The plant is right off of the highway, and “optimally connected to rail and waterways.” (Ruetgers, 2010). In contrast to the relative ease of tracing production from one phase to the next, tartrazine reveals the unmappable nature of the reverberations from the supply chain. This microscopic chemical compound could cause physiological aggravation and disease in consumers. (Neuman, Creter, Elian, Nahum & Shaked, 1978).
The Kraft branch plant at which all of the elements are united is located in Mount Royal, Quebec. The location of the facility in Mount Royal has little to nothing to do with the social context, and everything to do with access to existing infrastructure. This area of Quebec has been labeled a food processing and biofood industrial cluster by the City of Montreal. From here, the Kraft Dinner makes its way by rail to Kraft’s distribution centre in Calgary. Trucks move the product to the Buy-Low Warehouse in Surrey; then Buy-Low takes over, and their own vehicles transport the shipment to the store. A truck unloads at the Mount Pleasant Buy-Low where I shop, and links up with me, the consumer.
When I interact with a Kraft product, the moment is mediated in part by the advertising and marketing strategies of the company. Kraft’s marketing division in Canada is segregated from its U.S. counterpart, and works out of the head office in Toronto, Ontario. The VP of grocery and beverages at Kraft, Chris Bell, told Marketing magazine that Kraft Canada’s advertising connects to consumer identities – Kraft “understand[s] who they are and how they consume their media. Then we make sure we have really good content that will engage them.” In spite of this proclamation of consumer understanding, Kraft has struggled to supplant the image of Kraft Dinner in the minds of Canadians as a cheap not-quite-food. At the end of the supply chain, Canadians tend to, like Tara, associate Kraft Dinner with nostalgia and comfort. (Rock, McIntyre & Rondeau, 2009). However, Canadians with less financial security, and therefore reduced food security, make alternative linkages: to discomfort, to Kraft Dinner as a “hunger-killer of last resort.” (p. 172). In these circumstances, Kraft’s advertising campaigns falter. Still, regardless of the symbolic interaction of a consumer with the food, the supply chain has been completed with a sale and profits continue to appreciate.
The capital that is generated by the Kraft Dinner supply chain has positive feedbacks in the company. In spite of the fact that the Cheese segment of the company is comparatively less profitable than other divisions of Kraft, it supplies the greatest portion of the Kraft’s North American revenue. From the wheat in the soil to store shelves, the chain exists in order to provide the capital that allows other supply chains to be dreamed up and used to grow Kraft’s profits. Without the capital from Kraft Dinner, Kraft Singles, et al, Kraft’s ability to expand would be reduced. For the company, then, Kraft Dinner’s supply chain plays a role in the fulfillment of their capital-generating, utopian ideal: a “Delicious World.” (Lutz, 31, from Kraft, 2005. p. 2).
Resources
Chapman, S. (2012, September). Manufacturing Taste: The (un)natural history of Kraft Dinner—a dish that has shaped not only what we eat, but also who we are. The Walrus, 9(8).
Glenview Classifieds. (2012, January 17). Sourcing Analyst – Milk, Nonfat Dry Milk, Whey Kraft Foods – Glenview. Retrieved from http://glenviewillinois.olx.com/sourcinganalyst-milk-nonfat-dry-milk-whey-kraft foodsglenview-iid-304550211
Harris, R. (2012). 2012 Marketers of the Year Shortlist: Kraft Canada. Marketing Magazine, November 19 issue. Retrieved from: http://www.marketingmag.ca/news/marketer-news/2012-marketers-of-the-year shortlist-kraft-canada-66498
Innis, J. (2006) Restoration keeps flour mill running. CoatingPros Magazine. Retrieved from: http://www.universalfloorwall.com/case-study/nabisco-kraft restoration-keeps-flour-mill-running
Koppers. (2003) Coal Tar Process. Retrieved from: http://www.koppers.com/htm/PandS_Proc_Main.html
Kraft. (2005) Form 10-K. United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lutz, D. (2006). Kraft Foods. Prepared for the Global Companies-Global Unions-Global Research-Global Campaigns conference.
MacCara, M. E. (1982). Tartrazine: a potentially hazardous dye in Canadian drugs. Canadian Medical Association, 126, 910-914.
McTigue Pierce, L. (March 3, 2011). Kraft-ed innovation. Retrieved from: http://www.packagingdigest.com/article/517159-Kraft_ed_innovation.php
Neuman, I, Creter, D, Elian, R, Nahum, H, & Shaked, P. (1978) The danger of “yellow dyes” (tartrazine) to allergic subjects. Clinical Allergy, 8(1) 65-8.
Rock, M, McIntyre, L, & Rondeau, K. (2009) Discomforting comfort foods: stirring the pot on Kraft Dinner and social inequality in Canada. Agriculture and Human Values, 26, 167-176.
Rosenblum, J. (2006) Kids to Kraft: where’s the wheat? Rethinking Schools, S.
Ruetgers N. V. (2010) Global reach is our vision: we’re making it a reality. Retrieved from: http://www.ruetgers-group.com/en/home.html
United States Department of Agriculture. (Nov 25, 2012). Research. Retrieved from:
http://www.spcru.ars.usda.gov/research/projects/projects.htm?accn_no=419672
on queer spaces, in honour of orlando
Kathryn Mandell Feb 15, 2012
GEOG350: T. Barnes
Swimming Pool, Library: Division of the City and Social Spaces
Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Swimming Pool Library” is a novel set in 1980s London. London functions as a social arena, where the lives of strangers continuously overlap. The structure of the city mediates their relationships. Written in the first person, it is the central character, William Beckwith’s perspective that is projected on the pages, as he moves through social and material space. The novel is a homosexual work, and this impacts the urban experience; familiar gay haunts are clearly marked on the city map. In the space between these safe places, the arena is uncertain terrain, which offers the possibility of either endlessly gratifying interactions or hostile, discriminatory encounters.
Hollinghurst’s London is hermetically sealed off from the female sex, women mentioned only twice, in passing, over the course of 288 pages. The city is a men’s realm.
The aforementioned familiar haunts are highly frequented spaces for social interaction between men, and so are distinct from the urban fabric. For instance, the Corry, a men’s club and recreational center, is a closet space, “remote from the rest of the world.” (Hollinghurst, 16) It is an important setting in the book: it functions as Beckwith’s principal place of retreat, where he can ground himself as an individual as well as within a social network. It is easy for men to approach one-another here, where they are exposed by exercising – and more so by showering – in public. Openness towards homosexuality is expected. A handful of gay bars serve a similar purpose. They allow characters to remove themselves from an urban space populated by a diverse range of people, and become more or less submerged in an enclave. Whether or not a space is designated as an enclave evolves with the relationships of those who inhabit them: bars become dear and then passé, and a hotel room — once remote – is turned by intimacy into another “underworld of life, purpose and sexuality.” (Hollinghurst, 13)
In the city these types of encounters spill out into public spaces. Miller (1989) studied the changing geography of gay culture, and witnessed as it “mov[ed] in from the margins” in London. Every walk down the street has the potential for exchanged glances, fondling or fornication. Strangers and acquaintances, by passing on the street, can have their relationships altered. In the novel, the crossing of Beckwith’s path with Charles Nantwich, a local aristocrat, is significant. They first meet in a dingy, cement washroom in a park, where Nantwich suffers a heart attack. Both of their lives change as a result of this spontaneous meeting: they become intimate acquaintances, and a part of each other’s personal geography. However, the park itself is of less significance than the more general social potential of city space: for instance, the subway is a “gigantic game of chance,” where one is “jammed up against many queer kinds of person.” (Hollinghurst, 55)
Simultaneously, anonymity makes characters vulnerable in the urban landscape. There exists the “risk of rejection, misunderstanding, abuse.” (Hollinghurst, 154) James, a foil and Beckwith’s closest friend, is made a target. He is lured from a gay club by a man he recognizes, but whom he does not know. The stranger reveals that he is a policeman, and charges him with indecency – an interaction that threatens the sanctity of the enclave. In tandem, it makes the very act of approaching a stranger more dangerous. “There is always that question, which can only be answered by instinct, of what to do about strangers.” (Hollinghurst, 153)
The arena of London is carved up by class. These divisions structure the relationships of characters. Beckwith “belongs to that tiny proportion of the populace that… owns almost everything.” (Hollinghurst, 6) He does not distance himself emotionally from the lower class. Class lines blur in his sexually charged interactions with individuals. However, geography draws bold lines. In a trip to Stratford East, the segregated nature of the city by wealth becomes clear. London in the 1980s is a burgeoning financial center, hinged on the deindustrialization of the city. Blue-collar workers, ejected by price from the city core, are clustered in decrepit flats on the outskirts of London. Coupled with his distinctively homosexual aesthetic, his upper-class status makes Beckwith an outsider there. These lower-class sections of the city offer him greater uncertainty and hostility. With the intention of visiting a loved one on his trip to Stratford East, Beckwith is mugged by a group of skinheads. One of the muggers hatefully emits, “You can tell he’s a fuckin’ poof!” a statement which sickens him further when coupled with another realization: he must appear to be “pickled in culture and money.” (Hollinghurst, 202) The division by class of the built environment limits the scope of Beckwith’s social life.
By contrast, the spaces that characters most frequently occupy are firmly in the upper class. Beckwith has the privilege of seeing places that people of lower status would be barred from. He sees an opera from a private box; he sits for dinner at an austere London Club; he steps on ancient tiles in Lord Nantwich’s basement, and passively looks over his collection of artifacts and art pieces. He is also given access to the gay enclaves of the rich, inside of which he is flattered and boozed, sexual offers extended from all sides. To enter most of these spaces, he is first sniffed and assessed by a butler, the gatekeeper of the exclusive corners of the city. An inheritance makes work unnecessary for the novel’s protagonist. This makes it likely that he experiences more of the urban fabric than most, never confined to particular spaces by lack of resources, or responsibility to either a job or family.
Although also upper class, James’ commitment to his work as a surgeon leaves him feeling deprived of social interaction. He sees “hundreds of people,” but “never anyone” he’d like to. This suggests that Will is privileged not only by money and time, but also by an openness to connecting with strangers; James confirms this by explaining his feeling of being “accustomed” to having few entanglements. He is “out of it.” (Hollinghurst, 257) So, it is not only the city, but also the attitude of those in it, which forms their social experience. Meanwhile, many scenes detail James’ interactions with men at the bar and in the heightened sexual environment of the Corry. In spite of his sentiments, the “sexed immediacy of London life” (Hollinghurst, 8) appears ever present.
It is the city of London that makes these encounters possible. The sheer number of people makes most relationships ephemeral. Individuals can noncommittally cross paths with one another. Cosmopolitanism, a partner to the globalization underway, underlies this type of interaction. For Beckwith, the diversity found in the city is represented on a small scale in the shower room of the Corry, by the “variety of the male organ,” displayed in “instructive contrasts.” This diverse population, when not scaled down to fit a shower, is immense. It makes the city vibrant and capricious. Moving through the social realm, interactions alter the day-to-day lives of all who participate. Beckwith’s existence is monotonous and without objective; London makes him feel alive. (Hollinghurst, 153)
Works Cited
Hollinghurst, A. (1988). The Swimming-Pool Library. New York, NY: Random House.
Miller, N. (1989) In Search of Gay America: Women and Men in a Time of Change. New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press.
O’Hanlon, S. & Hamnett, C. (2009). Deindustrialisation, Gentrification and the Re Invention of the Inner City: London and Melbourne, c.1960–2008. Urban Policy and Research, 27(3), 211-216.
affectiveecologies 