Potluck connections from a food-systems muser.

I welcome the opportunity to ruminate here on some of the ideas raised by this volume, and upon my food systems joys and perplexities more generally. The papers in this volume explored some intriguing moments among the myriad of stories which define our contemporary foodways--from the foundational mysteries of life encapsulated in a seed, and the deeply local context of an urban garden, to the realm of the food we prepare in our homes and which root us to a tangle of convoluted cultural histories. And, all of them I would add, intertwine with the increasingly complex and contentious narratives which define humanity's ties to the stuff of the earth which sustains us.

For me, food is a centering element in my life, a continuous source of inspiration and reflection, reaching from the everyday moments of Red River cereal in the morning to those serious winter soups my partner makes for our boys and me at the end of the day. In between those end-posts of my daily nourishment, along with the fair-trade brew and apple turnover I nosh on at the local coffee shop and the sandwich with colleagues at lunch, are infusions of my reflections on the nature of the conventional food system in the world around me. This can mean anything from the soils or substrate from which food emerges, the people who pick the food or butcher the animals we eat, the gauntlet of machines, trucks, factories, packages and containers through which foods pass, to the people and organizations enmeshed in the processing, preparation, and distribution channels along which such foods wend their way to the world plate. In this vein, food is increasingly saturated with the meanings represented by the choices my food signifies--what I consume, how I consume it, with whom I eat it, and with what frame of appreciation, if any, that I tie in with these daily moments and rituals. If I am what and where I eat, then I am connected in multifarious ways with the evolving food cosmos.

Let me create for you a little more context As Winter merges into Spring where I live, I reflect on how seasons have become a more conscious part of my path in the last decade. I walk to work along the flood-plains of the lower Grand River in southern Ontario, sometimes through blustery winter storms, sometimes in the enveloping heat of the summer, while almost always in mind of how these once fertile bottom-lands played host to the pre-European cultures, the Native peoples who inhabited this realm for so many thousands of years. This was the rich and diverse world of the Carolinian forest zone--hickories, black walnut, paw-paws, ungulates, birds and a host of other forest creatures. I picture in this diverse environment, in concert with the three sisters intertwined in those seemingly long-ago verdant clearings along the river, a deeply local world of custom, sustenance and celebration of the peoples living in this place. (1)

Many years later, my own turn-to-the-local, though pale in its comparative contours, is punctuated by forays to the Devon Acres CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) just outside of Brantford, of tending my garden of Brandywines, purple Cherokees, strawberries, blackberries, various native beans, garlic and gourds that I take from the garden through the summer and fall, and by my weekly 'foraging' at the farmers' market here. At the same time, my coffee and chocolate fixes, along with a decidedly Canadian disposition to bananas, no matter their fair-trade and organic constitution, tie me inexorably into that vortex of the global food system. And at that juncture, I find myself immersed in imagined waves of massive container ships, agri-business office towers in the North, and swashes of electronic transactions linked to 'production' platforms and cash-crop regimes across the global south. And, from these latter images, I journey to the homes and fields of the underpaid farm-hands enduring the consequences of environmentally and health-degrading agricultural practices, while toiling surreally at the behest of millions of distant and detached consumers--who, for the most part, are largely and unknowingly removed from the impacts of their decisions. To me, this has awesome and bewildering collective social and environmental consequences and, some days, my efforts seem like just so many gnats in the face of the juggernaut--from my place here in the North, in Canada, in Ontario, in Brantford, by the Grand River from my little kitchen putting raspberries in a bowl of yoghurt.

And on other days, I see hope taking shape in the local and alternative food systems movements--in all their many and diverse configurations. Though perhaps quite small relatively speaking, I position them as intense points of light piercing the gloom around this common theme, and as outcomes of an emerging shared sense of the deep and inimical presence, in my judgment, of the global food system tyranny. My efforts are moved and take sustenance from seeing so many others in my part of the world swimming to counter those swirling eddies, and from those more globally-recognized food-pontificators that rise to the surface like beacons: Michael Pollan's journeys through four meals, ending with his semi-metaphorical hunt for that local, wild meal in northern California; Barbara Kingsolver, wafting words of humour along with smells of harvest from her canning kitchen in the US Appalachians; from Raj Patel and his far-flung stories of food-growing and consuming hope in the south; to Marion Nestle wandering and waxing in her measured tones through the crammed and seemingly endless aisles of processed foods at the centre of the giant American food emporiums; and then finally to Francis Moore Lappe (1971) from that place in the wilderness almost forty years ago beckoning us to a more respectful and appropriate global diet.

I also turn to the likes of Wayne Roberts of the Toronto Food Policy Council speaking recently at a Guelph University symposium in Ontario where he shared his witty tirades regarding the industrial food-hegemons from his "No-nonsense Guide to World Food" (2008), and his jocular anecdotes on the emerging data. In such a realm of inquiry as the world food system, I also see the critical and sometimes painful reality that many of these food-system crusaders are helping (or hoping) to unmask the deeply disconcerting prevalence of our participation: "... consumers ignorant to the suffering that precedes every mouthful of food" (Patel 2007: 293). Patel recognizes that we in the North struggle to grasp our own complicity in what he calls the 'dark plenitude' of our bulging food terminals and the blight of fast-food arterial strips located in every town and city. Such advocates for more critical reflection and action in the face of the complex array of structural and psychological barriers erected to keep us in some befuddlement around food, note with some resignation that "It is very much in the interest of the food industry to exacerbate our anxieties about what to eat, the better to then assuage [us] with new products." (Pollan 2007: 5). Pollan's investigation of the deep and powerful, yet largely hidden role of corn in the North American food basket is indicative of the manner by which the industrial food system is structured. From corn's more humble and authentic origins as Zea mays thousands of years ago in Mexico, to its insertion in thousands of food products on the shelves of industrial food retailers, I witness the revelation of this story and its connection to me in my home in Brantford. That is, that ancestral races of the current dominant strain of this plant in its massive swathes of green across the western US states, have been grown for more than a millenium by the pre and contemporary Iroquoian cultures in this part of the world--literally in my backyard. The food chain and its complex of stories, once again circles back to me in my daily sojourns around my home town.

So, as I muse upon, decipher and attempt to situate all of these images, events, players, and unfolding narratives somewhere in the swirl of the food-chains out there. I see moments in the nested scales of the food system. That is from the older couple with their brooding hens from whom they collect (surreptitiously) a couple of eggs in the backyard of their home in Vancouver; to the transnational corporations orchestrating--from on high and behind the scenes--the direction of the US Farm Bill and World Trade Organization agricultural policy. And then I drift back to me, munching on a knobbly carrot from Robin Kirby's farm and taking comfort in the sight of the strawberry plants and rhubarb poking out of the soil as the ground thaws in early April here.

References

Gangnier, G. 2009. The Three Sisters. Available from http://www.cqsb.qc.ca/svs/434/fn3sis.htm [Accessed June 5th, 2009].

Kingsolver, B. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle--A Year of Food Life. HarperCollins Pub. Ltd., New York.

Lappe, F.M. 1971. Diet for a Small Planet. Ballantine Books, New York.

Nestle, M. 2006. What to Eat? North Point Press, New York.

Patel, R. 2007. Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power, and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System. HarperCollins Pub. Ltd., Toronto.

Pollan, M. 2006. The Omnivore's Dilemma--A Natural History of Four Meals. The Penguin Press, New York.

Roberts, W. 2008. The No-nonsense Guide to the World Food System. New Internationalist[TM]Pub., Oxford, UK.

(1) The three sisters refers to a kind of companion planting of the beans, corn and squash of Native American peoples, though most specifically associated with the Haudenosaunee people of this region of North America who saw these sisters as the 'gifts of their creator' (The Three Sisters, 2009).

Robert Feagan is an Associate Professor in Geography and Contemporary Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (Brantford). He can be reached at rfeagan@wlu.ca

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