Hungry? Let’s eat!
Yet for much of the world, it’s not that simple. Many people across the globe—and not a few in these United States—live with unsatisfied hunger on a daily basis. A surprising number of them live in countries that are, like our own, rich in resources and even arable land, but in which their food-producing ability has dwindled; often the arable land has been expropriated by occupiers of one kind or another. Meanwhile this country poisons the earth to produce a glut of food (of ever-decreasing nutritional value), much of which gets thrown away at the end of the day.
Around the world, people are crying out for food justice, in efforts that range from resisting the expropriation of indigenous lands to constructing new, more sustainable and/or equitable models—or returning to ancient ones—for food production. This issue of WIN offers a kind of smorgasbord, a look at some of those efforts, and also at some of the deep and complex connections between food injustice and other forms of exploitation—along with a couple of recipes so you can put some of these ideas into practice and on your table.
We have two stories, from opposite sides of the earth, of indigenous resistance to the degradation of farm- and food-producing land. In our own hemisphere, Robert DesJarlait of the Red Lake Ojibwe-Anishinaabe Nation of Minnesota describes the centuries-old central place his people reserved for the wild rice—manoomin, in the Ojibwe-Anishinaabe language—that grows in the wetlands of Minnesota and Wisconsin. The manoomin is endangered now by treaty-violating pollution from mining enterprises, and the Ojibwe-Anishinaabe are fighting the pollution and trying to keep the treaties enforced. (Along with DesJarlait’s account of the struggle, he gives us one of the few non-vegetarian recipes ever to appear in these pages.) And in West Papua, in the Indonesian archipelago, indigenous people are going through a similar struggle to preserve their traditional food sources, in this case the tracts where their staple sago grows and where they hunt and gather other foods. West Papuan journalist Octo Mote and WRL ’s (and East Timor and Indonesia Action Network’s) John M. Miller give an account of how the Indonesian government is violating every principle of sustainable development with deforestation and other projects—along with every principle of human rights—in West Papua.
At WRL and in the pages of WIN, we try to remember that nonviolent revolution must involve constructive programs as well as resistance: building a new society within the shell of the old one. In this issue, the constructive side is represented by Connecticut high school senior Lloyd Schramm, who writes about a YouthPeace “experiment” in re-learning food and leaves us with a recipe for a vegan-friendly pesto made with local ingredients.
The reviews in these pages also look at food in our lives. Jeanne Strole reviews Annia Ciezadlo’s Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, a story about coping with war seen through the lens of cultural and gastronomic displacement, and former WIN editor Judith Mahoney Pasternak provides some historical context with a look back at Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal.”
If indeed, as the French lawyer, politician, and gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said (more or less), “You are what you eat,” we’d better start helping the world to eat better. Hungry for justice? Let’s cook some up.
And bon appetit!
