Take-out: Food Insecurity and Resistance

photo by john cameron from unsplash

photo by john cameron from unsplash

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen.

These lines, from Woody Guthrie’s classic paean to the outlaw life, Pretty Boy Floyd, demonstrate the two kinds of thieves in this world: the capitalists who have stolen from the common stock for profit and those who have been driven by the cruelty of economic inequality to steal it back.

We’re taught to fear the masked criminals (though now that we are all masked, it is much harder to tell them apart), the hooded prowler out for your jewels, the mugger in the alleyway. Yet we pay rent and tax to those who’ve claimed a monopoly on the natural world: the landlords and CEOs who’ve ransomed our rights for an ever-increasing price.

photo by franki chamaki from unsplash

photo by franki chamaki from unsplash

Everything in this world is already owned. The concept of property has created a free-market which stakes its claim on every natural resource, placing a price tag on that which should be held in common. As the mutualist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously reminds us, “la propriété, c'est le vol

Long ago, when the earth was first carved up by early merchant capitalists, resources such as arable land and game rich forests were monopolized by force. Agrarian people were displaced and absorbed into the economy of cities, where they became increasingly alienated from one another, the products of their labor and their ability to rely upon themselves and their community to survive.

When people become disconnected from the knowledge and tools to produce their own food, they become dependent on the apparatus of supermarkets and restaurants. These institutions take food which, framed in Marxist terms, has an intrinsic ‘use value’(because we need it to live), and attaches the capitalist ‘exchange value’ wherein food becomes worth more because of the methods of production/cost of labor. To this a third value is attached, what Baudrillard has called the ‘sign value’ wherein certain food is perceived as more desirable because of its attachment to brand names, celebrities, and the social capital of eating what/where is “on trend.”

photo by maksym ivaschenko from unsplash

photo by maksym ivaschenko from unsplash

When a person cannot afford this now overvalued food, they may turn to the food bank industry and receive nutritionally negligible, preservative filled “non-perishable” items. Instead of access to quality ingredients and knowledge about cooking and growing techniques, the food bank provides what wealthier people didn’t want. This foments the culture of dependence, ensuring the population is beholden to the state and its allies. Where, now, is one left to turn?

“My stomach hurts so I’m looking for a purse to snatch;” Tupac Shakur explains how a society like this will never go through any meaningful Changes. According to a Food Insecurity Policy paper, 1.8 million Canadian houses are food-insecure, with nearly half unable to afford balanced meals. Many neighborhoods in Canada are considered “food deserts,” areas where residents have little or no access to healthy food. These neighborhoods are overwhelmingly poor, and the population are driven into the waiting arms of the food bank profiteers.

Every capitalist who has claimed a monopoly on a food supply and withheld it from others at a price is a thief. This presents the starving person with a moral question: is it theft if you are stealing back that which is yours? Is it fair to demand that everyone have equal access to food? For the mother who cannot afford to feed her family, who has had everything kept from her by pen-pushing thieves, where else is there to turn than the six-gun?

And as Bertolt Brecht says in the Threepenny Opera: “food is the first thing, morals follow on.”

 

For information about food bank alternatives visit parkdalefoocentre.ca.


me.jpg

Matthew Smith

Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks far too much tea and overthinks everything.

Twitter: @Squabbleronline

Quisque iaculis facilisis lacinia. Mauris euismod pellentesque tellus sit amet mollis.
— Claire C.