“Food is not a commodity; It’s a gift.”
This was text messaged to me on Saturday by one of my best friends who was attending a weekend retreat organized by her church about sustainable food production and Christianity. As I read her text messages–her sprouting desire to learn to garden–I found myself wishing I could hear all of what speaker Fred Bahnson had to say, though Christianity isn’t always consistent with my spiritual and political persuasions.
What I find particularly compelling about this statement is that it has clarified some apprehension I’ve felt about a similar mantra that is often echoed within food sovereignty discourses. That being, “Food is not a commodity; It’s a right.” Let me be clear, I don’t disagree with either version. But the later, has always rung with an air of legalese that, deep down, I have felt does not quite capture the gravity of what is at stake in such a declaration. That we have need for such statements, that they hit our ears with a sense of novelty, that such things are uttered in the spirit of revolutionary politics and not unassailable fact, is something of a tragedy. As a student of cultural/political economy, and someone who has structured their research around the ontologies of value, I am seeing that the valuation processes associated with the gift, as opposed to the commodity, are infinitely more suited to food politics–while I won’t go into it here, the work of Marcel Mauss again finds its way back into the fore.
The photo above, the neat raised beds, center walk, mulched lawn, is perhaps what my yard might look like if I were a more tedious individual, if I were neater and more fastidious. This is the property of Julie Bass, who faced 93 days in prison for planting a vegetable garden in her front yard. Though the City of Oak Park, MI has since dropped charges, her fight is worth discussing in light what I’m thinking about this evening. Her situation raises the questions, “Wasn’t legal recourse exactly what was needed here? Weren’t’ Ms. Bass’ rights exactly what needed protecting in this case?” Well, yes.
But the gift does not discount our rights and offers something more. The gift, as Mauss theorized, is the foundation of a social structure–as the giver secures her intention to invest in the formation of social relationships and the receiver reciprocates with an acknowledgement of the social bond. The gift of food, the practical and wondrous reality that is harbored in the potential of each seed, the (unequal) bond negotiated between people and land, should provide us more hope than an army of financial experts’ confidence in the market could ever inspire.
This weekend, I looked out over the plot of ground on the south side of my house–the space that today, represents 3 times more garden area than I worked last year, and is now the smallest of the 3+ plots on my property. I looked over the weathered boards pulled from dumpsters and salvaged from deconstructed pallets that frame the bed, the uneven rows of vegetables and crooked bamboo stakes, the encroaching weeds and pest-chewed leaves, and I am able to contemplate fearlessness in way that SSRIs and money have never made accessible.
Expanding on last year - supplementing this.
Though I will never be one to minimize the palpability of material reality, especially when it comes to the realities of injustice and poverty, I will offer here that poverty in the US can be summarized as the systemic obfuscation of hope. Legal rights, the centerpiece of our uniquely American ethical calculus, if you will remember, are currently and historically some of the most unequally allocated objects known to humankind.
Analytically, the gift, I think, is different in that it negates the sneakiest of neoliberal paradoxes. We say on one hand, that rights are inalienable, that they are bequeathed at birth and protected until death. However, we practice (and codify in our penal and military systems) something entirely different. Rights, as we articulate them, are negotiable–something we earn ostensibly via consistency with the status quo and are always in jeopardy of losing.
A seed however will germinate, despite how it arrives in the soil. The gift is given no matter who the recipient. Herein lies the beauty. The valuation of gifts evades our flawed and clumsy tallies of worth, wealth, and deserving action. It makes silly our bar codes and meticulously stacked displays. It forces us to look at the City of Oak Park and all the institutional forces like it, and ask not “how can you possibly abridge our right to grow food?” That question has unfortunately been answered over and over–in the struggle for women’s suffrage, in civil rights movements, in the contemporary plight of LGBTIQ folks nationwide, and for those who have dared to Occupy–”when the rights of many conflict with the whims of few who are deemed more important, justifications aren’t hard to come by.” The logic of the gift poses what I think is a more compelling and difficult to answer question, “What business does [Oak Park] have arbitrating the giving and receipt of a gift by two other parties–in particular, the gifts of hope and nourishment.
The tomato run is growing!
