Part of the success of the movement has been its largely nondenominational, big-tent approach, committed to the idea that food should be a pleasure available to all, and that, above all, food is a domain in which something can and ought swiftly to be done. 2 Indeed, it’s the very success in community farms, gardens, feeding programs, kitchens, and food banks that has helped recruit more and more people to a movement that seems to offer the transcendence of “old politics” so earnestly cashed in by the Obama campaign in its first election run.

Yet it’s the movement’s practical success that puts it in a precarious position today. At the time of this writing, hunger is its highest levels in a generation (Nord et al. 2010)—50.2 million Americans are food insecure, and one-third of female-headed households are food insecure. At the same time, food prices are rising, unemployment remains stubbornly high, and a Republican Congress has ambitions to amputate social programs from the body of government in the name of fighting inflation (Patel 2011). In the resulting vacuum, community organizations have been pressed, much to government’s approval, into the business of service provision. As Suzi Leather remarked of a similar period in the UK government’s history:

It is easy to see the appeal of the community development approach for the present administration: it smacks of the selfhelp ethos, involves vanishingly small resources and can be encouraged without at the same time having to admit to the existence of poverty. (Leather 1996, 47–48)

To inoculate ourselves against the dangers of being co-opted into the very food system we have spent a decade criticizing, we need politics. Two instant caveats, though. First, merely talking about the politics of the modern food system isn’t sufficient to prevent the movement’s energy from being dissipated while dealing with the “dignified emergency” 3 of increasing hunger. History is littered with all-night activist conversations about the root causes of hunger, with little change to believe in the morning after. Second, a call to talk about capitalism in the food system isn’t a call for a single totalitarian politics to which all must subscribe. Every US social movement, from abolition to the Tea Party, has drawn on an assortment of sometimes contradictory political positions.

The problem is that the food movement’s ideological pantry is rarely raided, and despite a rich history, there’s not nearly enough talk about it. By food politics, I don’t just mean the kinds of interaction between state and private sector presented by Marion Nestle in her fine dissection of the food industrial complex (Nestle 2002). I’m referring to politics as an ideology, as a positive system of beliefs, analytical principles, and values that informs practice (Badiou 2005; Hall 1996; Rancière 2007). And of these systems of politics, there seems insufficient praxis. Perhaps the origins of the food movement, in politically embattled times, is to blame for a certain ideological quietism. But whatever the food movement’s genealogy, its future needn’t be hostage to the past.

The problem is that the food movement’s ideological pantry is rarely raided, and despite a rich history, there’s not nearly enough talk about it. By food politics, I don’t just mean the kinds of interaction between state and private sector presented by Marion Nestle in her fine dissection of the food industrial complex (Nestle 2002). I’m referring to politics as an ideology, as a positive system of beliefs, analytical principles, and values that informs practice (Badiou 2005; Hall 1996; Rancière 2007). And of these systems of politics, there seems insufficient praxis. Perhaps the origins of the food movement, in politically embattled times, is to blame for a certain ideological quietism. But whatever the food movement’s genealogy, its future needn’t be hostage to the past.

Part of the mechanisms of the Black Panther Party’s self-defense were programs for survival, ranging from the provision of free shoes and education to land banking and the school breakfast program (Huey P. Newton Foundation and Hilliard 2008). In the provision of these services, Newton understood the ambiguities and contradictions within the programs:

All these programs satisfy the deep needs of the community but they are not solutions to our problems. That is why we call them survival programs, meaning survival pending revolution. We say that the survival program of the Black Panther Party is like the survival kit of a sailor stranded on a raft. It helps him to sustain himself until he can get completely out of that situation. So the survival programs are not answers or solutions, but they will help us to organize the community around a true analysis and understanding of their situation. When consciousness and understanding is raised to a high level then the community will seize the time and deliver themselves from the boot of their oppressors. (Huey P. Newton Foundation and Hilliard 2008, 4)

The breakfast program itself served a shifting menu, with varying degrees of success, numbers served, and outreach in the 45 different branches nationwide. 5 New York’s chapters fed numbers in the hundreds, California’s in the thousands. Nonetheless, the universal aspiration was for a balanced diet of fresh fruit twice a week, and always a starch of toast or grits, protein of sausage, bacon, or eggs, and a beverage of milk, juice, or hot chocolate (Huey P. Newton Foundation and Hilliard 2008, 31). In practice, the breakfasts were constrained by funds and in-kind donations. The FBI was keen to prove that these donations were extorted from local businesses, but despite considerable effort, failed to do so (Newton, Hilliard, and Weise 2002, 340). Meanwhile, there is now a wide consensus that, for many children, the meals were the only source of nutrition in a child’s day.

Beyond the success in feeding, there was a political component to the program. The New York Times (Caldwell 1969) represented the breakfasts as austere “diets of food and politics” at which children recited the dour mantras of the movement: “I am a revolutionary; I love Huey P. Newton; I love Eldridge Cleaver; I love Bobby Seale; I love being a revolutionary; I feel good; off the pigs; power to the people.”

In some cases, the police and FBI were successful in casting the breakfasts as not only doctrinaire, but as dangerous, with rumors circulating that the Panthers were serving poisoned food, and would rape girls if they could (Abron 1998). In one case, the Chicago police allegedly broke into a Panther feeding facility and urinated on the children’s food the night before it was to be served (Heynen 2009, 414). In some places, particularly New York, those rumors took hold, and parents kept their children away from the programs. Yet a recording made at the New York breakfast program suggests that the brainwashing wasn’t always successful—when a 12-yearold boy starts calling for “Fewey Hewton” to be freed, everyone felt safe enough to laugh along (KPFA and Kamen 1970, 15:30).

A more subtle understanding of the program’s politics, one repeated by activists in print and interviews, is that the breakfasts were explicitly geared toward demonstrating what socialism might look like (Hilliard 2007; KPFA and Kamen 1970). In a touching moment in one testimony, a woman recalls a child’s transformation, after being found filling his pockets with food and hearing that he wasn’t stealing but that the food was his and would he like a bag. As Joan Kelley, national coordinator of the Black Panther Breakfast Program said, “We try to teach children not so much through indoctrination but through our practice and example about sharing and socialism” (KPFA and Kamen 1970, 6:14). By bursting the idea of food as a charity bestowed by rich to poor, setting in its place the notion that food is a right—and the suggestion that an order might be composed without private property—the act of feeding children was transformed from pacifying to revolutionary, without a single “Free Huey” passing anyone’s lips.

The breakfast program was part of a suite of survival programs with explicit goals of transforming relations around private property—the vision of a land bank, for instance, called for the creations of trusts that would suspend the profit motive from land tenure, making other arrangements possible (Davis 2010). Land reform was, in turn, part of a broader political strategy, enshrined in the Panthers’ Ten Point Plan, which featured “power to determine the destiny of our black and oppressed communities,” “full employment,” “an end to . . . robbery by the capitalists,” “decent housing,” “decent education,” “completely free health care,” and an end to war, militarism, police brutality, and, in the final point, “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.” It’s hard to argue that this longer vision, the goal of emancipation postponed, didn’t infuse the feeding programs with a political momentum missing from common philanthropy’s food banks. It was the political vision, the possibility of a different tomorrow after surviving today, that transformed the Panthers’ feeding into radical social work (Bailey and Brake 1976).

In an important and thoughtful paper, geographer Nik Heynen (2009) presents a series of interviews with women who were part of the BPP’s feeding programs in the 1970s. One activist cited by Heynen 8 spoke, like many others, of the lengthy discussions and dialogues around gender, and the lengths to which the Panthers earnestly but inconsequentially paid lip service to questions of gender equality 9 and then said:

You could have a thousand dialogues on gender issues and you would have never gotten that result faster than you did by saying look, if you love these children, if you love your people, you better get your ass up and start working in that breakfast program. (413)

It was the active participation in the program that transformed gender relations, not merely the talking about it.

This vision of gender transformation isn’t, however, widely shared. When I asked one activist whose work was based in New Haven about Heynen’s ideas, she was unimpressed. She wasn’t alone— many of the women who were part of the Panthers engaged not because of the enlightened gender praxis, but despite it (LeBlancErnest 1998; Matthews 1998; Nyasha 1990). Indeed, the only way in which many women were taken seriously within the movement was not because of equality over the cooking range, but because they were armed. For some women within the Black Panther Party, power grew out of the barrel of a gun.

But it’s not inconceivable that, among the dozens of Panther chapters, even if women have reported the persistence of patriarchy, this sexist bubble might also have been punctured by moving men into kitchens and onto serving lines for children.

The Black Panthers’ vision for radical change is one from which the food movement today might benefit. The Panthers understood that while the needs of the hungry were real, and deserved immediate attention, those needs could only ultimately be banished by a far more radical transformation than the government was ready to provide. Political education was, the Panthers knew, vital to understanding the reasons behind their hunger. So they read Mao, Frantz Fanon, and Marx. They also knew that the combination of political education and effective action made them dangerous, turning them into enemies of a status quo that produced hunger. Hence the massive government-sponsored attempts to murder their example, and parade its body as a warning to those whose hearts might harbor similar hopes.

Yet the Panthers’ example remains important for today’s food movement. Clearly, it’s difficult to balance the desire to recruit a broad movement under a single banner, and the need to broach the potentially divisive subject of capitalism. You can find this tension within the notion of “food sovereignty” that guides the international peasant movement, La Via Campesina. Their definition of “food sovereignty” has changed over time (Patel, 2010), though it is at heart a call for political equality at every level of the food system, so that decisions about the food system might be made democratically.

With an organizational structure as diverse as La Via Campesina’s, vagueness is politically expedient. In a movement peopled with landed peasants and landless workers, any talk about “the means of production” is fractious—some folk in La Via Campesina have land and are reluctant to talk about giving it up—even if talking about all of this might provide more political focus. Food sovereignty is, from the outset, an idea built on postponing certain difficult political discussions to another day—just as long as everyone gets a say in what a new food system might look like.

Precisely because equality in political participation has to come first, the one conversation that can’t be avoided or postponed is the one about gender. Although questions about unequal ownership may be punted to tomorrow, the consequences of gender inequality need to be addressed today. Hence a recently launched campaign confronting violence against women, which itself is the product of hard conversations, and concerted organizing by women within La Via Campesina (2011). The campaign stretches not only to domestic violence, but the structural violence of poverty, i.e., to those inequities magnified by capitalism.

For La Via Campesina, some of the most powerfully transformative and practical parts of a theory about global change in the food system come from actual gendered fights for the future of food. The Black Panthers’ struggles for survival may not yet have brought the revolution, but at least they saw the scale of change needed so that hunger might finally be banished in our communities. And in the US today, the group most likely to be food insecure are households headed by women. It’s possible to explain why this is so—why women are paid less than men, why hunger flourishes among the poor, and why capitalism will not willingly provide food to those unable to afford it.

In providing these explanations, and organizing effective actions to address inequity, we will make the food movement more threatening to the powerful. That sounds frightening, but every movement that has ever accomplished social change—whether the civil rights movement, the Indian independence movement, or indeed the global justice movement—has put the demands of justice ahead of the need to accommodate oppressive thinking. Instead, such movements have been armed with radical ideas for a better future, in which all people are possessed of dignity, and able to govern themselves. The Black Panther Party’s vision of a world where all children are fed, where food, healthcare, education, access to land, and housing and clothes are rights and not privileges is a vision that can and should spark the food movement today. Inspired by their example, and learning the lessons from their experience, we can dream beyond the limitations imposed by capitalism, of a world in which hunger is, for the first time, a specter of the past.

http://rajpatel.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/patel-2011-food-movements-unite.pdf

shennong posted:
this looks great, thanks. it really frustrates me when urban activists talk about how fucked up the food system is but they never bother to actually go out and make connections with sympathetic local farmers or anything. i was doing some serious handwringing about the local occupy group because they were shopping at supermarkets and no one was interested in trying to get together and talk to some organic farmers about setting up something like a food-for-shit exchange where they could ship their waste nutrients back to a farm in return for food etc. if via campesina got properly connected with urban activists and organisers and they started making some serious land reform demands that would be great. what was the source of the food for the black panthers' programs?

are there really organic farmers who'd be interested in night soil? you don't need much pasture to get all the shit you need

crustpunk_trotsky posted:
who says they have to eat corn, make them eat grass and replenish barren lands with their poop

but then our meat would be too lean!

shennong posted:
ya, do that too!! but eventually you have to have something to replenish the pasture with after you've moved the phosphorus from the pasture over to your barren lands. unfortunately conservation of mass is not suspended by organic farming techniques

i'm not understanding you. does grass growing deplete the soil to any significant extent?