Permaculture is about a lot more than just food. But food is something that comes up a lot in Permaculture simply because Permaculture is about people, about meeting the needs of people in the immediate moment without damaging the ability of ecological systems to meet our needs in the long term, and so of course that leads us inevitably to food. And because food is so integral to our basic living as people — it’s our Zone One, the place we begin from — many people come to Permaculture through food. As our globalized food system is showing now on a daily basis the symptoms of its tragic absence of ecological principles and sensible design, food is getting a lot of peoples’ attention and through that is bringing people to more wholistic and less destructive methods of meeting our needs, like Permaculture. Indeed, so much of our public conversation these days seems to be about food that many people are going so far as to say that we are in a “food revolution” in Western culture right now.
But I see a gap in a lot of the public discourse about food, and without addressing this gap I don’t think that anything very revolutionary is going to happen in our food system any time soon. It’s a collective blind spot that’s based on two trends that I encounter again and again in my work as a Permaculture activist, and even within Permaculture movements.
The first trend I see is that where I am in Vancouver (Coast Salish Territory) and in many places across the English-speaking world we almost always see that talk about changing our food system remains squarely within a capitalist understanding, framing the issue in terms of consumer choice. Stories that we hear about changing our food system often focus on educating the public about the importance of buying local and organic, giving farmers new ways to access their market, and other approaches that are rooted within food as part of a supply and demand economy where people have free choice about what they access (read buy). But what about people with less choice, with less power in our consumer society? Differentials in power that are based on historical dynamics of race, class, gender, ability, and other factors work to marginalize many people and disenfranchise them from having meaningful choices about their participation in our food system. We need to ask who, exactly, is being reached by these exciting new consumer choices that are being offered.
I would even go so far as to say that the idea of consumer choice in food is a myth for most of us. Capitalism as we see it today has brought us a corporate-controlled food system in which economies of scale allow big players to limit our choices, where just as the rich tend to get richer, the big players tend to get bigger and accumulate more control over what food we are able to choose from as consumers. Industrial food producers, commodity traders, giant supermarket chains, and others who play on the globalized market where food is treated as a commodity like any other are able to externalize their costs — social, environmental, and health costs — to bring us cheap food that undersells smaller producers who have to pay their real costs and pushes them out until corporate food is all that’s available to us. So how much choice do we really have, anyway? Many folks are working to change these dynamics by changing what kinds of markets we access our food through, which is certainly important work. But by itself, it’s not going to create a food system where everyone eats well and with dignity because a market model that’s absent a social justice lens doesn’t address the root causes that differentially limit the choices of people and communities. And as my friend Jen Fisher-Bradley of the Women’s Food and Water Initiative says, “If you have food security and nobody else does, then you’re in trouble!” (For more about WFWI, keep your eye out for my article in the upcoming May issue of Briarpatch Magazine).
Framing of the problems in our food system within the rhetoric of consumer choice brings us to a second trend that is emerging in the so-called “food revolution” that’s coming into our public consciousness. As food moves more to the centre of our public discourse it becomes depoliticized, shedding language or ways of acting together on these issues that challenge the political and economic status quo that created the problem in the first place. Social power dynamics based in historical systems of domination and subjugation are implicated in every step of our food system, from agricultural workers’ rights to inequities in global trade systems and the destruction of water, soil, and other natural resources related to agricultural practises — and that’s before our food even gets to the supermarket. Sadly, an “organic” label doesn’t mean that the food you’re buying is exempt from these problems, as many large-scale organic producers have been shown to remain irresponsible with their natural resources and especially their labour practises. So if we are talking about food, we are talking about human rights; we are talking about Indigenous peoples’ rights and lands; we are talking about women’s rights; we are talking about workers’ rights. We are talking about race and class and gender and ability because these factors limit peoples’ ability to access food in a market- based economy where poverty marginalizes people based on those factors. We are talking about environmental justice. Depoliticizing our concern about food and abstracting it from the social fabric that our food system operates in, with all of the discrimination and marginalization that’s part of that social fabric whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, creates a system where yet again those who have more privilege are enfranchised to “take back” our food system while those with less power are kept from gaining equality and agency within the social movements that are coalescing around food. Look around you at the next food movement event (or Permaculture event, for that matter) that you go to and notice who’s there — and who’s not. How might that be effecting the kind of movement that we’re building, and the kind of food system that it’s going to create?
The tragedy in these two trends that are befalling the otherwise exciting movement to take back our food system is that we risk wasting the potential that food issues have to bring people together perhaps more than any other issue because everybody eats. It’s a common ground that matters to every community, that effects everyone — but to work with that, we need to be able to acknowledge that it effects every community differently based on the uneven social playing field that we’re all starting from. We hollow out the core of potential in the food movement if we divorce food from social justice and don’t teach ourselves to see and learn to uproot the power dynamics between communities that effect how, when, and with what level of agency people participate in the movement. The concerns that a single parent or a low-income person of colour has about their food may be very different from the concerns of a young white university student or a middle-aged cancer survivor who beat their illness by changing what they eat. This is not a personal criticism of people who, through the accident of their birth, have more privilege or power in our society. But it is a call to all of us to be honest about these truths, and learn the ways that we perpetuate systems of oppression by ignoring them and continuing to act out the social patterns that replicate them. To do this, we have to listen to each other, we have to learn to notice whose perspectives are dominating the conversation and take responsibility for making space for the voices that we can then see are missing. It might mean that we have to hear, or have the strength to stand up and say, things that are politically or personally uncomfortable. It also might mean that we need to turn a critical eye on the internal dynamics of our movement as much as on the corporate and government forces dominating our food system that we are trying to fight.
Permaculture is very much an art and science about observing patterns and learning how to work with them. One of the core things that we must learn to notice when we are doing Permaculture is that patterns repeat across orders of scale, so what we see on one level we are likely to see writ larger or smaller but similar in form on another. A tiny creek displays the same branching pattern as a huge river system, the same pattern repeating itself but on a bigger or smaller scale. Likewise, the patterns that we see in our small personal interactions and within the social movements that we build will be repeated on the larger social scale. The responsibility lies with us, then, to make sure that we are enacting the patterns that we want to see get bigger. I want to see a food system where everyone participates, where everyone gets to eat what, where, and how they want in a spirit of sharing and mutual responsibility, celebration and gratitude. I want to see a food movement that includes and values everyone, that is able to be honest about the problems of where we’re starting from so that those problems don’t follow us into the future. We cannot do food now, and social justice later; food is social justice, and only a movement that builds them both at the same time can possibly succeed at either.
