Coming to Portland this week is the series of food and drink events called Feast Portland. It starts Thursday with something called a "sandwich invitational," for which tickets cost $95, and the weekend includes tastings, classes, and dinners, with events ranging from 55 to 200 dollars.
Net proceeds will be donated to two charities, Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon and Share Our Strength's No Kid Hungry campaign; the latter organization has corporate "partners" including Wal-Mart, Tyson, and Sysco.
In the situationist pamphlet Spectacular Time, number 6: Food, we read
The food industry has a problem--no matter how rich we become we can
only eat so much. So if we cannot consume more food, we must be
encouraged to consume more profitable foods.
It is difficult to see how everyday life is to be reinvented while the most fundamental requirement for the continuation of any kind of life remains a mystified commodity.
Once we have consumed the maximum amount of maximum profit food we are encouraged to buy the surplus as proxy consumers for those too poor to have a demand themselves; we give to charities who buy the market surplus to feed the poor.
Aid and charity --in the society of the spectacle--are necessary to maintain high prices and a stable market. Thus the money from charitable donations and taxes is recycled back into the hands of capital --which at the same time disposes of its previously worthless surplus production.
Charities only attack the symptoms--if we really cared we would attack the disease.
In the summer 2014 issue of the magazine Contexts, we find an essay by sociologist Shamus Khan called "Culinary Capitalism." He writes,It is difficult to see how everyday life is to be reinvented while the most fundamental requirement for the continuation of any kind of life remains a mystified commodity.
Once we have consumed the maximum amount of maximum profit food we are encouraged to buy the surplus as proxy consumers for those too poor to have a demand themselves; we give to charities who buy the market surplus to feed the poor.
Aid and charity --in the society of the spectacle--are necessary to maintain high prices and a stable market. Thus the money from charitable donations and taxes is recycled back into the hands of capital --which at the same time disposes of its previously worthless surplus production.
Charities only attack the symptoms--if we really cared we would attack the disease.
There is, perhaps, no greater triumph of capitalism than the culinary
realm. Consider supermarkets. Immediately upon entering we are
confronted with produce. How refreshing; healthy foods for a healthy
lifestyle! But take another look at that banana and recall the ... news
about Chiquita providing 3,000 AK-47s
and millions of rounds of ammunition to militias that murdered their
farm laborers. Bananas are ubiquitous in grocery stores because they
have one of the highest profit margins of any food product..... Even
though bananas often must be shipped across the globe, it costs mere
pennies to cultivate and bring them to market. Why? Armed insurgencies
against workers help keep labor costs down ....
The pictures of green fields that surround you on the produce section banners are absent of farm laborers, who, brutalized by low wages and terrorized by foremen, are kicked out of our nation the moment they stir up trouble or have the misfortune to
physically suffer from their labor. There is a grave cost to our uninterrupted access to year-round cheap produce, and it is the laborers at the base of the production process who suffer it...
Next in our supermarket tour is the animal, far removed from any hint of the festering stench of the feedlot and the routinized violence of the slaughterhouse and sanitized for you in its plastic wrap. The cheapest way to feed livestock is through monoculture: the rotation of just two crops—corn and soy.
Countless acres of land have been ruined by this practice, but it’s cheaper. And the food makes the animals sick, but the pharmaceutical industry has stepped in to keep them alive long enough to pack on the pounds so that we can kill and market them quickly....
The pictures of green fields that surround you on the produce section banners are absent of farm laborers, who, brutalized by low wages and terrorized by foremen, are kicked out of our nation the moment they stir up trouble or have the misfortune to
physically suffer from their labor. There is a grave cost to our uninterrupted access to year-round cheap produce, and it is the laborers at the base of the production process who suffer it...
Next in our supermarket tour is the animal, far removed from any hint of the festering stench of the feedlot and the routinized violence of the slaughterhouse and sanitized for you in its plastic wrap. The cheapest way to feed livestock is through monoculture: the rotation of just two crops—corn and soy.
Countless acres of land have been ruined by this practice, but it’s cheaper. And the food makes the animals sick, but the pharmaceutical industry has stepped in to keep them alive long enough to pack on the pounds so that we can kill and market them quickly....
“But I buy locally sourced foods, ethically raised, from my local
market,” you might protest. So do I. It’s nice to be able to afford
this. What about the (cheap) food items the poor buy to feed themselves?
The average person on food stamps receives $5 a day for food.
[And how far away is that market?]
Capitalism provides the wealthier a way to buy moral purity by periodically participating in specialty markets. We don’t transform the system, but we do feel better about ourselves.
Responsible food shopping can be exhausting, so let’s not cook tonight. We’ll go out to eat. Perhaps we’ll go to an authentic Chinese restaurant... where a [meal] is put before me for a mere $5. Why so cheap? Probably because the workers have had their passports seized by their employers and will work for years paying off their migration debt in a modern form of indentured servitude....
Food can create community. It can also be a celebration of culture, artistry, and a daily enticement of the senses. But let us not forget that every time we eat we are implicated in the great capitalist triumph that is our food system. And that system is a deeply violent one.
For challenges to this we need to look not to events like Feast but to ones like last week's Justice Begins with Seeds conference. We need to look not to charity but to activism, to organizations of farmworkers like PCUN, to worker cooperatives including the Red & Black Cafe, to movements for food sovereignty around the world.[And how far away is that market?]
Capitalism provides the wealthier a way to buy moral purity by periodically participating in specialty markets. We don’t transform the system, but we do feel better about ourselves.
Responsible food shopping can be exhausting, so let’s not cook tonight. We’ll go out to eat. Perhaps we’ll go to an authentic Chinese restaurant... where a [meal] is put before me for a mere $5. Why so cheap? Probably because the workers have had their passports seized by their employers and will work for years paying off their migration debt in a modern form of indentured servitude....
Food can create community. It can also be a celebration of culture, artistry, and a daily enticement of the senses. But let us not forget that every time we eat we are implicated in the great capitalist triumph that is our food system. And that system is a deeply violent one.
