And now for something completely different...

The two men who sat down had seen hard times, very hard times; or at least that’s the back-story I assigned them.

The scene was my local coffee spot. I had positioned myself within flirting distance of a cute woman I’d recently seen working at the local video place. The line-up was this: her in a coffee-house-chain leather armchair, an empty armchair, me, and another empty armchair. Perfect. Between her and I we had the whole corner on lock. How could anyone get in there? One person would be a creep, a couple would find it awkward, conversation impossible. It was like having Xs in three corners of a tic-tack-toe grid. No one could make a move on us.

Wrong.

Never underestimate the fallout of ill-placed chivalry.

So these men, these two men, walked in; the overhead air blaster, like an Arthur Rothstein photo of a dustbowl homestead, drew embarrassing attention to the last few wisps on their otherwise barren, artificially-wind-swept heads. I’d seen one of these men before, casually slouched over in a crowded plaza hacking and spitting as though it was just the thing to do in that quasi-urbane place. I recognized this man when he came in but like the law, good judgment arrives late if ever.

They were moving on us; like they gave a shit about my set-up, these two. Our solidarity was in jeopardy. Like the Sooners of suburban sprawl we had to confront the fact that, yes, those empty spaces would be filled – and by people we didn’t like.

I was of course way ahead of the latte sipping beauty in realizing the severity of the situation. She was engrossed in some Chuck Klosterman or Chuck Palahniuk thing. I had no choice; I had to be polite to these oldsters, but what to do?

Now, I’ve read Caesar’s Gaelic Wars. I know that when faced with such a maneuver the best thing to do is hold your line. Barring this it’s better to be surrounded than to have your forces cut in two.

They made their move for the empty chairs and I panicked. Instead of moving right and creating a solidarity power-pod, I moved left, ceding our center to this aged enemy. Unfortunately, having lines of communication cut by these two was the least of our worries.

I cannot emphasize enough the repulsiveness of these two men. Now I’ve mentioned the one before: blithely engaged in an act all passersby politely ignored but fully understood to be the preface to a eulogy. Words, alas, do not exist to describe the grotesqueness of what followed. Their actions reside outside the limits of language or any apology I may proffer.

Simply to collect the passel of ailments they displayed these men had to be well into their 90’s. They spoke an unfamiliar language, it may have been Aramaic. One way or another I assumed that these nonagenarians hailed from a place very different from suburban Los Angeles, a place where the life expectancy was at least one-third their walking age. Moreover, these were certainly not the types that skillfully dodged the death, disease, wailing, chest pounding and general raucous that weighed on their miserable compatriots. No, these men had lived lives the equivalent to the pain and suffering of three deaths; as though they pushed on not through continued regeneration but through subtracting death from the equation

The facts thus far: 1.These men were (and are, if still alive) bald. 2. They were very fucking old. 3. They were speaking Aramaic. What’s left? Lots. Once plopped down, successfully fissuring our youthful Kaffeekultur, I began to see these men for what they were: a baroque collection of every ailment known to humankind.

They were certainly ‘old’ and ‘slumped over,’ ‘resigned’ and ‘suffering.’ But I place these terms, these linguistic signs, in scare quotes to insist that the images that, in your mental rolodex, you have assigned to these groupings of letters are wholly inadequate.

Imagine the jet-lag that would accompany a three hundred hour flight. To the moon and back in a cramped window seat. Now imagine being under extreme mental and physical duress for the entirety of the flight – aside from the window seat. Imagine thirteen days in a globe-trotting Guantanamo Bay. An Extraordinary Rendition, indeed. This approaches the lethargy these two men displayed. Their bodies had given up. What, I asked myself, transported them to this suburban coffee spot, besides this flight? From where did they hobble?

And they talked, man did they talk. With sudden dissents into sleep their living bodies tortured the dialectic of their cracked, dead language. The sleep was in-turn shattered by bursts of guttural life, violent clearing of throats, wheezes and bellows. Yet, there were ailments beyond the aural.

Remember that flight, the one that marked these men with severe and irreparable jet-lag? Now imagine that, just before landing in L.A., this flight experienced a violent crash. These fragile, ancient foreigners were jettisoned from the craft, hurtled into the atmosphere. In impossible free-fall they smashed through limbs of trees, bounced of chain-link fences, tumbled over hoods of late-model Buicks, broke through hotel awnings and shattered the inevitable pane of in-transit glass.

There’s a line in Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” where Chuck D states that he was followed by “fifty two brothers, bruised, battered and scarred but hard.” These two men were not hard; though they may have been brothers. However they could no doubt – and each on his own – claim the bruises, beatings and scars of Chuck’s fifty two rebellious inmate cohorts. They had canes, arm braces, S.A.S. orthopedic shoes and one of them was apparently blind. Disheveled, tired, beaten and broken, occupying a liminal position between life and death these men conversed violently.

Their conversation, like the aged vessels that brought it to me, was jarring and repugnant.

Remember the plane crash that mutilated their impossibly fragile yet indestructible bodies? Remember the torture they endured on that flight? Now imagine that before this surreal tragedy lifted off these men were not friends but the worst of enemies. Fattah vs. Hammas; Palestine vs. Israel; The I.R.A vs. the Orange Order; Foucault vs. Chomsky; The Cold Crush 4 vs The Fantastic 5. The apparent beef between these repulsive relics eclipsed all others. What were they talking about? I could not penetrate the hidden plot of this ancient text. Was this some cultural thing? Was their native land a place where robust debate was equaled only by hard-living and sudden sleep?...

“This esoteric Byzantine debate must be settled before we both die…We cannot die until there is an answer… we must go to a franchise coffee shop adjacent to a small Southern California liberal arts college campus and finish this…Whatever it takes, whatever it takes.”

Had I underestimated these two? Was I actually witnessing the concluding remarks between Glaucon and Thrasymachus regarding the nature of justice? If this had been the case, I would have liked to interject that what the video vixen and I were being forced to endure was certainly not a valid notion of justice. This was a tyranny of repulsion.

Are you beginning to understand the gravitas of this situation? What am I leaving out? What more can I tell to lend texture to this nauseating scene? Have I mentioned that the pants of both men were unbuttoned? Not in a casual, “oops, forgot to zip,” kind of way but in a way that suggests a fierce lack of concern. Did I say that one of the men had a substantial shit stain on the back of his pants? Did I tell you how, roused from his torpor, the blind man turned to his right and grabbed the movie madden’s white leather hand bag? (She quickly and commendably rubbed both her hands and the bag with Purell squirted from a tiny travel-size.) “I no see it…I’m blind…soorry” was his rejoinder. Did I fail to mention that this be-feebled purse thief, when not muttering, bellowing, or crumpled and sleeping, would slowly spit into tiny napkins and toss these cess-pods onto the travertine floor? No, I spared you these nauseating details. But I lived through them and I bare witness.

The girl is gone now but the men remain. I have a video to return today. Perhaps I should apologize: “I’m sorry, I had no idea it would be that bad. And I know this doesn’t erase things or make it better but, I should have moved to the right.”

"It's black, it's white, it's tough for you to get by..."

Sometimes things aren't as they seem. Other times things are very much as they seem, so much so that we don't believe what we're seeing. Take this famously creepy pic we all remember from thin, dog-eared picture books of our youth:
Coy Beauty or Grizzled Hag? (Watch "The Shinning" for the definitive answer.)

Sometimes we see things that unsettle us, sometimes we experience things that aren't one/the other but are both/and.

This is purportedly a blog about "food," but I don't see how that baggy term precludes me from talking about other things like, say, alcohol, and racism. I mean, I grew up in suburban Detroit and from what I can remember of the "grown-ups' table" - or at least a large contingent thereof - food, alcohol and racism were as much a part of the holidays as Fords caravanned in the circular drive.

So, keeping in mind the above photo, what should we think of this picture:
You can find this curious drawing along the left side of most Jack Daniels bottles (half pints don't have sides, ya dummy!). Sure, it's a hand clutching - if awkwardly - a glass of Jack. But, what else do we see here? With the above image in mind, lets now look at another item with deep roots in American culture:
Anyone? Anyone? Now with blackface in mind (or better yet a Sambo character) what else do we see in the J.D. label? Can we also see the thumb, forefinger and empty top half of the glass as a hat? The two curious white dots just below as eyes? The remaining fingers as bulbous nose and obscene, larger-than-life lips? Like the old woman photo, Jack Daniels gives us an image that is both/and; both white hand clutching a glass and a minstrel image evoking better times - presumably in the glass and in the past; what with all J.D.s talk of tradition that surrounds the drawing how could it not?

With these images - and any "optical illusion" - you see what you want but you cannot "un-see" its other half, it creeps into the periphery of what you'd prefer to see. Because it's there too, it's part of the image .

So what? Is this just some dumb exercise of my passion for academic pedantry and booze? Well, yes and no... Actually yes on both counts, but it's also bigger than that. Let's look at another image with a curious message:


So besides robust, alcohol inspired homo-social bonding, what is this an ad for? Certainly Chivas would say "honour" and "gallantry" - in fact, if I heard them correctly, they do say this. As Chivas would have it these are frail and forgotten ethics that can be resuscitated if we just drink enough whiskey. And while it's a step up from Jack's Jim Crow and The Minstrel Show, it still has an illusory quality that demands deeper focus. What was all that about a "code of behaviour that sets certain men apart"?

If the Jack Daniels label is haunted by what is there, the Chivas ad, and its message, springs from a fear of what is not there. Anyone? Anyone?

Answer: Be suspicious of an ad that features a bunch of white guys and ends with "Here's to us." (Unless it's an ad for stormfront.org or the Republican Party.) 'Us' in the Chivas world means the kind of guys who not only drink Chivas but are also predisposed to do all those great things the ad is suggesting. 'Us' is the guys in the ad, white guys - only.

Still don't buy it? Or is the advert just too English with its "sporting" types and effete, Thom Yorke-esque bellowing?

Then how about this one:


I much prefer the Stranglers-inspired soundtrack but I think these guys have seen "Lock. Stock, and 2 Smoking Barrels" one too many times. Visually, this looks a lot like the Jack ad: all chiaroscuro, glass clutching, and masculinity. But while blackface is right up front in the Jack image blackness simply surrounds the guys in the Ketel ad. In the end the cool, brash, young dudes end up looking like these old ladies.

So why are these ads so amped about white guys and the past? Admittedly all Ketel is pining for is "last night" (albeit filtered through "300 years of tradition) while Chivas seems to want to get out of that gray city and find a place on which the sun never sets.

The cynical response to all the images, to the whole post, from the Jack label to the Ketel ad is that I am "reading too much into it," that all this racial stuff isn't there. However, like the old lady picture, the whole point is that it is there, but it's there in such a way where, whether you see it or not, it's part of the image, part of the message. You don't have to see the racial undertones of the Ketel or Chivas ad for these very undertones to seep into the periphery of your thought - in fact, it works better this way.

So have a drink, think about it, but remember: a lot of thought went into these ads - and vision can be impaired by more than alcohol.

Where's The Local?

Ok, It’s time to get this thing back running, that’s to say, time to get my 3 posts in for the new year. Ideally this time I will keep it up, we shall see. In fact this post isn’t even new, and it’s certainly not very entertaining.
Last year I was invited to give a talk about food culture at a small, progressive liberal arts college. I figured the best thing for the kids was not for me to puff-up their already inflated sense of self righteousness but to actually give them something to think about. What follows is an abbreviated, updated, linked up and slightly humor-fied version of that talk. Enjoy. I will return in time with more goofiness.

Ours is an age of food culture. From Michael Pollen’s pithy pamphlet of the moment to arcane and theoretically inclined academic writing, we write about food. From cell phone snaps to highly elaborate “food porn,” we photograph and film food. And from PBS to Japanese game shows, we watch others prepare food – often in elaborate and unfamiliar ways. Increasingly, we also flex our personal (some go as far as saying political!) muscle through how we spend money on food – or perhaps better said: we are increasingly aware of this muscle. These days organic, grass-fed, line-caught, non-GMO, heirloom products have become so diffuse that we can find them – if we so choose – on the shelves of our local Wal-Mart. Indeed, the emergence of “Big Organic” shows us both how far our knowledge of food has come and how fragile and ill-defined this knowledge is.

And there have been many positive developments in this food culture, but I would like also to see a larger discussion of the complicated and often contradictory nature of our contemporary foodscapes. I am specifically interested in the emergence of locavorism within our current culinary scene. Is this movement the panacea for the ills of our global, industrialized food systems, or is it just more embroidery for our bourgeois blankies?

With perennial food contamination scares, claims of higher nutrients of organics, and the rise of the farmers market, the emergence of the locavore seems creepily conjunctural. We need to remember, however, that a desire for sanitary, nutritious, and convenient foods also motivated the food system against which the locavore movement pushes – instant dinners were the organic ramps of their time! And just as the industrialization of last century’s food chain bore unseen and harmful costs, so must our current localization of food contain consequences we vaguely understand. Who is at the other end of this globalized food chain and how do our choices effect them? May we simply “go local” without considering the global ramifications of such a move? How can local be both redefined and expanded so as to become more relevant to urban, poor, and otherwise marginalized communities; communities in which a local “foodshed” may contain only processed foods and liquor stores? Lastly, how do we position a politics of food consumption within a larger network of social and environmental activism? I am certainly not the first to ask these questions, I hope however to chart the topography of this discourse, to begin to understand its discordant and at times unsettling tones.

In his 2008 book The Green Collar Economy, former White House special advisor Van Jones discusses how food politics may fit into a larger green political movement. Jones quotes Peoples’ Grocery of Oakland founder Brahm Ahmadi as saying that he desires,

"completely localized food systems that are regionally based, with the majority of food consumers consume coming from within a few hundred miles of where they live, so that consumers have direct knowledge of the farms and farmers, and how and where that food was produced. A revolution in terms of environmental stewardship and reducing the carbon footprint in the food system. And finally, dignified job creation and wealth creation rooted in social justice and environmental sustainability."

Ahmadi’s vision basically sums up the locavore ethic – even better coming out of urban Oakland as opposed to the foodie mecca of Berkeley. (More on Oakland below.) So we have a “revolution in terms of environmental stewardship” that would also help local job creation! Sounds groovy. But not so fast. We need to interrogate the unsaid in the above statement; what lies on the other side of the deep-rooted desire to stay local or regional, to see the farmer and have knowledge of the farm?

In Ahmadi’s world, knowledge of where food was produced, how and by whom is power, power over the products one consumes and the way in which they are consumed. In this world knowing and seeing are all-important. Knowing who produced what, seeing them and what they produced in person – knowledge and sight are prime movers of the new locavorism. But what is un-seen and un-known under this ethic is exactly where our attention is most desperately needed. When our gaze shifts to the farmer at the local market it shifts away from the migrant laborer in the Salinas Valley. When we purchase local we don’t give our money to the farmer in Guatemala. The proper rejoinder to this claim may be that choosing local is also not choosing the industrio-capitalist system which may exploit the migrant laborer and the Guatemalan farmer. Fair enough, but how does this choice effect change in the system? On its own it doesn’t. Taking your chips off the table doesn’t mean you’ve changed the game – it means you are no longer playing. As I see it, on its own locavorism can go one of two directions:

1. As a standalone ethic, at best, locavorism ignores that the Guatemalan farmer couldn’t give a shit about his carbon footprint. He or she (or more likely he and she and their children) make a living because far away people buy their products. At the end of the day, and despite the nasty corporate intermediaries, we can choose or choose not to purchase from them. And while it is not the pastoral ideal of the local farmers’ market, farming may be their only source of income. (Much of this discussion is inspired by this excellent book.) As part of a globalized food chain our decisions effect others, a turn towards the local is always a turn away from somewhere else.

2. As a standalone ethic, at worst, locavorism finds itself an unwitting partner to that ever shifting yet always present American x-word, xenophobia. Ahmadi wants “job creation and wealth creation” but only for local communities. As went the farmer in Central America so goes the migrant laborer in the Central Valley. His labor is not needed, his presence not wanted. Is this the nasty underside of the local foods movement? Can we go as far as to suggest that by patrolling the borders of our bodies, by needing hyper-familiarity with what we let in, we are also complicit in a jingoistic fear of what the nation keeps out? Don’t food scares, in fact, play a proxy role in this move? If E. Coli and Salmonella outbreaks represent the fear of all thing beyond our culinary horizon and our personal control, can we extricate the laborer and the global labor circuits from this fear?

My point in all this is neither to defend globalized industrial agriculture nor to excoriate the local foods movement. Rather, I would like to insist that locavorism cannot exist as a standalone ethic, that a turn towards a local food system must also equally and actively engage a regional and global food system. This is a tall order, but without political engagement outside of local action this movement does little more than grease the wheels of the system it purports to change.

From cars to Kashi bars, green lifestyle options have become roundly normative, that is to say, they are not only the gold standard for “ethical consumption” but also comfortably incorporated into the prevailing mode of production. So if, as Thomas Frank put it more than a decade ago, “the countercultural ideal has become capitalist orthodoxy” how can the locavore movement create a position independent from yet invested in the prevailing networks of food production and distribution? I’m going to make my turn towards home by suggest a new way of approaching the movement and the terms which it applies.

But first a mea culpa (that’s how pricks say “my bad”): I’ve been beating up Brahm Ahmadi throughout this post and, while my critique of the movement has I think been accurate, my use of Ahmadi has not. Ahmadi’s work within the Oakland community and specifically with the West Oakland farmers market may serve as points of departure for reformulating what ‘local’ means. The community of West Oakland contained 137 grocery stores in the 1960s but only 22 in the 1980s. Oakland is not alone in this trend, in Detroit an estimated 550,000 live in what are commonly known as “Food Deserts,” areas in which party stores, gas stations and fast food restaurants are the only food sources. The health consequences of living in such a locale are many including higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and death. The Bay Area Regional Health Inequities Initiative claimed recently that “the average West Oakland resident lives 10 years less than their Berkeley counterparts, and that food access is a significant factor in this disparity.” A survey of Detroit residents contained more conservative but no less alarming figures; Detroit residents losing a combined 11 years of life per 100 residents compared to 7 for the greater metro area.

Yet within these spaces of urban blight also spring the thoroughly local and urgently needed urban gardens. These gardens are an important nodal point not only for the communities they serve but also in a larger constellation of a productive politics of locavorism. Here in Los Angles the South Central Farm Market (or Community Garden) thrived from 1994 until it was forcibly closed in 2006 – this despite a last-minute intervention by Joan Baez.

I use the term ‘nodal point’ and reference the South Central Community Garden for specific reasons. First, as I’ve said it is important not to privilege the urban garden over the distant farmer, or the unseen laborer; all three must stand as free and equal partners on an ethical terrain. The urban garden may address health concerns in the inner city but without existing outside itself it cannot address working conditions in other countries or equitable pay within our own country. Second, I use the term nodal point to reference a group whose existence I have so far only hinted at yet whose absence is everywhere – the upper-middle-class bourgeois liberal. From Alice Waters and Michael Pollen to Peter Singer, the prominent figures of the locavore movement show the pallid face of classic hegemony; Jones and Ahmadi notwithstanding. Let's consider this post from the South Central Farmers’ blog,

"WHAT: The South Central Farmers who starred in the 2008 Academy Award Nominated documentary “The Garden” will [ ] host an organic cooking demonstration; sell and share local organic produce from their new farm in Shafter, CA; and host a roundtable discussion about Locavore community food initiatives....
WHERE: Whole Foods Market, Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA"

How do we parse out locality within this event? Is it found in the farmers, formerly of South Central? In the farm, currently north-west of Bakersfield? Or could it be in the clean, LEED certified, culinary fetish-filled aisles of the Pasadena Whole Foods? The answer is I think obvious, and it is exactly this phenomenon from which the local foods movement needs to break free.

It would seem that locavorism in its current instantiation simply paraphrases Orwell’s famous quote from (where else?) Animal Farm. That is, we’re all local, but some of us are more local than others. The above event vacates the interiority of the South Central farmers, it positions them not as equal partners rooted within a constellation of localities but as heirloom products to be consumed by specific locavores.

This is, I fear, the obscene underside of the locavore movement: that the rules of the game are being dictated by a specific group and others participation in the movement is only validated through translation and dislocation, meaning that viable partners in the global foodscape are only acknowledged if they are moved in (S. Central farmers), moved out (migrant labor), or moved away from (Central American farmers). And it is through these processes that people and places are made into fetish items to be consumed and/or discarded.

What the local foods movement needs is not a new mask on the same old face. As I’ve suggested, what is needed is a constellation of nodal points, of free and equal partners, a system that is rooted in the local yet sees itself as ethically and equitably linked to other localities. What we need is a movement that embraces a paradoxical localism, an ethics of consumption that sees the urban gardener, the migrant laborer, the distant farmer, as well as the urban and suburban consumer as linked. And again, locavorism cannot have a “first among equals” but must be radically democratic. If locavorism can see itself and its choices as emanating from and extending beyond its locale it may traverse more than just culinary concerns, it may in fact help foster a more organic form of social understanding.