How do we talk about this?
on the linguistics of what we eat
November 18, 2020
Last week I visited a farm 100 kilometers from my Buenos Aires apartment for an upcoming article for Life & Thyme about the history of agriculture and the climate crisis in Argentina. What was meant to be an hour and a half train ride ended up being a six hour pilgrimage. This of course was after weeks of confirming and getting canceled on by farms. Each progressive detour — the train running out of gas, missing a long distance bus by a minute, a driver not being able to find me on the side of the road — slowly felt less and less incredulous and more and more ordained from above.
I was already riding on an extension for the article and was struggling to put a single word to the page without seeing something green. This was my last chance to step foot onto an organic vegetable garden and the powers that be were working their hardest to stop me.
As I sat on the side of the highway 15 kilometers from a destination that felt like another universe, I almost turned around. I could feel the invisible hands that guide our way and the invisible hands that tempt us to turn back tugging away at me. I am beginning to believe more in this, in the otherworldly, although I dislike that word because it is in that separation away from the immaterial world and towards the purely physical that I think our humanity became inhuman. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and the ways in which we trick ourselves with words to separate ourselves from our own humanness and our relationship to nature. Why does our language around food not align with the qualities of the food we eat?
I did eventually arrive and spent hours walking through three hectares of vegetable gardens with owner Fernanda Tramontani, who talked to me about heirloom tomatoes and wild kale, farm rotation systems and the difference between good weeds and bad mushrooms. I pulled carrot leaves and dill and arugula from their roots and smacked the leaves against my pant legs to shake off the extra dirt. Hollow tubes of green onion touched my tongue like butter and sage. Wild kale felt like smacks of wasabi and fresh ground pepper. Everything tasted loud. Salt and spice and earth reverberated through me like a chorus.
While Fernanda finished responding to some emails, I walked into the brush and trees that surrounded the property and found a log to sit and rest. Living in a city, I often forget that I live on a planet, on earth. I write a lot about the need to protect nature but even so I forget that there are ecosystems outside of the city beyond theory and concept. Being in the countryside was as much about writing a story as it was trying to understand what compelled me to seek out nature that afternoon. What did I need to take home with me?
I scrunched the stale leaves under my feet and watched a highway of ants crawl along the floor. The air sounds differently in the country. The wind pushed through the forest like waves onto the sand as if the 400 kilometers that separated me from the ocean didn’t exist at all. As if it were all connected. I wondered, why was something standing in my way?
When Tramontani opened the farm three years ago, she decided to certify it as organic to give her customers transparency that they were eating food that was good for them and the earth it came from. The internationally recognized certification is an expensive, bureaucratic application process that requires her to work side-by-side with an agricultural engineer, an agronomist and an auditing board that regularly checks her books and tests the land to make sure the farm isn’t utilizing any GMOs, herbicides or pesticides.
“I have to pay to be a certified organic farmer that takes care of the land responsibly and sustainably and sells directly to my local community while others can destroy the environment to make food for export and in many cases receive subsidies to do it. They are constantly checking in on me to make sure we are following the rules which is great. But the ones doing so much polluting?”
There is a great linguistic trick enveloped into all of this. What comes from the ground ‘organically’ is labelled as if it is something extraordinary, when in reality these foods are simple expressions of agriculture and ecology. It’s truly as ordinary as a vegetable can be. A pear grown on an agroecological farm is simply a pear that grows from the union of earth, sun and water. It is the pear grown with pesticides, herbicides and genetically modified seeds that is non-organic, the union of engineering and biotechnology, completely and totally unnatural to this world.
The latter isn’t even agriculture, it is agribusiness, and that is an important difference to note. Agriculture comes from the latin agri, or “field” plus “cultura”, to cultivate. To cultivate is to tend and protect. We cultivate friendships, we cultivate knowledge, to cultivate is to work towards something that is mutually beneficial, harmonious. To cultivate is to accept responsibility — for ourselves and for the land we take from. Our agricultural systems place a lot of responsibility onto nature but what responsibility does it place upon itself? Business is about yield and capital. It doesn’t care about the sustenance of anything but its own growth.
These linguistic manipulations, however, make complete sense. If our agricultural systems are built upon the destruction of natural resources it isn’t surprising that it is facilitated through the destruction of our language. Agribusiness and the food industry is aware of the power of words, and uses them strategically, and uses words so skillfully that consumers absorb them unconsciously.
In Argentina, the sugar lobby has successfully been able to wage war against a law that would require processed foods and soft drinks to be clearly labelled as excessive in fat, sugar, calories or sodium. The lawmakers against the measure argued that a law made for consumers would unfairly stigmatize the industry.
And on the topic of farming, I’ve been reading a lot of studies lately about how to transition to organic or agroecological food models and the arguments against are always in relation to yield. The common thread I read in favor of conventional models is that it requires less land to produce more food. It would supposedly take far more land to produce the same amount of food with an agroecological model, although from what I have read, this is not conclusively proven. Regardless, completely absent from the thought was that we currently produce 1.5 times the amount of food we actually need to feed everyone on Earth, which we don’t do anyway. Like the lawmaker arguing for the industry over the people she is voted to protect, scientists are instructed to think in terms of yield and not in terms of hunger.
Examples like these, of manipulating language and flipping the conversation, are infinite and infinitely destructive. This way of talking reformulates our understanding of the world to normalize a reality that isn’t organic to this world, of naturalizing systems that do not serve us, the land and the people who work it. Food as commodity, industry over consumer. It is a misunderstanding of language that makes eating ‘good’ food a debate that divides us by capital and class rather than a conversation that unifies everyone around the indignation that eating ethically-made food isn’t a universal right.
We need words like hunger, non-organic, pesticide, gmo to roll off our tongues and take up space on the page. Is it really more radical to call organic lettuce “lettuce” and the other stuff non-organic lettuce or genetically engineered lettuce or pesticide-grown lettuce than it is to willfully destroy our foodways and pump our bodies with venomous materials? To push these words into the vernacular means to recognize that they live with us and within us; hunger is not a concept, communities diseased by crop fumigation is not theoretical, it is a reality and our language should reflect that.
Words alone cannot save the world but choosing them more succinctly, more consciously, is the start to truly understanding the world we have constructed and that which we need to reconstruct.
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