What does it mean to feed?
On food as a form of resistance.
+ pork belly and chimichurri sandwiches
this interview is part of a collection of pieces in FANZINE OCTOBER: WHAT IS A RECIPE?
I was seven or eight years old the first time I gave food to someone who needed it. I remember the sky was grayish blue and heavy. The seasons in my hometown are brutal. We lived in a valley where the weather gets stuck and macerates - the chill or the heat grows and grinds against the body. Winter is wet. It drizzles non-stop and the air smacks dry against the skin and absorbs into you until it pushes into your shoulders and wraps around the spine.
When we pulled into the grocery store, he was standing there. I don’t remember anything about him physically but I do remember his breath formed a cloud that pushed into the sidewalk when my mother asked if he had any children and how old they were. He had two. A boy and a girl and they were just a little younger than my sister and I. Inside my mom grabbed a cart and told us to grab another. We were instructed to pick out all of the things that we liked to eat. We probably filled the cart with oreos and pizza bagels and Dr. Pepper and gushers and when we met up with our mom she likely added vegetables and eggs and bread and turkey. There was definitely a roast chicken because I remember his eyebrows raised high when he saw it.
On our way home, my mom explained simply: when you have all that you need, you give to those who don’t. And then we never talked about it again.
The memory of that man at the grocery store has sat in my mind lately. I’ve never told anyone that story before. Until recently I never shared with anyone, not even my wife, that I continued to give food to strangers as an adult. It’s not hard to find someone who is hungry in Buenos Aires. As I become more visibly involved in local community kitchens, I’ve begun to think of that man while I ask myself why and how to feed people. Is there a right or better way to talk about it? Why do regular people have to assume the responsibility of feeding others to begin with?
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In 2020 it is unfathomable that anyone lacks access to food or suffers malnourishment. The world has more than enough resources to feed every human on the planet and Argentina alone has the potential to produce food for ten times its current population. Yet as of 2018, 4% of the country suffered malnourishment and 32% experienced food insecurity — numbers which have grown during the global health crisis. This is not a contemporary phenomenon and neither is our awareness of it.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, doctor and lawyer Juan Bialet Massé was tasked with traveling the entirety of Argentina to understand the reality of the country’s working classes. Report on the State of the Argentine Working Class (1904) was envisioned to understand the necessary working conditions to keep the threat of anarchism, socialism and revolution out of the minds of the country’s working poor. What Massé found were laborers that were chronically denied basic human rights, grossly underworked and severely undernourished. What made Massé’s work monumental for the time was pointing out the paradox of a starving working class that fed the world and made Argentina one of the wealthiest, fastest-growing economies in the world.
“In this country so abundantly rich there exists an abnormality. The ranchers set aside their best cattle and best chickens for export. These excellent meats are sold in Europe for a lesser price than the inferior meat that is left for the domestic market. The bread made with Argentine wheat is sold cheaper there than it is in the towns of Buenos Aires, Santa Fe and Córdoba. We eat worse and pay more,” he writes. “And it isn’t for laziness or vice he who experiences slow starvation and premature aging, a death that is expected and undeserved, by the worker that makes and moves the trains; the worker that takes care of the cattle for export; the working woman who washes and irons and sews to buy her children a piece of bread. They are not the victims of big cities, no. They are the victims of wrongdoing and greed, of prejudice and ignorance.”
When will our consciousness finally become as global as our consumption? Do people believe that a pear or pound of shrimp or piece of steak imported from the Global South means that everyone here is well-fed? Those grass-fed ribs from the Argentine Pampas are simply agricultural leftovers? This is certainly the cultural construct propagated in the North. The systematic extraction of resources in the South is wholly dependent on an understanding of global food production that is disingenuous to the reality of food consumption everywhere else. Food is treated as ordinary there and a privilege here.
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In my own life, food is a central pillar that holds everything up. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think about is toast, eggs, a sprinkling of chile oil and a hot cup of coffee. Before I finish my breakfast, I’m already planning my lunch, and as my wife and I eat lunch with one another, we are discussing what we will have for dinner. I plan my schedule around deliveries. Food comes to me. It simply appears. Fresh eggs arrive on Mondays, my baker stops by on Tuesdays and Fridays and my vegetable bag comes on Wednesdays. I spend most of my day looking at pictures of food, writing about it and reading about it, including stories about places I will likely never visit and food I will never know the taste of.
This all constructs within me an abundance of choice that knows few bounds. Not being able to choose what my next meal is difficult to imagine, not knowing if I will have a next meal at all is completely outside my realm of understanding. It would be easy to extrapolate that relationship with food as universal.
Agribusiness that functions underneath systems of blind capitalism and exploitation want us to view food that way. That food simply appears. Mainstream forms of media that function within the same systems of capitalism and exploitation facilitates and molds that understanding. These are cultural constructions built through words and images and the lack thereof. The prolificness of food in media and the banal superficiality of the majority of it teaches us that food is both mundane and extravagant. The Global North’s retelling of food coupled with a dangerously ignorant understanding of how the rest of the world produces and consumes food reinforces the belief that the ordinariness of extravagance is universal.
Food is anything but ordinary. While researching the history of the arepa for Whetstone Magazine, I found a definition of the significance of food in ¡Viva la Arepa! that I liked. Historian Miguel Felipe Dortas Vargas explains, “The food that we consume possesses biological, ecological, psychological, cultural and social characteristics that strengthen within the collective consciousness an affective memory that connects us to what we eat.”
Vargas reveals something important when considering his definition alongside food access. Food is everything but what comes first in motivating the masses is its emotionality and the way that it fills or empties us psychologically. A lack of access to food isn’t just a biological deficiency, it’s the difference between human connection and social isolation. As cook and performance artist Gloria del Fogón once said to me, “Food has the power to dignify or humiliate.”
To be denied our most basic human necessity is to lose our humanity.
In a capitalist system in which human value is measured by our ability to produce, with consumption being the exchange, we are tricked into believing that those who are unable to acquire food do not because of an individual inadequacy. Society treats food like a shiny television set or new pair of shoes, a commodity rather than a human necessity.
This is precisely why feeding is fundamental to resistance. To feed and be fed is to be human. Feeding another person requires us to suspend the machine, to produce something that has no value in monetary terms, that doesn’t produce anything except the sedation of hunger and satiation of the body.
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I think back to something that Santiago Figueroa, an organizer of a community kitchen at cultural center La Chilinga, said to me, “The social work we do here is helping people re-accustom themselves to eating. It’s not just about giving food, it’s about one human giving attention to another.”
Later Figueroa would invite me to cook a meal for 60 people. I woke up early in the morning to walk to the butcher shop and buy two whole pork bellies. The 16 kilos of meat barely fit into my two cloth bags and cut into my shoulders like paper cuts whilst I walked the 10 blocks back. I calculated 250 grams per person although 150 would have been enough. It took nearly two hours to carve off the skin, sharpen the knife, cut the bellies into three equal pieces and cover them in a dry rub the color of toasted pecans. I dearly missed my comal, which fills my house with smoke that drains into the hallway and brings the neighbors to my door with fire extinguishers in hand.
The oven is just a centimeter too narrow to fit my roasted pans and juts open just enough to taunt me. I covered the thin opening with aluminum foil and hoped that the cheap plastic handles caught in the middle didn’t melt. It jutted open rudely but perfumed the house with smoked paprika, cinnamon, cacao, oregano, cumin and the orange peels that I dry in the sun and pulverize in my coffee grinder. When the pan began to sizzle with juices stained carob so loudly I could barely hear my music, I covered the roasting pans tightly with the aluminum foil from the kitchen supply store across the street that overprices everything because they are the only ones in the neighborhood. I busied myself with chimichurri and pico de gallo while the pork belly boiled and steamed in its own fat, opening once every hour to ladle juice over each piece and switch the oven shelves they sat on. I felt the meat’s resistance with a thin knife, it vibrated slightly against my fingers like a new bicycle chain. I turned off the heat and left it alone, letting the marinade absorb and solidify.
The following day the taxi driver asked where he could eat whatever I had packed into the back of his car. The messenger that brought us 60 warm teleras silently examined every corner of the kitchen. Everyone passed a jug of chimichurri around the enormous open kitchen, tearing apart pieces of bread and trying to guess the culprit for its rose-colored shade despite the obvious presence of cilantro, parsley, green onion and leeks. It was the small squares of turnip from a bunch I had found in my crisper that I didn’t want to go to waste, the hint of acidity teased out with generous squirts of lemon, salt and the best olive oil I could find for 300 pesos.
Gimena and Cordoba gently operated on the long rolls, careful not to cut them in half before emptying out a bag of mayonnaise and spoonfuls of chimi and pico de gallo, trying not to burn themselves on the sliced pork belly and giving up on their surgeons technique once their fingers were dyed with deep orange grease. We laughed when we realized that Santiago only listens to Amy Winehouse; he sang Rehab in broken English eight times in an hour. We piled the sandwiches onto plates with thick potato quarters roasted in the oven with fresh thyme and more olive oil and no one asked for seconds but some asked for sandwiches to snack on for the rest of the afternoon. A table with a group of young men gestured to me to come over, and one, a dishwasher who lost his job in March, told me he felt like he was back at the restaurant. I smiled and thanked him because I can’t take a compliment about my food from anyone and asked what he’d like to eat the next time I came.
To take such a significant chunk of time out of your day in a time in which we are taught to be on call at all times to work, to say to society that to feed and to give is more important than to produce and consume, is to resist a hegemonic system that was built to benefit few and keep the rest of us either content enough to not take action against it or so hungry that you don’t have the capacity to. To have the privilege to choose your ingredients and the meal it will create and pass that gift and energy to another human being is to re-introduce ourselves to the meaning of food.
Feeding is a re-introduction to collectivism and the recognition of the ways that imperialism and colonialism continue to bottle feed the system with individualism. One meal won’t stop a person from going hungry but it can be the start of a reunification and the understanding that food is anything but ordinary.
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