“All of this makes people see the complexity of the food system and its relationship to sustainability and economics and health.”
Mary Scherpe & Alicia Kennedy: sustainability in the time of corona virus – April 28th, 2020
Mary Scherpe: Hello everyone, today is April 28th and my name is Mary Scherpe, I run Stil in Berlin and am the cofounder of the Feminist Food Club, a Berlin based network of trans and cis women, and non-binary folks supporting each other in gastronomy. We usually do real life meetings but we switched online to do talks on pressing questions of the Corona crisis. You can see all videos and transcripts of the talks I’ve done until now on our website feministfoodclub.com. If you find our program helpful, we would appreciate it if you shared it, maybe invite other people to watch it, or even consider becoming a donating member at steadyhq.com/feministfoodclub. As a usual gentle reminder, we’re going to talk a lot about business but please remember self care is the most important during a crisis. If you don’t take care of yourself you cannot take care of your business. Take a lot of breaks, sleep, lean on your loved ones, eat regularly, stay hydrated; this is a marathon not a sprint. We will be in this for a while.
My guest today is journalist Alicia Kennedy, she is based in Puerto Rico and has written for the New Republic, Washington Post, Nylon and many more. She is also the host of the Meatless podcast, which is currently on hiatus as I understand.
Alicia Kennedy: I will actually publish the last episode on my newsletter on Friday. I’m going to bring it back in this format, there will be new episodes for paying subscribers.
Mary: Everyone who has not had the pleasure yet, you can still listen to all of the old episodes on the usual podcast platforms. Recently you wrote an article for Epicurious about what is happening to sustainability efforts in this crisis. I wanted to talk to you anyhow and this has given me the perfect reason. But first, how are you doing?
Alicia: It’s pretty good, we’ve been on a very strict and full island lockdown since March 15th, that might be loosening up as of next week. There are officially 1400 reported cases. For the most part it’s been super quiet, we’re walking the dog in the sun, and I get to see the ocean every day, so I’m much better off than a lot of people. But it’s been weird and exhausting just to be so stressed on an ephemeral level where it’s not tangible. At the same time, I’m a freelancer and work from home, my day to day life is mostly the same.
Mary: How has it been for the hospitality industry in Puerto Rico?
Alicia: Everything’s pretty much closed, some are doing takeout and delivery. A friend of mine is a bread baker and he has dropped bread off, another cultivates mushrooms and brought those over, and we get wine delivered. We actually hadn’t been part of a CSA (community supported agriculture) before, we just go to the farmers market every weekend, but lately we’ve been getting deliveries from a specific farm. It’s been easy to keep up with fresh produce, because the CSA systems were in place and have been expanded. A lot of bakers and farmers have switched from selling to restaurants to making more individual relationships with people, mostly with those who were already aware of them by going to the restaurants. One positive aspect of how food has changed through this is how there are more personal relationships between the eaters and the growers.
Mary: Berlin’s regulations are quite similar, restaurants can only do takeout and delivery, there are some rumours that table service might be allowed again at the end of May. Germany is lifting the lockdown right now, in general we have been doing fairly well. Even though the number of people who have been infected are close to the countries around us, the number of deaths is much lower, due to several reasons. We’re in a weird week, people seem to think that the danger of the virus might’ve been overestimated and they’re questioning why we need to obey all the measures when our hospitals are not filling up. Just from this week on face masks are mandatory in shops and public transport. We will need to wait two weeks or so to see if the lifting of the lockdown will have a negative effect. For many people, it feels as if we’ve taken several steps back in our effort to lead a sustainable life. Most places are doing takeout, they don’t accept you bringing your own to-go cups, there’s a huge amount of waste created by protective gear like disposable face masks. Would you agree? Have we taken a step back?
Alicia: The article I wrote was an assignment, I didn’t pitch the story. And it was my editor who told me, it feels like sustainability is going out the window right now. I answered that from my angle, which is an admittedly small window into the world, everyone’s been regrowing their scallions, planting gardens, getting into sourdough, all these things that are focussed on regeneration of what you have. My editor asked me to find out more about it, so I asked on Social Media whether people found all their sustainable choices were gone, and a lot of people answered with yes. I was surprised by that because I thought now more people were into composting. But actually municipal composting is currently often on hold, plastic bag bans were lifted, people order more takeout, everything’s wrapped up in more packaging, and more disposable things are used. It’s interesting that I didn’t notice that change until I looked for it. But being a reporter right now is very odd, because we can’t go out into the world and observe things or talk to people, so you have to rely on your weird Social Media window and other reports. People do feel a lot of tension and guilt about wasting more things than they would usually, throwing things in the garbage that they would usually reserve for composting, running the dishwasher more because they’re at home all the time. People with kids especially are getting really exhausted by taking care of the household while doing homeschooling and their own work, and they might reach for the paper plates. People have also been cleaning a lot more, so they use more paper towels. Some told me they gave up on natural cleaning products and bleach everything in order for it to be sterile. It’s a twentyfold issue, from cleaning to mask and glove wearing to takeout to throwing out instead of composting to doing so many dishes. Simultaneously a lot of people find new ways to be sustainable. They are afraid to waste food because they don’t know when they will go to the supermarket again and there’s all the news about the food supply chains being completely screwed up. They’re saving every scrap to make stock and regrowing scallions and lettuce so they are still able to feed themselves. This anxiety around food scarcity is new for a lot of people, and it makes them learn how to be better about these things. Sometimes it’s necessary to let the other shoe drop, or you might lose your mind. As I said in the piece, it’s a good chance for us to think about what sustainability means, because we have to think about how accessible it is to everyone, not just financially and in terms of time, but also in terms of knowledge and disability inclusion. It can’t just be about taking a canvas bag to the grocery store, even though that feels nice. It’s a good moment to change the way we think of sustainability.
Mary: There’s a clash between what you as an individual can accomplish and the complex situation at hand. The personal motivation to do better for the environment can mean you are excluding people who don’t have as many choices as privileged people. It’s a good moment to reflect on these privileges, the situation acts like a mirror because now more people are experiencing limits, and we lost the ability to make choices like bringing a tote bag or your own coffee cup. At the same time, suggesting we should just not have a coffee if we have to use a disposable cup isn’t helpful – getting a coffee in your bakery of choice is a social act, it’s a way to take part in life, it’s not just about drinking a bean brew. You already mentioned some opportunities to balance out the feeling of guilt around creating more waste, what are other things we can now do?
Alicia: My personal suggestion is to not eat meat, which is a really great way to balance your footprint while you are in quarantine. Especially since we are hearing so many horror stories from meat processing plants right now. In general, it has to be a two pronged approach. We need to make better choices individually like composting if we can, making stock from scraps, bringing the canvas bag, eating locally and seasonally, driving and flying less, to have less of an impact on the environment. At the same time there needs to be a policy angle to it. It can’t be something individuals solve by themselves, not even individuals collectively, we need systemic change. However, we do need both, and I got to say that in my piece for Epicurious: the individual choice does matter and so does a change of politics, like advocating for the green new deal that would have an immediate impact on fossil fuel use and provide jobs. There are all these levels on which we have to act in order to make a real impact. The solely consumer-based ideas around sustainability are outdated, we see now that we can’t only rely on our own boujee choices, we need to act collectively to stem the effects of climate change.
Mary: Boujee is a good word, because often and also legitimately so, these choices are a part of self-care. Me taking a tote bag to the supermarket is not me thinking I will save the world with this one choice, but I am personally feeling better because of it. However, we often phrase it as an either-or issue, either we insist we need a systemic revolution and disregard individual action, or the conversation is only about what individuals do and only about whether you put that one plastic cup in the correct bin and if you haven’t, everything’s lost. Both of these conversations often lack an acknowledgment how much time and means are necessary to make certain choices. You don’t only need time to ferment, you also need the time to come up with the idea, research recipes and how-tos. People who are now forced to stay at home, especially when they have kids, realise how much work it actually is. I grew up on a farm in the GDR with our own garden and limited way of shopping groceries, so my mother put a lot of work into making food. For her, the arrival of supermarkets with their huge choice of convenience food was a relief, because that meant she had to spend less time on making food. Do you feel like these days of lockdown, where we don’t have access to all of the things we used to, could serve as a lesson in how we need to approach sustainability as a more inclusive concept?
Alicia: I hope so. It’s making people more aware of how time consuming it is to make more sustainable choices in the kitchen, that it is a luxury and built upon legislation. The people who have been composting are now realising they depend on the municipality and are part of a community. People have started hoarding ingredients like flour or yeast or beans, even, and many people are cooking at home, so the supply chains are all weird. In the US, since 2015 people have been spending more money on eating out than on grocery shopping, by far. For someone in the US cooking three meals at home is bizarre. Now people realise that shopping for things in a supermarket relies on people somewhere else providing these things, harvesting, packing, and transporting. The connections are more clear now and that will go a long way toward realising that access to more sustainable choices is contingent on massive systems. Like the news from meat processing plants where they have to euthanize animals because there aren’t enough workers to safely kill them. All of this makes people see the complexity of the food system and its relationship to sustainability and economics and health. I hope there’s no going back to pretending the food system is separate from all of what’s going on. It’s not separate from minimum wage, health care for all, and environmental issues. We need to understand this in order to understand that there’s weight in the everyday.
Mary: We can use this crisis as a reminder of how complex food supply chains are and how many people are actually essential to get products to a supermarket. In Germany, as in many other countries, a lot of the harvesting is done by people migrating from less privileged countries like Romania and Bulgaria just for this work. This March, the big scale agricultural industry has put a lot of pressure on the German government to allow 80.000 workers to enter the country despite the current lockdown. Those workers are barely protected from the virus, they live in mass accommodations, work very long hours in physically demanding jobs with low pay, have little access to health care, and there have been reports about their passports being taken away. We have one reported Covid-19 death among them already. However, these workers are coming to Germany to work under the same conditions in the food industry every year, and usually the media pays little attention to it. This crisis underlines the absurdity of this system, and people are looking at these issues with different eyes.
Alicia: A couple months ago I wrote a piece for The New Republic asking the question why food media doesn’t cover labour related issues that are so clearly connected to food. They have been treated as separate issues, there are websites covering food systems, farming, and labour, and there are websites covering Popeye’s chicken sandwich and recipes, as though these worlds had no connection. That’s a cognitive dissonance: I don’t understand how we can think about one without thinking about the other. The sections that made their bread and butter from covering chefs and restaurants don’t have that at the moment and could cover food systems, but there’s still too much ink being spilled on writing about how all these big chefs are doing. We could have a reckoning moment with what is deemed important in food – why are we always talking about the chef and rarely about the migrant worker who is getting the chef the produce? These things are becoming more clear.
Mary: Shifting the conversation is a huge part of sustainability that goes way beyond bringing your own cotton bag to the store. A lot of people believe they’re living a sustainable lifestyle because they’re looking for the fair trade label on coffee and chocolate, but aren’t necessarily thinking about what local issues are, like how are those who harvest the produce on our local fields treated.
Alicia: Coffee and chocolate are the best examples for how people devalue food labor. We only see the cup of coffee or the chocolate bar, we were trained to believe that we can pay two Dollars for a Hershey bar, and so the labour behind it is very out of sight, out of mind. Same for sugar, things that are traditionally grown in the global south using underpaid labor. Now in this crisis we learn that the reason something’s not available is because of the supply chain and unprotected workers who are now sick, so these issues hit closer to home. In the past it’s been easier to believe you’re one of the good ones because you buy the fair trade chocolate or pay five dollars for the coffee. But it’s always been a bit patronising to believe those issues are only apparent in faraway places, where we believe rights aren’t respected and the economy is corrupt. Actually, it’s everywhere. Workers aren’t protected and paid properly in our own big industrial farms and slaughterhouses.
Mary: Your way to phrase these issues is so refreshing compared to a lot of other reporting. I talked about this with Soleil Ho and Ashtin Berry, and you are all collectively working on this big shift in narrative, pushing it away from the focus on chefs pretending they cook their twenty course meals on their own, to a real acknowledgement of how complex it all is. That complexity can be overwhelming, it can be soothing to jump to things that seem like an easy fix.
Alicia: I never feel like I know enough, it’s difficult to get a real handle on it. But I’m happy how people are asking more questions about how all of it fits together. We are over-relying on chefs as our teachers on the food system and labor and hospitality and this really needs to change.
Mary: Chefs are a part of the conversation, but just one part.
Alicia: While now they’re regarded as the leaders of the conversation.
Mary: Here’s a question from the audience: can you talk about the importance of framing sustainability as inherently political and leftist?
Alicia: It’s important to frame sustainability as an issue of economics and economic inequality, you can’t discuss it without discussing workers rights, fair wages, medicare for all, food deserts, and accessibility. We need to bring the conversation into a politically leftist space. Talking about animal agriculture in a leftist context can be difficult, because people are hesitant to recognize the ethical issues, but it’s necessary to include it. All these issues come together, you don’t get anywhere in terms of solving the issues of climate change without talking about workers’ rights.
Mary: Also, there are a lot of very uncomfortable intersections between environmental activists and nationalists.
Alicia: Ecofascism is a huge issue.
Mary: Berlin is the site of the biggest protests against the lockdown rules in Germany, and it’s a weird mingling of conspiracy theorists and right-wing extremists with former leftist activists and people who are working on ecological food issues. Again and again I’m shocked to discover these connections, but of course ecofascism is a thing. So we need to make sure any discussion of sustainability is firmly rooted in an anti-fascist, anti-racist thinking.
Alicia: There’s an ecofascist strain in veganism, because being pro-animal can involve anti-human angles that touch on humans ruining the planet by having too many babies which involves the question of who is having too many babies and so on…
Mary: Please tell us where people can read your work, and other sources for this type of topic.
Alicia: My website is alicia-kennedy.com, my newsletter is at aliciakennedy.substack.com, I’m also on Twitter and Instagram. I write a lot for Tenderly, a vegan magazine on Medium, and have included a lot of vintage book recommendations there. I recommend reading The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing from 2015, which brings a lot of issues together, and The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J. Adams from 1990, and Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé from 1971. It was a bestseller and the first mainstream positing of the idea that hunger is a distribution problem.
Mary: Good quarantine reads! Thank you so much!
Transcript edited for length and clarity by Mary Scherpe.