[P2P-F] Fwd: ZNet Commentary: Esther Vivas: Class Struggle & Food

Wed Nov 5 14:08:02 CET 2014

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From: ZCommunications <michael.albert at zmag.org>
Date: Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 12:13 PM
Subject: ZNet Commentary: Esther Vivas: Class Struggle & Food
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Esther Vivas: Class Struggle & FoodZ Communications Daily Commentary

Do the rich and poor eat the same? Do our incomes determine our diet?
Today, who is overweight? Although often, and from certain quarters, the
call for healthy and wholesome food is viewed with disdain, as “a fad”
“posh”, “hippy” or “flower power” the reality is rather different than
these short-sighted comments imply. To defend ecological, local, peasant
food is most “revolutionary”.

If we look closely we see how today’s agricultural model is determined by
the interests of capital, by the interests of large companies (the
agroindustrial sector and supermarkets), which seek to profit from
something as essential as food. The capitalist system, in its race to
transform needs into commodities, rights into privileges, making food, and
especially food products of quality, into a luxury. Just as it has made
housing only accessible to those who can afford it, and the same fate
awaits our health and education systems.

Although it is not only the logic of capital that impacts on food, the
invisible hand of patriarchy also pulling the strings of this system.  If
not how is it that those who produce the most food, women, are the most
hungry? Do not forget that between 60% and 80% of food production in the
South, according to the FAO, is in the hands of women, however you are,
paradoxically, it is women who suffer most from hunger, 60% globally.
Women work the land, but do not have access to land ownership, means of
production or agricultural credit. This not about being ideological, but to
make it clear to all who consider the idea of “eating well” is, as they say
in France, a thing of the “bobos, the “bohemian bourgeois”,  that nothing
could be further from the reality.

If we answer the initial questions, the data confirms this. Do the rich and
poor eat the same? No. Does our income determines our diet? Indeed. A study
of Spain’s Platform of People Affected by Mortgages has put this in black
and white: 45% of those who have been evicted have difficulty buying enough
food to eat. Income puts limits on what we buy: it decreases consumption of
beef and fish and in relation to the pre-crisis period, the consumption of
fresh fruit and vegetables. In contrast, there’s been an increase in the
purchase of less nutritious products, highly processed and high in
calories, such as packaged sweets: cookies, chocolates, pastries and cakes.
Our social class, education and purchasing power determines what we eat.

So, today, who is overweight? In general, those who have less eat worse.
Looking at the map of the Spanish peninsula it is clear: the regions with
the highest poverty rates, such as Andalucía, Canarias, Castilla-La Mancha
and Extremadura, have the highest population that is overweight. In the US,
people with higher obesity problems are African American and Latino
communities. The crisis only accentuates the difference between food for
the rich and food for the poor.

Questioning the dominant agricultural model and fighting for an alternative
that places at its core people’s needs and respect for the land, is to get
to the heart of the class struggle. The Agricultural Workers’ Union
(Sindicato de Obreros del Campo, SOC) in Andalusia, led by Cañamero Diego
and Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, neither easily classifiable as “petty
bourgeois”, are clear about it. Their work is to defend of a living
countryside, land to the tiller, in favour of organic farming, for another
model of consumption. This is a “fight” in defense of “nobodies”, the
oppressed.

To fight for food that is local, healthy and campesino is the most
subversive battle there is.

ZCommunications, 18 Millfield St., Woods Hole, MA, USA, 02543
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