More on Eating With Accountability

Brownfemipower (BFP) pushed me to think past the given frames on choosing what I eat.

First, let it be said that I still eat fast foods occasionally because I'm too lazy to plan ahead. I still eat meat. I also weigh way more than I ought to, which, in my case, is not for a lack of decent grocery stores in my neighborhood, or because I can't afford to fill my belly with nutritious foods and so opt for carbs. I am beginning to excavate this enormously complex issue. I'm not hypocritically "talking the talk." I'm thinking out loud. There's a difference. I'm taking next steps on a journey.

BFP made my week by acknowledging my response to her posts and EllePhD’s on this vegan/vegetarianism subject. I’m happy to have connected partly because I couldn't reach BFP directly to tell her how much I admire her work. For that matter, I still can’t. She’s turned off the "Comments" option on La Chola. But now that I've dug around in the tombs of the Internet, I think understand why, and I now consider that act a wonderful example of owning her own power. BFP could have just gone away, driven into silence by that particular pack of hyenas. (You know who you are.) Instead, thank God, she turned her mike back on and drew some insurmountable boundaries for people who plainly are not acquainted with the concept.

BFP’s response makes me really happy, too, not just because I am a huge fan of her crystalline thinking and writing, but also because I so much want to link across the chasms that the birth lottery carved between our paths. It's not easy, it's perilous, and it doesn't come with promises of perfection on either side, I know. But linking across race, class, sex, gender, nationality, immigration status , religion (and all the rest) is mortally essential. Mortally, morally, vitally essential.

Because you know we're supposed to fail at it. We're not supposed to talk with each other, and if we try, we're supposed to blow it. Everything about the status quo depends on our not connecting across the chasms. When the buttons they’ve planted blow up, we’re really just doing their dirty work. Lateral hostility. All that. It’s true. Look how much time we’ve lost already.

Which isn’t to say we can’t get angry or disagree with each other. It’s just that there’s a way to do so without gutting each other like catfish. To me, BFP illustrates how in her post in reply to EllePhD about vegetarian/veganism. She isn’t attacking anybody. This is one of the several reasons I admire her work.

Second, let it be said that this is a skill too few possess, including me. There's a difference between knowing what I ought to do and being talented at it. Again, I’m just beginning to excavate this next enormously complex issue. These are next steps on the journey.

More thoughts on eating with social consciousness.

It’s also about the vendors.

On the vast list of things I just do not get is why progressives are not all over the whole constellation of worker justice issues: a living wage, worksite conditions, wage theft/fraud practices, health and safety factors, union busting, and all the rest.

Oh, right. “Benefits.” Let’s stop calling health insurance, retirement income, and profit-sharing, and personal leave “benefits,” OK? “Benefits"? As if they’re ours solely at the discretion of the patriarch who owns our labor? Uh, no. This archaic term intrinsically undermines the truth, which is that these are non-negotiable, earned universal worker rights.

As a dear friend puts it, it doesn’t matter whether someone else writes your paycheck or hands you cash in exchange for your work: If somebody else pays you, you’re a worker.

So it’s obvious, isn’t it, that the way the grocery store or chain treats its personnel is directly related to the way your own boss treats you, right? Over time, unfair labor practice in one sector becomes unfair labor practice in all sectors. We get accustomed, and if we have it a bit better than some, well, unlke us, they're just "workers." That's just a "labor" problem. Not.

If that isn’t sufficient reason to get your head out of your sphincter and get active in worker justice, then what about this?

If eating with consciousness is about how the food gets to our mouths and where it comes from, then it’s also about all the other links in the chain, including the warehouse stockers and the cashiers and the gourmet deli workers. It’s about all the labor practices of their employers.

And if that isn’t sufficient reason to pull it out and get busy, then consider this:

Any employer who is willing to cheat his workers of a living wage, clean and safe working conditions, and universal worker earnings (healthcare, leave, retirement income, profit-sharing) is willing to cheat his customers of fair quality for a fair price. It's about one chain of stores for poor Latinos and another for wealthly Scottsdale. It's about expired product on the shelves, and half-rotted produce, and dirty butcher shops, because if the prime motive is money, don't think for a moment that you as consumer aren't fair game, too.

So let’s stop calling it "eating with a social consciousness." Consciousness is essential, but it isn’t a substitute for doing something to benefit the rest of the production line. Consciousness strikes me as the minimum factor necessary to benefit myself in this matter. If I eat with a social consciousness, I eat very well and support relatively fewer adverse repercussions for others, but I don’t actually change anything materially.

That takes eating with accountability.

I don’t get out much anymore, but I really believe that the last time I saw the (largely) white radical-to-progressive contingent get out en force around any of this was when Ronald Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers. There was a huge protest at the Mall in DC, and I'll never forget it because it began to seem, there for a while, that we might expand our peace and justice movements to include (gasp) all workers-- as if all workers are intrinsically linked in power, strategy, and, well, the fate of humanity. That would include poor white male workers. It seems to me that we could have changed the country if we had had the wit to include them in our demands, because then their anger and resentment would have been redirected. We would have made them allies instead of the reactionary tsunami that swept Reagan, Bush, and Bush into office.

The point is that it isn’t about menus. It's about all of us, and it’s about opening our eyes to every implication of the fact that we actually are all in this together, regardless of the fact that some of us are fuckers. We certainly can prioritize, but I don't think we can leave anybody out of the peace/justice equation.

I don’t aim to perfection. I just aim to do a little bit better with this horrible reality every day.

A.F.G.O

Taking off from Oprah's exploration of vegetarianism, Elle, PhD and Brownfemipower over at La Chola are dialoguing about the work of, and the practical and emotional cost of, and the political meaning of going vegan as women of color.

They're talking about what it means in communities (like mine, too) where meat-eating is pretty much a given, and women's identities have been baked in the nurturance of feeding others for centuries, and where any chefs we have are in our own skins, and grocery shopping comes with enough angst already.

I don't want to characterize their conversation any further, but it talks to me, too, because in this household we're also struggling with the decision to go vegan.

So just read the originals. If you labor under any misapprehension that going vegan is just automatically taking a giant step up the moral ladder of life, let them smack you upside the head. A.F.G.O.: another fucking growth opportunity.

Get this: I'm definitely not saying it's better to eat meat. I'm saying that at least for me, anyway, the way PETA and Oprah and pretty much tout le monde have framed this conversation so far, in that blindly racist and classist way we have of just not seeing, has obscured the most important ethical/moral fact of all: The way what goes on our tables degrades, brutalizes, cheats, injures, and causes other kinds of grave harm to all the workers who get it there.

I'm saying that acting in behalf of animals who are subjected to atrocities so that we might eat is moral, ethical, and principled, but it only goes halfway. It isn't the whole conversation.

I might say, "How did I miss that part about how a vegan diet depends every bit as much on worker exploitation as a meat diet!," except that I know how I missed it. I haven't been thinking about it, and that's a damning indictment of my own racist, classist, blind-way-of-not seeing privilege. I haven't used my eyes or my brain, which leads me still yet again one more time to reflect on the nature of "sin" again--namely, that it happens primarily when we just aren't paying attention to others.

Instead of paying attention myself, I've been content to let the "prevailing conversation," the one that makes it onto the self-help bookshelves, frame the whole thing for me.

But I'm not knocking Oprah. Since when does she have to be perfect in order to make a point worth making? I too feel pretty good that she's taking animal suffering to another level of national consciousness, except that (as you know if you read Wild Chi), I definitely do not think PETA is St. Francis of Assisi by about a trillion miles. About that more some other day.

Meanwhile, thanks to Elle and BFP, I now see in my mind's eye a holy communion meal at which we all KNOW--I mean really KNOW--that not one single bite of anything goes into our mouths that hasn't been sanctified by the blood, sweat, and tears of a picker, a hanger, a packer somewhere, who might be 11 years old or 82, and by the suffering of the animal and sacrifice of the plant that it comprises.

OK I feel a little odd talking about plants' sacrifices over against humans' and animals. I know the story about the pig and the hen: When it comes to breakfast, the pig makes the commitment. But maybe I don't know what plants experience. There's that, but more important still, is this: Since we really are all connected, it really isn't possible to eat without exploiting somebody unless we grow our own. And even then, somebody got paid a low wage to work in miserable conditions to harvest and pack these seeds or the fruit they came from.

So the point for me this minute--it could change because I'm thinking about this--is partly that it's futile to look for the perfectly ethical menu, there being no such thing. Rather, choose my path and be mindful of what I eat and how it comes to me.

Own the debt. It's not just about changing diets. It's about changing industries, wages, working conditions, immigration paths, global trade treaties, and stepping out of the hierarchical, patriarchal way of looking at women and people of color and animals and Earth and, yes, even plants. It's about a whole-life stance, not about what goes on the plate.

So.

This from Elle:

So, a number of things have me thinking about vegetarianism/veganism. One, as noted above, are the thoughtful discussions BFP has about potentially becoming a veg*n.

Another is the nature of my work. Invariably, when I talk about my dissertation, I talk about conditions in poultry processing plants. For the workers, there is exhausting, dirty work, at unbelievable speeds. There is routine underpayment of wages. There are supervisors who treat you as if you are nothing. There is the huge company that will do almost anything--legal or extralegal--to keep workers from organizing. There is the exploitation of the most vulnerable workers. There are the "chicken" rashes, bone splinters, musculoskeletal disorders, cumulative trauma disorders, cuts and amputations, slippery, fat-slick floors, extreme temperatures, dealing with frightened, live chickens and dead ones that rest in a "fecal soup."

Here are the hands of a 22-year old man who works in live hang.

And this from Brownfemipower:

"Dr. Elle talked a lot about the connection she and her family/community has to meat plant workers. She had a picture of the hands of a 22 year old worker and she talked about how wounds and accidents that happen in the plant have led people she knows to do horrible things to the animals that work there (one took out a knife and stabbed the animal).

"Her discussion brought back so many memories to me–memories that I’m not even sure are mine, but sit in my body anyway.

"* My father was a strawberry picker (among other things). He worked on his hands and knees for hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks at a time. As a child, when I heard the stories, I imagined my fully grown father with his wide shoulders and strong legs competently stripping berries from plants–just like he did when he and I picked blueberries. As an older woman, I realize now that he was only a kid in those stories. Younger than I was when I started working in the fields (11 yrs.).
To this day, I avoid blueberries. And bananas make me sick. How much blood of the murdered flows through the flesh of bananas? How many years of lost childhood flow through the skin of poisoned blueberries/strawberries/tomatoes/grapes….?

"Is a vegan lifestyle really a 'cruelty free' lifestyle? Why is it so easy to prioritize cruelty inflicted on animals over cruelty inflicted on brown people? Why can people list a whole litany of wrongs committed against animals by the food industry–but at the same time those people “never really thought” about what happens to the workers?

"Should I consider these things while contemplating veganism? Should I mourn them?

"Can I bring myself to say with a straight face that I no longer eat meat because I care about ending violence against animals? Can I say to the workers, to myself, that even animals are more important to me than they are, than I am? Can I continue my own people’s erasure? Can I continue mine?

"How do I make eating vegan/vegetarian a political choice about liberation without making the sacrifice one set of beings make with their bodies more important than another set of beings?"

Where Clinton Went Wrong

Earlier I wrote that HRC's tack to the Right was one reason she lost. And I'm not sad that she lost. She made me furious too many times to regret that she won't be in my face to make me furious regularly any more.

Later I was surfing the web and came across this explanation of why being sad about Clinton's losing could be an affront to women of color.

"You said,

'Those of us who care about institutional misogyny (and, again, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive groups) don’t have that consolation, as regards a barrier being broken with regard to misogyny. There was no transcendence; only a loss.'

"I feel your loss, I understand why it hurts to see a woman lose, probably (I disagree, but I am willing to see your point) because of sexism."

"But some of us who care about institutional misogyny don’t feel a loss at Clinton not being elected. There would have been no barrier broken if she were elected. I personally don’t look at Clinton and think–geez, look at all she accomplished–now I can do the same thing–I think–geez–she supported the militarization of the Mexican/U.S. border. There are women now being raped, arrested, imprisoned, and ripped from their children because she actively supports increased militarization at the border."

Read the whole post. It is an education.

It isn't OK to tack to the Right. There are consequences.