greed’s no good
But, because the audacious claim “greed is good” is too easy to rebut, let me focus instead on the more nuanced aspects of the Funk’s article.
Let’s start with Neo-Malthusianism – a panic in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction the supposedly universal formula of population growth against the growth of agriculture: exponential versus arithmetic. ”Food security” in its original form arose from the terror that the (poor) “masses” were outgrowing our food growing capacity. This approach legitimized agribusiness and monopolies like Monsanto. It reinforced the western world’s supremacy, establishing an international food system upon surplus yields from the US and other industrialized countries being send abroad. It allowed no local control over food, and disregarded local knowledges. Further, we came to see that the inundation of foreign, cheap surplus food staples into underdeveloped communities undermined the existing food system in many areas.
So, why do I reel to read the term “food security” applied to Heilberg’s work? And how is this “food security” different from the community food security work we’re doing in the ninth ward?
Today, the Community Food Security Coalition defines CFS as “a condition in which all community residents obtain a safe, culturally acceptable, nutritionally adequate diet through a sustainable food system that maximizes community self-reliance and social justice.”[1] This definition, unlike the 1974 one, acknowledges the importance of taking into account local particularities, both culturally and socially, for effective food security. This most recent poststructuralist model of CFS takes into account both third-world and first-world (like the Lower Ninth) food insecurity, though it takes distinctly different forms in each place.
Community food security rejects the universalized Neo-Malthusian analysis as ineffective. Food systems – how we grow and distribute and sell and eat food – must be understood on a local level. Food systems are, food oppression (if you may) is, intimately intertwined with the household, social, cultural, and political systems of oppression in our communities. So insofar as Heilberg – a rich, privileged, educated, white, North American male - is replicating instead of dismantling power dynamics in the communities in which he’s working, his supposed food security is ineffective. Oppressive.
Because, yes! “all oppression is connected,” as StacyAnn Chin yells. So here’s a less directly applicable, but more also poignant and powerful response that I am reminded of: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ofsVwH4O_k
[1] Community Food Security Coalition website. www.foodsecurity.org/views_cfs_faq.html.