The ward where I lived constituted 10% of the land area of the entire city, but it was not possible to buy a tomato except at the one-day-a-week farmer’s market in the summer.
Last spring, I bought my first car. Because I had walked and bused everywhere but I didn’t formally exercise, I assumed I would gain weight rapidly upon switching to car transportation. Not so—I lost about 15 pounds really quickly. Before long, I had to buy new pants. I still wasn’t exercising, but being able to reach beyond the North City food desert for food access caused me to lose weight without trying. Scary.
I live in Detroit now. Food access is varied here. There are no major chain big box groceries inside the city, but we have a number of medium box stores ranging from horrible to good, as well as a number of smaller ethnic and specialty stores. We also have one of the largest, oldest farmer’s markets in the country, where at 2am I watched friends buy bushels of beautiful raspberry-red heirloom tomatoes for canning. It really runs the gamut. I say Detroit is not a food desert, but in the likely event that my very broken car quits in the next month or two…. Ask me what I think about Detroit food access then. And then help me look for my old, bigger pants.

— rustbelt commenting on The Hierarchy Of Food Needs

Now research conducted by Portsmouth University has shown that of those people claiming to have an allergy or intolerance, only 2 per cent actually did. That means millions of people wrongly think they have a food allergy. Their condition is not an allergy itself, but the belief that they have an allergy. … The realisation that most people aren’t that special can be avoided by adopting a quasi-medical condition that sets one apart. It demands attention and consideration. It forces other people to think about them and make special arrangements for them. Only last week, a friend with recently self-diagnosed lactose intolerance came round for a cup of tea. Do you have any soya milk? she asked as the kettle boiled. I confessed I hadn’t and felt awful. It was then that I realised she was on her third chocolate biscuit. Oh, milks OK in chocolate biscuits, she said hastily. How convenient, I thought.

— Food intolerance: the new epidemic? [via]

I find this example somewhat annoying (even though I agree with the sentiment) since lactose tolerance is something that declines for the large majority of people as you become an adult. Whatev, though. I’m still really feeling the bit from savage minds of food allergies as an anti-modern idiom of distress.

But this fussiness is part of a larger yearning for control altogether, which is where the anti-modernism comes in. Food has long been not only a means of forging and asserting cultural identity but of resisting the onslaught of a homogenizing, enervating modernity that threatens to dissolve not just cultural identities but individual identities. From the health spa/retreats of the Kellogg brothers and their peers (that gave us corn flakes and granola) to the popularity of Sweet-n-Low in the ‘50s and ‘60s to the communes of the hippie era to the herbal remedies of today, food has been seen as a way to “get back” to a more “natural” way of life – as opposed to the high-stress, low-community, detached and distracted way of life that is modernity.
None of this is to suggest that there are not very real food allergies – it’s hard to argue with anaphylactic shock. Nor, more importantly, is it to say that the 98% of food allergy sufferers in the study with no medically detectable food allergies do not, in a very real way, suffer. The bodily manifestations of the most obviously social disorders can still drastically limit a person’s quality of life.
What it does suggest is that treatment of food allergies needs to go much further than antihistamines and food avoidance to encompass the cultural psychological. If control is a central issue – as it is already recognized to be in anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders, which strike bright, ambitious young women with overbearing parents hardest precisely because they are the least in control of their lives and the most aware of it – then a) developing non-food strategies for regaining control, and b) developing a realistic relationship with the demands and pressures of daily life are also important to individual adjustment.

— Food Allergies and Modern Life

Because when you say you can fix the problem by consuming the right things, by doing correct individual actions–you don’t have to think about real solutions. You don’t have to think about capitalism or the shit corporations put in our food. And you can look down on people who don’t live up to those individualist morals. You get to feel good about yourself for teaching your niece to say no to dessert, and not to waste water. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so much of the responsibility, in both cases, lands on the shoulders of women. So much of it has to do with food. Maybe it’s time for us as women to let go of guilt for not being vegan, for taking long showers, for leaving the water running, for all of it, just as we let go of guilt for what we eat. Because not only does “every little bit” not necessarily help, the attitude that it does contributes to shaming women, and elevates middle class conservation to a morality that was never allowed the poor. Consuming your way to environmental salvation: the feminism-acceptable diet talk.

— It’s not a diet, it’s lifestyle activism [via,via]

Food Not Bombs is a white supremacist movement. If you can’t see that you still have your blinders on. Fuck you is my response to white charity. All your romantic rhetoric about blurred lines between the servers and the served quickly enters the wastebin of reality with every chapter formed. For all those FNB chapters that rely on dumpstered food, I flip a finger to all you white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture, get your fucking privilege out of my face. Did it ever cross your mind that people of color cannot do as you do? Did it cross your mind that dumpster diving is a practice that comes with risks for people of color you know nothing about? And quit fucking up the dumpsters. Some people rely on them for survival; and boo on you that I have to point this out, but they shouldn’t be made to go to your once or twice a week “picnics” to get fed. Fuck corporations but fuck you too for controlling the underground food supply. White people, you’re still stealing.

— Open Letter to Food Not Bombs [via]