I Volunteered as Tribute from Wyoming
Hello Big Team!
I’ve been basking in the glow of Amanda Gorman’s poetry (and weeping lightly about the promise of The Youths) for a few days now. A section I found particularly apt for the Big Team Farm—
“American is more than a pride we inherit.
It's the past we step into and how we repair it.”
When I think about our country’s past, within agriculture or without, I am overwhelmed by the sheer scope of what’s been done, by the scale of the injustices that have been committed.
But I’ve been taking some inspiration recently from this being…
This is my dog, Sagan. The domestication of dogs is a pretty amazing thing. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson would say, it was a result not of evolutionary competition, but of the “Survival of the Friendliest.” Wolves were once one of our greatest competitors and threats, so much so that scientists have guessed that nightmares featuring wolves might even be in our DNA. But despite this fear, our ancient ancestors did not exterminate wolves. Instead, a branch of wolves learned to follow us around, eating our scraps and keeping us company, even hijacking the human bonding pathway by gazing into our eyes (and souls).
I once had a Hinduism professor who described this situation:
There’s two ways to kill your enemy.
You can kill them, or you can kill the enemy within them.
Dogs, I like to think, taught us this powerful lesson. That our real superpower is not that we are mighty, that we are smart, or that we have opposable thumbs. It’s that we’re resilient, we have short memories, and most of all, we’re incredibly lonely. We crave one another in particular, and all living things in general. We crave closeness and care and affection. That, on some fundamental level, is who we are. We spend a lot of time dismissing this touchy feely stuff. But that glorious, powerful stuff is the primordial soup from which dogs (and we?) sprang.
So when I worry that I might not be up to being part of the task of stepping into the past to repair the present, I like to remember that I have more than one legacy to draw on. Many of my ancestors are guilty of these violences that need to be repaired. But other ancestors of ours mastered the ability to turn existential threats into best friends, and we are their descendants too. We have the power to kill the enemy within our enemies, to turn loneliness into love into justice. It’s our legacy. Remembering this makes repairing the past, and healing each other, feel possible. Which might be just the hope we need to keep going.
I Volunteered as Tribute (From Wyoming)
The Hunger Games, both the books and the movies, got a of attention as the existential anxiety-inducing dystopian world that inspired a whole sub-genre of YA novels. Plus incredible memes like this.
But what many overlooked was the racist (and agriculturally rooted) tropes that built the districts.
District 11 is dedicated to agriculture, and is home to the only People of Color in general, and Black people in particular, in the stories. According to the Wiki, it is covered in orchards, fields, and herds of dairy cattle, and is located in the Deep South, whereas Katniss’s 12 is just North of there, in Appalachia, from West Virginia to Kentucky and Georgia. The people in Katniss’s district very much embody the rural, poor, white population we associate with Appalachia, where the primary sources of work are coal mining, the black market, and cake decorating. Katniss learns about District 11 from Rue, a young competitor in The Hunger Games, who illustrates a much harsher and more abusive life for the people of 11. Rue mentions a boy named Martin was once killed for theft, despite the fact that he “wasn’t right in the head.” Katniss reflects;
"Hearing this, District 12 feels like some kind of safe haven. Of course, people keel over from starvation all the time, but I can't imagine the peacekeepers murdering a simple-minded child."
I found these themes fascinating on a reread, because intentionally or not, they capture the experience of People of Color in the food system.
The incredible double standards the Katniss (sort of?) grapples with are true in the real world too. In 12, the border fence is not electrified, and she's able to pass through it and hunt in the woods. The Peacekeepers of 12 are negligent, but not vindictive. Children in 12 aren’t required to work for the Capitol. None of those things are true for the farmworkers and their children in the district next door. In that way, Katniss and the people of 12 might be poor, but their poverty is a pale imitation of the poverty in 11, which is comparatively more violent, more oppressive, and more all encompassing. It is systemic racism on display.
Ironically, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia (all places that are ostensibly part of District 12) are not overwhelmingly white in reality, as the people of 12 exclusively are. This betrays another truth— the false idea that Appalachia is a monolith of poor white people. It is not. It’s a racially and ethnically diverse region, home to some of America’s fiercest environmental and labor advocates. I highly recommend reading What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia for more on this— it’s just what you need if you’ve recently consumed anything that’s left the bad taste of Hillbilly Elegy in your mouth.
In all these ways, The Hunger Games is a good way to access the idea that white blue-collar poverty is usually not a comparable experience to that of People of Color in the food system. Vulnerable farmworkers do one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, all while trying to avoid being beaten by their bosses, enslaved, or poisoned, and are made to live in unsafe housing, eat the inedible, and pay for both. Not to mention that they don’t get overtime protections and that 70% of farms that are investigated for labor abuses end in violations. Oh and don’t forget that the Trump administration lowered their wages during a pandemic. America’s farm labor system runs on the abuse of mostly undocumented migrants.
The racism in The Hunger Games becomes less subtle as it goes on. Despite the fact that District 11, the most oppressed of all, did the work and made all the sacrifices of starting the rebellion— Katniss gets all the credit. This Ursula K. Le Guin quote comes to mind;
“Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.”
(If, like me, you’re still moved a little bit by Rue and the people of District 11, support their real life counterparts by sending money and support to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, United Farm Workers, or a local farm worker organization in your state like the Worker Justice Center of New York.)
SNAP to it!
So we’ve got a new President. It’s been a big few days for 46, but I wanted to write this week about the best way any administration (or Department of Agriculture in particular) could help vulnerable people without needing Congress to do much. Because I don’t know if people know this, but there is exactly one best way USDA can intervene to juice up vulnerable communities and economies (and it’s not, as my partner guessed when I floated this topic, “a Quarter Quell?”).
The best way is to put as much money as we can into SNAP, the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program (putting money into WIC, the Women, Infant and Children feeding program, is also good).
If you work in and around food at all, you may have seen some of the countless atrocious headlines about USDA and its food assistance efforts since the start of the pandemic. The food boxes that had a Hatch Act-violating letter from the President in it, that contained little more than loose ketchup packets and Spaghetti-Os in some cases, was just the tip of the iceberg of boondoogle that funneled unknown mountains of taxpayer money to CRE8AD8, etc. while millions of Americans went hungry.
And the injury to insult of the whole situation was, literally no one wanted these boxes *even before* they were authorized. The model utilized during COVID came from a failed Farm Bill pet-project of former Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue called the Harvest Boxes, which gained support from literally no one. Food banks didn’t want them, hungry people didn’t want them, and all the while, both were pleading for the one thing that actually works to get people fed. SNAP dollars. Food bank and pantry officials will be the first to tell you that they do not have the infrastructure or the capacity to take on the scale of America’s hunger problem. SNAP does.
So if you have some time over the coming days and are anxious to be heard by the new administration, feel free to harass your elected officials about getting more money into the SNAP program. Need more guidance on how to advocate? Feeding America has some great resources.
#FarmArt
Just in case you were worried that all the farm art was going to be fancy visual art, don’t worry. Not all art is high brow. I just received this fabulous mug from my friend chick, a Big Team Farm member who’s well worth the follow— she lives and works in the conventional ag world and is *incredibly* clear-eyed about what she sees.
The connections between agricultural and sexual imagery are legion. From “virgin soil” to getting plowed, from “hung like a horse” to spreading seed. The vast majority of this ag-sex word play is hyper-masculine, which makes sense only in the most outdated sense that “man’s role in farming is to seed the fertile Earth and bring forth life.” The historical irony of this, of course, is that men being in charge of farming is a relatively recent development in human history. I like to think that women, who continue to dominate farm work in many places, are more cognizant of the fact that the Earth does not need to be seeded by man to produce food. The land might be “pregnant” with bounty, but the human role in that process is, at most, as midwife.
That’s why I really like this mug. Because it unseats the power balance that always puts representations of masculinity over femininity in the ag context. Literally, it suggests that all those cocks strutting around the barnyard, thinking they rule the roost, do so at the pleasure of a higher, feminine power. Figuratively, it’s also a celebration of female sexuality— a particularly provocative move in agriculture, where ideas like “virgin soil” underpin expressions of private property rights (one man, one women : one farmer, one farm).
But news to America’s farmers; the Earth has had other farmers before you, and she’s going to have other farmers after you. She is liberated. She can not be tied down.
Last F(ew) Things
If you’re still excited about the book, look out for a sneak preview in next week’s email! Also, if you’re particularly interested in providing feedback, please reach out by responding to this email. And so sorry for the delayed responses to folx who have reached out to me over the past two weeks or so. Revisions are taking up about 107% of my time. But you’re not forgotten! I’ll get back to you ASAP.
If you’re new to Big Team Farms and want some explanation for what the F you just read, check out The Intro Newsletter and “Nobody Wants to Read About Agriculture”, “We Found Some Animals and Now They’re In Prison”, “We Won’t Be Home for Christmas,” and Farm You, America.
If what you need today is a good laugh, I recently remembered Bo Burnham’s Country Song, so enjoy that.
Stay safe and well out there, friends. And remember, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or high quality gifs (especially farm-related) you’d like to share, I’m right on the other end of this email.
Rock on,
Sarah