He Dairied to Dream
Hello Big Teammates—
First of all, obviously I’m here for every single anal-tuber-stockmarket-shorting meme, and little else.
It’s been a glorious few days for getting to make the system look as stupid and broken as we know it is. But what happened Thursday with companies like Robinhood was a good reminder (for the tech-optimist like myself) that Silicon Valley is Wall Street-backed. However much I’ve wanted to believe that tech startups could be the remedy to our myriad broken systems, they haven’t proven themselves up to the task. No one is coming to fix what’s broken, to empower the disempowered, or to fight inequality on our behalf. We’ll just have to do it ourselves.
F(ighting) for Us: Reader Mail
From a Dissatisfied Reader:
“Please give us something, anything other than telling us to support Feeding American and more SNAP.
Have you seen who’s on their Board? Anti-worker, anti- the type of farmer who grows food for people.
Could you mention putting pressure on politicians for policy changes that solve problems, e.g. a big fat 'tax and dividend’ bill (so pollution is taxed and we all get regular checks), and supply management? Even Canada’s doing a bit of it.
When are we going to stop paying farmers to overproduce commodities that kill? #ShiftPower”
First, thanks for your feedback!
Last year, I reported a story about hunger in West Virginia. One of the community advocates I talked to choked up and couldn’t go on, relating a story of a young black man who struggled with homelessness and starvation. His hopelessness, she believed, led to his suicide. He was 19. This happened before the pandemic that has plunged millions more men, women, and children into poverty, hunger, and desperation.
I understand the frustration of wanting bigger, more systemic change in the food system, and ASAP. But people are going hungry right now. We have to, *HAVE TO*, be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, to find emergency, stop-gap solutions (like both SNAP and efficiently run food banks/pantries) that save the lives of our community members while we are also working towards those bigger goals.
I will not deny that Feeding America is, in its organization, problematic. They are dependent on funding from the very companies that cause the poverty they seek to alleviate (and y’all, it’s not just them, our whole non-profit system is captured by the wealthy, read Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Saving the World for more). That’s fucked. You’ll notice I didn’t recommend donating to or supporting them— I simply noted that they have resources available to help advocates looking to promote SNAP (which no mutual aid organization I know of has the resources to put together). SNAP dollars not only give hungry people the most autonomy in choosing the foods they want to eat, they also give them the freedom to spend money at local small businesses (including farms), which is a powerful economic engine in many impoverished areas. As short term solutions to preventing hunger and death, SNAP might not be the best possible solution, but it’s the best we’ve got.
When it comes to the bigger, longer term problems with our food system, this government is not going to do this for us. Supply management is not the solution you’re suggesting it is here; you’ll notice that Canada has supply management in sectors like dairy, and exactly the same white/male/rich dominated dairy sector that the US has— the legacy of settler colonialism. I would love to stop paying farmers to produce commodities, but the USDA was literally set up to do just that. It’s not as easy as turning off a garden hose, it requires much deeper and more fundamental systemic deconstruction, and all of that starts with deconstructing our love affair with farmers of every size, crop, and stripe. It’s fun to dream that one day polluters will send the rest of us checks, but right now, we struggled to get the outdated $15 minimum wage across the finish line. I’m sorry if you’ve come here for dreams, I find pragmatism more nourishing.
The point of this whole thing, The Big Team Farm, is not to use it as a policy cudgel to pry a few dollars from our captured government. It’s to build an alternative, one that gains the strength over time to take on, not the government, but the people who have captured it. But the thing is, to build and grow a community and to ensure it grows strong, you need people, and not ones that are starving to death.
So I’ll say it again, support SNAP.
Political Cartoon or Butter Ad?
Confession: I love Bollywood. I fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan (the world’s third richest actor) when he and I were roommates in India. Or I should say, I spent enough time watching bootlegged SRK movies while lying on tile floors trying to escape the heat that it *felt* like we were roommates. Sometimes I’d go on runs and listen to SRK songs (no, he doesn’t sing, he lets singers like Akon do that for him 😂 ), and I’d pass this billboard that, despite not being digital, changed sometimes multiple times a week.
Every one was unique, but they all featured the same blue haired girl cradling a dairy product while winking at some cheeky pun.
I had learned about Amul Dairy before I went to India, and about the nearly 80 year history of one of the world’s largest agricultural cooperatives. Amul is owned collectively by about 3.6 million Indian dairy farmers who each own an average of five cows. Starting in 1946, Amul, led by Dr. Verghese Kurien, revolutionized the business of dairying on the subcontinent; collecting milk daily at thousands of local distribution points, centralizing, pasteurizing, and storing it quickly, and then turning it around to deliver it daily to consumer’s doorsteps in pint-sized bags. At the same time, Amul was leading the way in compensating farmer-owners not days or weeks after the milk was delivered, but at the moment of delivery, transforming many rural lives and communities in the process.
I could write ad nauseam about Amul Dairy (and trust me, I have) but I want to focus today not on the organization itself, but on the Amul Girl. She’s known across India as a fun and charming character with a team behind her who are not willing to pull punches, and gosh do they love a person of Indian descent abroad:
Amul chimes in on politics, current events, film, and sports often in these hand painted and often punny cartoons. In many ways, the Amul Girl acts as a sort of national mascot that captures the joys, pains, humors, and heartbreaks of India, Indians, and their neighbors.
Take a moment for that to sink in. A food brand mascot as a continuously relevant national icon. Imagine a universe where Tony the Tiger, The Green Giant, or the recently disappeared Indigenous women of the Land O’ Lakes logo was widely thought to be an interesting source of social commentary in the U.S.
Consider this salty ad from just a few weeks ago, created in response to a rash of high electric bills charged to residents in Mumbai in the midst of the pandemic (Sabka means “everyone” in Hindi):
The fascinating thing to me about Amul’s decades of pushing the envelope (and defying lawsuits) with their ads is that it so effectively invalidates so many of the staples of American advertising— within food and agriculture and without. Surprising but bland, memorable but vague, identifying with “brand values” but without signaling too strongly anything other than, “buy our thing.” These are the essentials of the commercials we see on billboards, on TV, and scrolling through our feeds. “Don’t offend potential customers” is the cardinal rule. And we saw last summer, and over and over since then, what happens when that kind of vague signaling from companies is questioned and the public demands to know what they really believe. Then comes the press release, the nice graphics, the big campaign about doing better and being allies, and the inevitable and quick as possible retreat back into to the empty “their greaaaaaaaaate!” brand positivity that corporate America has been shoving down our collective throats for so long.
I like to think that one of the factors that allowed Amul to be so bold in it’s stances is the fact that, instead of responding to a despotic board of ultra-elite owners, their real owners were the very “everyman” who’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions they were trying to capture. Cooperative company ownership, it’s clear to me, has benefits far beyond the company itself.
Regardless of why the Amul Girl has emerged as this bastion of irreverent and unapologetic commentary-cum-advertisement, it gives me hope that someday, America might be home to just such a company and brand. The food industry could use the breath of fresh air, and at the very least, the rest of us could use the laughs.
#FarmArt: Will You Read My Introduction?
Hello.
Here’s a link to the Introduction of Farm (and Other F Words).
Would you like to read it?
If you do, please feel free to offer feedback. You can do that by responding to this email, coming @ me on social media, or even aggressively providing track changes in a copy of the above Google doc and sharing it with me at sarahkmock1@gmail.com. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts, and I hope you enjoy the ultra-special, super exclusive sneak preview of this book that is taking over ever waking moment (and some non-waking moments) of my life.
If you’ve finished your homework, then you can enjoy this fabulous comic from artist Allie Shapiro.
Why does America need lesbian farmers (asked no one reading this email, but humor me)? Because Rush Limbaugh is scared of them, which is reason enough. Because we need folx of every sexual and gender identity to be on the land, and luckily, some are already there. And because cis-genderness is just as integral a part of our deeply broken “family farm” ideal as whiteness and wealthiness. For more on the relationship between rural/farm life and heterosexuality (and how 4-H enforces straightness), y’all must follow Friend of the Team Gabriel Rosenberg, a Duke professor who writes about food, farming, and sex.
C(orrections) Corner
Apologies here for using the turn of phrase “high brow” in last week’s email. Big Teammate Amalia lets us know why;
Only because I think you'll appreciate this, and not as a "correction" - just this morning I learned that we get "high brow" and "low brow," as in "Not all art is high brow" from phrenology? Feels like something I could have guessed, but never did...
Thanks Amalia, and correct away folx. I don’t know it all. Feel free to demand that I (and all of us) do better.
Last F(ew) Things
Covers are coming soon! And it’s going to be on you lovely people to help decide which one is the winner. Keep an eye out for this email next week for that.
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, Farm You, America, You’re a Farm Kid, Too, and I Volunteered as Tribute from Wyoming.
There’s also a couple more artists in the pipeline still for our #farmart project, so be on the lookout for some more unusual and super interesting stuff.
If you ever need a recommendation on a Bollywood movie to watch, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings therein, and am happy to provide extensive and personalized recommendations. Getting people to watch Bollywood is my secret passion.
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