Food Wars

Ohohoho it's fun ti have to think of silly titles for posts sometimes. I'm glad tumblr doesn't require titles, but I do enjoy them.

Anyway, I'm crossposting this one. I think it's worth storing, and maybe that this platform will be more conducive to the type of conversation I'd like to have with this regards.

So.

Tumblr OP, with Mino's tags here.

US Americans are, by and large, disconnected from food production in a way that I honestly was not equipped to understand based on where I grew up. Due to a combination of location and poverty, my family and community during childhood were heavily built around hunting for meat, farming for vegetables, and managing food waste through small animals (chickens, dogs, maybe a pig if you're rich/clever/weird enough to pen it, etc).

I didn't realize until the pandemic when "backyard chickens" became a "trend" just how separate my experience was from the norm.

I always perceived grocery stores as something for.... well. People with money to travel to them, growing up. We bought food there monthly in the winter, and saved our money on vegetable farming and hunting in the summer to afford it.

And I think what I've just described sounds like an unfathomable, impossible dreamscape from one of my solarpunk fantasies or whatever.

Or else sounds like a hellish monstrosity, if you're more familiar with rural poverty and food deserts.

But like... it's neither of those really. It's just... a food system that isn't as tied to the industrial complex as most in the US.

And that modest disconnect still sounds like a made up imagination world to most people in this country. That's how bad the disconnect between food, ALL food, and the average US American is.

And that's without even touching on the way foods native to various parts of the US are considered broadly inferior/filthy compared to colonial imports, including and especially with regards to meats.

===End of tumblr post===

I'm still just thinking about this subject a lot. I've talked before, especially on this blog, about food based racism I experienced growing up. But as I entered adulthood and left rural living behind, I experienced a peculiar sort of food classism (?) instead. The idea that I know how to manage a small scale farmstead because... because why would't I? Who DOESN'T???

It's still strange to me.

But then, I still have to remind myself that just because I have paranoid delusions about mass persecution that are exacerbated by real world politics, and thus literally spend a lot of time preparing for the apocalypse, I am not a "prepper"either.

After all, my preparations include making sure I'm up to date on current food processing safety standards, that I have adequate sewing supplies, that I know how to treat common poultry injuries and infections, that stuff.

you know.

actually useful skills.

Anyway, the disconnect is real and it confuses me to no ends.

Do you know most Americans not only have never killed a fish or game animal, but haven't even seen one be killed? That's so weird to me. How do you live like that??

Anyway, IDK, what are your thoughts??