I come from a land that wasn’t colonized and for the majority of my life indigeneity wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I come from a land my ancestors cultivated and sustained, where wisdoms and traditions were passed down through blood and psyche. I come from a land where food is bought in the hospital as medicine; is purchased from farmers directly as live forms; and is offered on the altar to connect with the other worlds. I come from a land where food is embodied knowledge. The cultivation and the consumption of food are intuitively orchestrated amongst the humans, non-humans and the more than humans.
I spent a lot of summer times with my grandparents. Everyday, my grandma would take a trip to down the street to the market, where live animals are in cages or tanks and dead ones are hanging. The market smells like animal odor and blood. My grandma would always ask me what I would like for lunch, and usually I would say fish. Then she would pick one that swims lively and the vendor would kill it for us. One spanking action of the knife, marks the end of a fish’s life and the creation of an ingredient for our lunch. Sometimes a relative would bring a chicken they raise to us, and my grandpa would kill the chicken himself. I would always cover my eyes and my ears when the killing happens, but It’s all vivid and clear in my mind, that my food comes from previous lifeform. It seems like the elders all know how to handle foods.
Then the idea of modernity and development infected the air, and supermarkets were built one after another. All of a sudden, the market I went with my grandma day after day seemed dirty, smelly, chaotic, and “uncivilized”. I started growing fond of the clean and orderly supermarkets and the foods shipped from all over the globe. Somewhere along the timeline plums imported from Chile or cherries from the USA became a standard of luxury. At around the same time I stopped wanting to go to the market anymore because I don’t want to be associated with the lower class, the uncultured, the farmer.
Since when have meat without a trace of blood wrapped in plastic become a symbol of civilization?
Since when have shipping landfill to a “third world country” become a symbol of modernization?
Since when have exploiting migrant labour as agriculture worker become a symbol of globalization?
