We will feed us!

How to support November's food crisis and more...

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I heard that there will be no food stamps for November due to the government shutdown. Will [the two of you] be okay?” I asked an Uncle and Aunty last week.

They responded that they wished they were able to tell me that they will be okay, “But it’s scary […],” they said. “We are just gonna have to figure [something out]. But [we are] not prepared at all. It’s like a slap in the face.”

Fifteen years ago, they were on track to being able to buy their own house. But the financial crisis resulted in them becoming houseless instead. They now live in a trailer home while informally working for their landlord in exchange, with the Uncle also helping to tend animals on a nearby ranch. Having to navigate a series of chronic illnesses, injuries, and disabilities, as well a car accident that wrecked their truck, however, has gravely limited their abilities to ever move beyond just scraping by.

Now, they are bracing for the impact of going from receiving $900 a month together in government food aid, which they were already struggling trying to get by with, to getting nothing at all.

Theirs is just one story out of countless, as approximately 42 million Americans, or 1 in 8, rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And there are many more people who do not qualify for the program but are nevertheless food insecure.

So this is very real. This is material. This is survival.

And the fact that the government is willing to cut this life-line off for so many of its own people on such short notice, while continuing to abduct undocumented peoples whose labor the exploitative food system literally relies on, should be sobering.

No, things are not okay. People are not okay. And more people are going to be not okay.

I reject the kind of passive, empty optimism that things will sort themselves out and that we just have to ride out the storm. As Bayo Akomolafe said to me, “What do we do after we fall? What do we do when we can no longer have hope? Or what do we do when hope becomes toxic because it leads us back on the highway?”

I do not want to go back on that same highway. I want for that hopelessness to transform me.

“Staying with the trouble” to confront the doom and gloom isn’t meant to immobilize us. To the contrary, it’s meant to awaken us to our potentials when we can finally realize that we are what we need. We are what we’ve been waiting for. And we will feed us!

It would be really nice if we had political systems rooted in values of care for all.

But that is wishful thinking. And we are well past the point of believing that we can just wait until the next election or the next to vote our ways towards systemic change. Holding onto that delusion is what keeps people complacent, continuing on with the status quo while never holding up a mirror to reflect on how we must shapeshift or what we need to change to better align ourselves with more life-affirming futures.

People are going hungry today, tomorrow, next week. While larger forms of organizing towards building leverage for change continue, we need to take matters into our own hands, now.

Just like how the pandemic opened up many peoples’ eyes to the vulnerabilities of centralized systems and sparked them to take action on rebuilding local networks of care, I think this stripping away of government food aid, even though it is devastating and not something to celebrate, can have a similar effect — if we allow these cracks to become portals to alternative possibilities.

So what might it mean to take matters into our own hands here?

A few months ago, I introduced the “Axes of Liberation” framework to invite us to critically reflect on what it means to build leverage for change. Namely, the axes ground us in two primary questions as we orient around a particular target issue:

1. The directness or relatedness of a response to the issue of target; and

2. whether the response challenges power and disempowers the system, or reinforces the underlying system that created the conditions for the issue.

(You can get the Axes graphic and more detailed introduction to that here.)

My original piece centered on supporting Palestine as the target issue, but in addressing the food and hunger crisis, I want to land us on these two guiding questions depending on the state of urgency we're working with:

• When supporting food aid as a crisis response, the question to consider is: How can we resource as much food as we can, and put them as directly as possible into the hands of those who need it most?

• When there is more time to organize with greater intention and strategy, the question to consider is: How do we work to reclaim place-based, biocultural food systems and support its 1) re-webbing with people who are most food insecure, and ultimately, its 2) re-integration into the bedrocks of Community?

Supporting food aid as a crisis response ~

In the case of food aid as crisis response, while providing items mass-produced by Big Ag or Big Food corporations isn't ideal, that really remains a larger question for guiding longer term, deeper work. When trying to meet more urgent needs, we often cannot afford to be purist or perfectionistic.

When I asked Hiʻilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), the author of Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, about how her research on refrigeration and food sovereignty converged with her involvement in the Mauna Kea encampments against the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project, she said:

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the kitchen looked like at the camp at that time. People were just bringing what they had, what they could pull out of their pantries, what they could grab at fast-casual restaurants, what they could pick off of their trees in their backyards. And you got this full spread of what community resource [looked] like.

Not all of it was what folks might recognize as a ‘decolonial diet’ or foods that reflected a bunch of the food sovereignty ideals often discussed in the literature.

But what it was, were people making it possible to have bodies in place in a space of resistance. And for me, that became so much more important than picking apart whether or not this or that was industrialized food, or whether or not there was this reliance on the cold chain.”

With this similar mindset of “working with what we got,” below are some ways that we can support those who may be going hungry this month (and beyond).

Note that I invite us to begin with the most direct ways to help — meaning that if we know of people in need, the best thing to do is to attempt to resource them directly. Then, we can broaden our focus to engaging in mutual aid networks (also focused on direct action) and supporting larger aid groups.

1. Know of relatives, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or other people in proximity who are food insecure?

If you are in a position to give, consider sharing your food abundance or harvests with them, giving them cash, buying them meals or groceries, or inviting them over for a meal. It may be helpful to check in with them first and to ask about food preferences and possible intolerance, sensitivities, and allergies as well.

If you are unable to give materially, you can still check in to see how they are doing, research local food pantries or food kitchens such as through findhelp.org to direct them to, and ask how else you are able to support them.

2. Know of relatives, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, or other people NOT in proximity who are food insecure?

If you are in a position to give, consider sending them cash, gift cards to grocery stores or restaurant chains, or sending them a meal or grocery delivery. Depending on how you intend to give, it may still be helpful to check in with them first to ask about food preferences and possible intolerance, sensitivities, and allergies as well.

Otherwise, you can still check in to see how they are doing, research places such as from findhelp.org that they might be able to turn to locally for assistance, etc., and ask how else you are able to support them from afar.

3. Don’t know people who are food insecure to resource directly? Or, want to help out more on top of directly supporting the people you know?

• Look up mutual aid networks in your area to resource or to get involved with, especially those focused on food (i.e., search “[mutual aid] + [your location]” to get started, or check out this directory)

• Support, resource, and/or get involved with Food Not Bombs, a mutual aid network focused on providing meals to people in need (look up locations here).

• Head to findhelp.org to search for other local and/or national food aid organizations to donate to or volunteer for.

• How else can you locate possible sites of food abundance in your area (markets, farms, restaurants…?) and try to connect that to people in need or organizations serving people in need?

Rewebbing food systems with greater intention ~

When there is room to move beyond simply trying to resource an immediate crisis is when we can really dream — and consider what it means to decentralize and untether our food systems from monopolized, corporatized, and extractive industries.

This speaks to the important difference between food aid, which retroactively addresses food insecurity without challenging the underlying systems that manufactured the crisis, versus food sovereignty that is oriented towards reclaiming power and rebuilding rooted, biocultural communities.

Examples of actions aimed at this deeper focus include:

• supporting community-centered food initiatives like the ones we’ve compiled in Green Dreamer’s working Regenerative Projects Directory;

• supporting efforts towards revitalizing Native food systems, and more broadly, rematriating lands to Indigenous stewardship;

• participating in community gardens and efforts to food-scape public spaces for a reclamation of food as commons;

• growing fruit trees or food crops in whatever land-space you have access to and sharing the abundance out;

• guerilla gardening in abandoned or neglected parcels of land and sharing the abundance out;

• learning greater “land literacy” in terms of what edible foods may be foraged or harvested from your unique regional land- and water-base;

• developing ancestral skills of food harvesting and preservation, such as fermenting, canning, dehydrating, etc., and sharing these skills out; and so on.

There are many more theories and strategies of change on this front, such as organizing for general strikes with clear demands for political change (as I explored further in my Axes of Liberation piece).

I personally resonate with a sort of “all-hands-on-deck” for “all-of-the-above” mentality. But I will also add that in my view, the above forms of direct actions geared towards community building and the reclamation of land-based “wealth” (in knowledge, land-based skills, and all of the resulting abundance) are critical for actually re-wiring power structures — away from a reliance on things that are destructive to our collective wellbeing.

If people can understand the logic of boycotting corporations that are exploitative and extractive, can we also understand the logic of divesting from entire systems that share and incentivized those very qualities? How can we make our community lives more relational and less transactional and therefore less taxable? Are we willing to get knee-deep in this mess beyond looking to one-off actions like dropping off a ballot or just refusing to buy something from a company?

Allowing the cracks to become portals ~

In 2019, a significant event took place for Kanaka Maoli that might offer some inspiration. The Hawaiian voyaging canoe of Makaliʻi became “the first voyage in modern times to be provisioned entirely with food grown, harvested, and prepared by the crew’s supporters” across Hawaiʻi Island from where they set sail, reported the public radio. Makaliʻi was stocked with enough locally grown, canned, and preserved foods to last the crew for a month at sea — becoming “hope in a jar,” said Keala Kahuanui, the cook of the waʻa (canoe).

And this is not just about food. Or rather, it’s about how much more food can be and mean for a people.

As my dear friend Kilihea tells me, “It really is about the connection of places and beings. Kupuna (Elders) remind us that the people who voyage cannot do their work without the people of the land. And that interconnectedness is what creates abundance in knowledge, in spiritual elevation of those doing the work, and in aloha.”

For an island where 40% of households are food insecure, Makaliʻi's voyage is a symbol of hope for a more life-affirming future that is also direly urgent. It charts an entirely different pathway forward that is rooted in values of collective care and intimacy with place — a far departure from that same old highway whose foundation’s cracks are only crumbling further by the day.

Rather than fearing these growing fractures and faults, what can we learn from peering through their openings instead?

Rather than allowing food to remain reduced into commodities of transaction or mere calories of sustenance, what can be possible if we let it regain its sacred role as the deeply meaningful connective tissues of land and community?

My interviews and writing rely on direct contributions from my readers/listeners!

Remaining “independent” is how I can continue to critically follow my curiosities without having to think about how to better appeal to sponsors or philanthropies.

Thank you for financially supporting my work through a paid Substack subscription or joining Green Dreamer’s alchemize program here.

Rhizome out further ~

• Sanjay Rawal: Honoring the native lands and farmworkers who feed us (ep283)

• Karen Washington: Food security, justice, sovereignty (ep325)

• Hi’ilei Hobart: Ambient sovereignty and questions of temperature control (ep379)

• Brian Yazzie: Supporting tribal communities through indigenous foods (ep312)

• Bayo Akomolafe: Slowing down and surrendering human centrality (ep317)