appliqué

Food is not abstract, it is not a metaphor. 

The starved brain narrows, it becomes more rigid, it protects.

Asking the nutritionally compromised brain to prepare for recovery is asking a person drowning to swim. We need to create the conditions for them to begin recovery. 

Malnutrition is an emergency we need to treat. 

Behavior change is necessary before insight and understanding. The brain cannot generate insight to change eating until it is adequately fueled. 

In My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem writes, "We Americans have an opportunity-and an obligation-to recognize the trauma embedded in our bodies; to accept and metabolize the clean pain of healing; and to move through and out of our trauma." I think of Dee's freezer stocked with the herbal remedies of her ancestors, Alex's courage in sharing her story publicly, Rain's sculptures, and the postpartum support group Adriana ran from her home.

It’s not solely the private work of individuals to heal from collective harm. We have to recover our stories, share them, trace our histories of pain and suffering across generations, time, and space. We have to hear the stories of others and believe what they say. We have to honor ourselves and everyone else as sites of trouble, grief, suffering, injustice, recovery, and hope.”

It took years of practice. I'm still practicing. But now, sometimes, she curls herself into me, folds into the vulnerable places and keeps them warm. I am mothering both of us, teaching both of us the possibility of a new kind of ease: surrender.”

Strata of Memories, Jennifer Rodgers

Käthe Kollwitz

The Mothers (Die Mütter), 1922–1923

Born 1867, Konigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, Russia); died 1945, Dresden, Germany

Because NGO-isation doesn’t only happen at the level of strategy or organisational identity. It happens in the proposal. It happens in the context section, the problem statement, the theory of change. It is the mechanism by which political knowledge gets converted into fundable language, and political language gets quietly removed.

Roy observed that NGOs give the impression of filling the vacuum created by a retreating state, but their real contribution is that they defuse political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by right. They alter the public psyche. 

The proposal is where that alteration begins. The moment we write “lack of access to services” instead of “deliberate withdrawal of state provision,” we have already altered the psyche — our own, our readers’, and eventually the communities we describe. We have made a structural choice look like a condition. We have let the state off the hook inside a document that was supposed to be advocating for the people the state failed."

Peter Kuper

The flaw is concentration. And in the case of fertilizer, the cost chain from farm to grocery store is short. When nitrogen gets expensive, corn gets expensive. Most American corn is animal feed, so feed gets expensive. Feed costs flow into meat, dairy, and eggs, and from there into almost everything in the middle of a supermarket. The same Congress that watched this shock coming cut SNAP funding earlier this year, so the families least equipped to absorb it are absorbing it with the thinnest safety net in a generation.

The concentration runs far beyond fertilizer. Four companies (Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef) process over 80% of American beef. A few COVID-era plant closures in 2020 threw the national meat supply into chaos. The Biden administration later spent a billion dollars trying to stand up independent processing capacity. The industry today is as consolidated as it was then.

ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus control 90% of the American grain trade. The grain that feeds most of the country’s livestock and a good share of its export market passes through those four companies’ infrastructure. When one of them has a plant closure or a logistics failure, the bottleneck isn’t theoretical.

The same logic of scale has moved from commodities onto the grocery shelf. Ten parent corporations produce most of what fills a typical American grocery cart, from bottled water to frozen dinners. A shopper choosing between brands is usually choosing between subsidiaries. The food system looks diverse at the point of purchase. It isn’t.

The fragility goes deeper than corporate structure. Over the past century, roughly 75 percent of the world’s plant genetic diversity has been lost as farming consolidated around high-yielding, genetically uniform cultivars. The Cavendish banana, a single cultivar, accounts for nearly half of global banana production, and a fungal disease called Tropical Race 4 is moving through plantations with no commercial-scale replacement in sight. Four varieties of wheat produce 75 percent of the crop on the Canadian prairies. Seventy-two percent of American potato production depends on four varieties. Almost every coffee tree in Brazil descends from six plants brought from a single location in Asia.

Morocco holds roughly 70 percent of the world’s phosphate reserves, one of three nutrients every crop requires, controlled by a single state-owned company. Last year’s drought dropped Panama Canal water levels low enough to restrict grain shipments from the entire American Midwest. A disease, a drought, a political decision in the wrong place, and a system built without redundancy breaks the same way every time.

Modern life runs on advanced semiconductors: the processors in your phone, your car’s braking system, the card reader at the grocery checkout, the imaging machines in hospitals. Over 90% of them come from one company, TSMC, on one island, Taiwan. TSMC itself depends on ASML, a single Dutch firm that is the only manufacturer on earth of the machines that make those processors.

If a blockade of Taiwan or a fire at ASML’s facility in the Netherlands shut down production for a year, you would not be able to buy a new car, replace a broken phone, or get certain medical imaging done, and the wait times for appliances and electronics would stretch into months. The cause would be different from a fertilizer shortage. The structure would be identical: one chokepoint, no backup, global consequences.

Patel, writing about food, put it this way: “These companies are optimized for global logistics and profit margins, not for national resilience.” He was talking about grain traders. He could have been talking about any of them. The logic is the same in every case: find the cheapest source of something critical, build the system around it, strip out the redundancy because redundancy costs money, and then, when it breaks, act as if no one could have seen it coming. We could see it coming. We have been watching it come for years."

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"You don’t feel fragility until something breaks. Before that, everything just looks cheap. Cheap groceries, cheap gas, cheap electronics. Nobody notices the strategic reserve that never got funded, the processing plant that got consolidated away, the soil no one bothered to rebuild. Those are just line items that someone cut because cutting them made that quarter’s earnings palatable to shareholders.