Co-opting Rasta Livity & Aztecs, making what was once a simple way of life, expensive AsF (Vegan classicism exposed)
As an animal identity vegan and a person of Capture Land extraction, I have noticed over the years the unseen growth (and imagery snatching), of a lifestyle that came naturally to peoples in Central America, South America, Africa and the Caribbean. I watched as avocados and greens and palm oil and banana flour and quinoa and chia and other CASUAL foodstuffs for tropical people became some of the most expensive items on the market.
We already have to fight against food deserts, the consequences of the colonial/slave diet (scraps, salt) and poverty, but now we have to pay extra for the crops of our elders too?
The Tarzan Complex (the co-opting of the aesthetic of jungle folk and erasure of their existence in favor of a colonial symbol) has allowed a displacement in the industrialized imagination of the original aesthetics of Rastas, shamans and other jungle folk. Things once associated with oppressed people living radically in their habitats becomes synonymous with "hippies", erasing the origins and isolating the inheritors of that legacy. I am a monkey and an ape if I eat healthy, dance and keep to myself and my tribe, but if Tarzan does it, he is "king of the jungle". I am a beast of the field if I eat a heart disease-slaying watermelon, but if Tarzan and Jane do, they are "exotic" and "healthy" and "primal". I eat a banana and I am a lowly ape (another blatant speciesism what is wrong with apes?) But if Jane does, she is "sexy" and "fit".
It is no wonder simple staple foods that allowed natural-living, spiritual traditionalists and naturalists (co-opted version is called primitivist) to live in abundance are being re-branded as superfoods (All plants are super though, so why the corporate branding?), using the imagery and words related to the cultures as selling points (exotic/mystical=more money) and leading to food instability in the very countries where these mega corporations are sourcing these foods. Please look into the avocado crisis in Latin America (NATIVE America. These foods are indigenous and eaten largely by living thriving indigenous Americans re-branded as "Latinos" in order to erase their identity within the corporate industrial farce).
Palm oil, once a staple for African living, and proven in its indigenous minimally processed form to benutritious, is suddenly being banned worldwide due to corporate ventures leading to mass environmental destruction like the world has never seen before by the hands of humans. How could this have happened? Now, I am hard pressed to find African red palm oil, a wonder oil for my hair, skin and food, in the same health food markets that once carried it years ago.
Turmeric, the base of curry, a spice blend used heavily in the Caribbean, suddenly got rebranded as a superfood and now it's the ingredient of some of the most expensive products available.
It seems overnight, the most simple foodstuffs went from basic ethnic staples to the culinary arc of the covenant.
As an animal identity vegan, I say STOP. THIS.
People are already going hungry with droughts and famines and floods and now the corporate western (and privileged eastern) elite wants to make it even harder to veganize and re-stabilize the planet and its custodians. The animals (all of us) will not see the return of the rainforests and coral reefs until the generous and kind hearted elite (you, my friend) call out and chant down corporate Babylon.
Slapping bongos and wearing peace signs is beautiful, but the enemy is not the meat eaters or the loggers or the state. The real enemy is the belief that some life is more valuable than the rest. Not others, the rest.
I am the rest. Me and the cows and the pigs and the chickens and the orangutans and the sharks and the coral and the palm forests and the jungles and the clean rivers are the rest.
You can judge the health of the planet by the (unregulated) health of its intelligent life.
