Food is Politics

I spotted this street art in Bergen on my first visit there and absolutely loved it.

“Food is politics!” I thought to myself.  I was so excited in October to be in a nation where people eat more healthily and take better care of their bodies than they do in the United States.  I was confident that smaller farms and less fast food would mean healthier food and healthier bodies for me and my family.  “We will eat fish and hearty bread and exercise in really warm spandex!” I resolved.  We have done most of that (not the spandex part), but I’ve found especially as we near our return home that I’m less and less interested in virtuous food and exercise and more and more interested in communal food and exercise.  I care less about how food and exercise makes me feel and more about how it connects me to others.

 

None of which is to say that food is not politics.  Teachers have filled me in on debates on the west coast over whether Norway’s famous brown cheese should be an allowed snack in preschools.  It is very high in calories and fat and not even cheese, technically, as it’s made from the whey, but there’s almost nothing more Norwegian.  

(Image from Nordic Nibbler -- the fabulous blog that kept us eating well in Oslo.) 

Especially after I visited the Sogn Jordog Hagebrukskule, an organic farm on Norway’s west coast and one of the most ecologically sensitive farms in Europe (They use almost all animal labor), I became intrigued with some efforts to make Norway’s family farms here more corporate.  (I visited only as a tourist, not a rover.) 

It seems like such a shame to move from the family farm tradition in a nation that takes such well-deserved pride in its farming efforts.  As well they should – it’s not easy to grow stuff here!

But most of my thinking about food in Norway has been more emotional, maybe even more primal.  After reading Hans Herbejørnsrud’s  “On an Old Farmstead in Europe” (in translation, of course), I was reminded of writing about the U.S. farming tradition in the upper Midwest.  I thought of the book, “APlace of Sense”; and an anthropology project my uncle, an agronomist, mentioned to me in which a scholar is studying gas station coffee shops near grain silos where Midwestern farmers spend their free moments; and Willa Cather’s My Ántonia and William Least Heat-Moon and the maps that show fewer and fewer farms in the U.S.  More than one Wednesday found me lamenting our distance from our St. Louis CSA, Fair Shares, and the extraordinary blueberries and butter and lamb and carrots and broccoli and potato chips and chocolate and all-round camaraderie among farmers and local food producers that they provide.  I have closed my eyes as I smelled red chile cooking and smiled with recognition as ex-pats from other countries described the near painful pleasure of smelling a dish from home.

My happiest moments have been sharing the farms of friends – on the west coast in Norway where my UWC classmate Nynke has a year-old goat farm and makes cheese with her family and outside Helsinki, Finland where my UWC classmate Veera has family who have given their land to a cooperative farm.  I’m in awe of how ready Nynke and her family are to learn new skills -- from how to operate the cheese press to how to protect their goats from preying birds to how to build a tree house.  Meanwhile, they are making really good cheese!

  The story of Veera’s farm seemed to come straight from the pages of progressive-era history.  Her great grandfather was an ardent reformer and prohibitionist and even brought reforms from the U.S. to Finland.  He was constantly in the city, but he wanted his son to be a farmer (not unlike many people of the age who sought to reform the city and recharge in the country).  His son had other ideas, but the farm has stayed in the family and now operates as a CSA.  Much of the area surrounding the farm is protected by the government.  I asked Veera why and she said: “Oh, the government always likes to be protecting land, especially in suburban areas to give people places to walk.”  I was struck by the differences between U.S. and Finnish land use patterns.  We finished our tour by collecting rhubarb in a nearby field.  It grows wild and serves the entire neighborhood.  As Veera showed us around, I told her about our CSA (I talk about it a lot here.) and Nynke’s farm.  She looked around and said: “It’s so strange.  We are all doing the same thing in so many different places.”

It is a commonplace to say that food is culture, but it’s terribly true.  The smell and taste of food are also the smell and taste of home and of distance.  Food is politics, to be sure, but too much of food in the U.S. is about virtuous counting: of calories, of bottom lines, of returns on acres.  Food is also friendship and connection and challenge and surprise.  Which, now that I think of it, maybe means politics is friendship and connection and challenge and surprise.

 

I guess that I should chew on that for a while.