Eating for empathy

It's time to pretend I'm stuck at home in London during the Blitz. I'll be doing this with the help of my new purchase 'Eating for Victory' which is a compilation of official WW2 instruction leaflets on cooking with food rations. I've had a brief look at the table of contents and I've decided to start with 'Crumb Fudge' and 'Dresden Patties' from the 'What's left in the Larder' chapter. It's certain to be enlightening!

Food Riots! Economic pressures in poorer countries and the social effects of food shortages

• Police chase protesting youths in the El Harrache district of Algiers on Thursday. The violence came after price hikes for milk, sugar and flour in recent days.
• Image Credit: AP

The brief I have given myself for this blog is to look at the future of food and violence in the west. But of course my often stated agenda is to get westerners to look at life in developing countries and into their own country's past for examples of resilience and struggle in periods of violent upheaval. In that light I recently contacted Amy Bentley Associate Professor of Food Studies at the NYU Steinardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development and author of Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity after discovering her contribution to the book Food, drink and identity: cooking, eating and drinking in Europe since the Middle Ages. Her chapter entitled 'Reading Food Riots: Scarcity, Abundance, and National Identity' made me think about the social responses to the onset of scarcity and the role that markets and governments have to play in bringing affordable and culturally appropriate food to the people.
So it was timely when today I found a Jan 7, 2011 article at gulfnews.com about unrest in Algeria over "price hikes for milk, sugar and flour in recent days". The article entitled 'World on brink of social unrest over food prices' discussed food inflation in Africa and across Asia quoting unnamed "international organisations" as saying there is going to be a global "food price shock". This seems quite plausible to me as there has been much talk in the US about inflationary pressures around food and with many European governments unable to exercise control over economic factors affecting inflationary pressures.
Amy Bentley's writings on food riots impressed me so much because she demonstrated empathy through her conclusions saying that rioting resulting from price hikes and lack of availability of staple and cultural foods was caused by "intense frustration and anger at being trapped in a global economic web in which they seem to have no agency".

Coconut crisis in Sri Lanka caused by loss of plantations to new housing developments!

Mexico's drug/war lords and the suffering farmers

  

Image from www.agoranews.org  Behind Mexico's Bloodshed Part 1&2

Some argue the North American Free Trade Agreement has played a part in the current bloodshed in Mexico by driving farmers off the land and fundamentally shifting the economy into the drug trade to the US. While some politicians in Mexico argue that the majority of those who've died were engaged in the drug trade, more and more evidence is appearing that ordinary citizens are being brutalised, tortured, and killed by both drug lords and the Mexican military sent to tackle the problem.

Molly Molloy in 'Who Is Behind the 25,000 Deaths In Mexico?' The Nation July 23 2010

" “armed commandos” dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008." 

Bruce Livesey in Behind Mexico's Bloodshed says:

"While free trade wiped out Mexico's traditional agriculture, the drug cartels moved in."

Laura Carlsen in 'The Mexican Farmers' Movement: Exposing the Myths of Free Trade'

International Forum on Globalization February 25, 2003

"The reemergent Mexican farmers' movement reflects not only the serious crisis in the country's rural sector but also a crisis of faith in free trade itself"

Scott Henson, writer of the Texan criminal justice system blog 'Grits for Breakfast' argues in his post 'Stop Digging: US policies enriching Mexican drug cartels' that a range of US policies including NAFTA and US agricultural subsidies have:

"combined to enrich Mexican cartels unimaginably, even financing military-grade weapons purchases, most of which is smuggled in from the United States"

Food is something we have to do as humans. When contrived arrangements cause the production of food to diminish and dependent populations are pressurised, those desperate for a market will go to violent extremes.