Action Research and Food Systems Transformation

Action Research and food systems transformation

Chapter: Give me back my yam: Caribbean staple foods and the crisis of the 'uncommons' Mama D

Summary

This is an ongoing piece of action research. Too often as I sit down to a meal, I recognise how far removed it is, as evidenced by the paucity of Caribbean staples on the plate, from the food of my forebears. Food Sovereignty and food justice implies I have a right to these foods but the many contradictions of what truly is 'Caribbean food' means that all is available to me is food injustice, and no sovereignty, together with insecure access to a selection of food that supports a telling of my cultural journey. What are the wisdoms that link both me and my food to a respect of the earth and how might I gain insights into the food transformations that I scarce have control of through a brief exploration of the foodways of others in a similar situation here in the UK?

Here are soundtracks to my thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MssS_SiyBpQ&list=PLoG5B2s- dUQYRkyR3JJrKcTTP1yQmLP0Q&index=29 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCpTkfYVHpQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfseWHf4d-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_1AeVAoVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMigXnXMhQ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGBXvI_65nc

A critical objective for this piece was to explore, across generations and geographies of the Caribbean, as relocated to the UK, what insights and what lore is associated with sitting down to a ‘good’ culturally resonant meal. That meal is one that to the cook conveys a sense of cultural well-being and satisfaction and about which they might have something to say.

As a product of Britain’s diasporan Caribbean family, I have had a lifetime access to those generations who had made their home here in Britain post the second world war or, as I stated in my questionnaire guidance preamble:

‘Those people of African Caribbean heritage who, as migrants, STAYED but who are only partially absorbed into the fabric of European existence’.

I have, so far, interviewed 7 individuals within households of different types, ranging from a single person through to a member of a whole family.

I had chosen 11 families to represent the number of days it took me to sail to the Caribbean when I was nine years old. It was both an eye and palate opener. Though I was accustomed to the dishes prepared by my elders, the freshness of the ingredients and variety of them, as well as the island cultures they related to, left me with a yearning for deeper insights into the food of my forebears and this excites now, the taking of a

1 mindful journey into our eating and sourcing of food. It is a journey I hope to expand on properly when time and space permits.

This is a personal contribution towards gaining insight into the food sovereignty of a people who responded to a call of empire, but who have, it seems, little to show of the foodways which underscored their ability to survive the passage. A passage little documented. If this is food systems transformation, then who and what are causing it? Does it confer a greater ability to make further meaningful food choices for those concerned especially within a regional context or that of a movement? How does being in Britain affect this potential role and what are the specific challenges that people face in being active players in the food system as African Caribbean descendants?

How did it go?

To speak of food in an objective way, to my respondents, always seemed strange, almost met with some level of embarrassment. Yet we are a people for whom food is a central part of our lives. As Wilk, 2006, suggests, food ingredients and meals have been a defining part of Caribbean people’s identity. It is an act of resistance to define oneself by something as sensual and as relevant to everyone as food. Especially when so little else could be claimed as one’s own, given that the ‘holocaust’ of enslavement damaged or degraded many important, self-affirming cultural forms and norms.

Each respondent had a different story to tell from their position in the Caribbean ‘family’.

My brief questionnaire was designed to encourage the respondent to share as much as they could about their understanding of the food they were shopping for, preparing and eating. It elicited a great deal more in stories at a tangent than it was designed for and somewhat less than I had intended in terms of ‘formal’ food responses.

In most cases we shopped, at their preferred outlets, together, before the meal was prepared and I recorded this activity.

We then went to where they lived, to prepare the meals, which I again recorded whilst they described their ingredients and preparation styles, and shared stories and memories.

Of the seven, four were women, three were men.

Of the men, one lived with a family (mum and siblings), one was a bachelor, living with a tenant and one was in a relationship but lived on his own.

Of the women, one was on her own but living as part of a shared household (elders), one lived with her daughter; one lived with her children and one with her partner and child.

The markets/food sources visited were Brixton (Brixton Village, Electric Avenue, Brixton Station road), Forest gate (High road), Peckham (Rye Lane), Tottenham (West Green Road and Tesco), Tooting Broadway (indoor markets). These food outlets/markets represent areas in London of traditionally significant domicile by Caribbean people arriving post war.

The names of the seven respondents are given below. Not all respondents wished to be identified. The filming reflects this, as do the images. Alongside the name is the dish that was prepared, with an image of it.

2 What the Name or description of dish Country of Image of dish prepared respondent is prepared Origin called associated Queenie Vegetable stew with hard food Jamaica

Bro Daniel Chicken curry with hard food Jamaica

Sis Yve Ackee and saltfish with Basmati rice Jamaica

Ras Levi Ital Stew with Hard food Martinique

Seba Verna Chicken soup Jamaica

3 Zawadi Saltfish and callalloo and Ackee and Jamaica Callaloo patties with fried plantain

KMT Pholouri with Tamarind sauce Guyana/UK

Metemgee: a hard food stew with Salt fish

A mini glossary:

What is hard food?

Hard food is the colloquial reference to root crops plus banana or plantain starchy staples that form the basis of a meal of many of the Caribbean islanders. These foods might include yam, sweet potato, eddoes, cocoyam, cassava, pumpkin and breadfruit. Dumplings made of wheat and any combination of the above or other grains might also be categorised as hard food. Hard food is also known as ‘ground provisions’.

Ital stew: In this case, the ital ingredients consisted of: pumpkins, spinach, onions, garlic and tomatoes

Metemgee: a dish based upon ‘hard food’ plus salted codfish in a coconut sauce.

Pholouri: a wheat-based, semi-sweet, fried dumpling.

From the images above: 5/7 participants cooked hard food; 1 rice dish (not rice n’ peas); 2 ackee dishes

3/7 salted codfish. Of the ‘hard food’: green banana, plantain and ‘white’ sweet potato featured 3/7

Purple aubergine featured twice, pumpkin 5/7 times

Conspicuous in its absence was rice and peas and stewed chicken and anything ‘jerked’.

Spices and spice mixes were common throughout, as was the use of coconut fat.

4 Some reflections on the approach

The journey of Action Research within these exchanges was both personal and shared. Shared in that the each meal seeks to capture the essence of a conscious, reflected food conversation within the interview, where the respondent seeks to make sense of the choice made, mixed in with a weave of memories and personal narratives.

Each meal was associated with the respondents country of origin as well as any personal journeys that respondents have taken since which have exposed them to different cultural food nuances and ingredients. Some respondents spoke of family journeys that have led them to a recreation of a remembered dish.

I was mindful not to make any personal input at this stage. A subsequent sharing between all respondents and myself is planned.

My own learning, as part of this exposure to others’ narratives of their food, forms a separate, but connected discussion. It is raised by way of drawing out deeper, shared reflections on how people of Caribbean heritage have interacted with the wider food system and it holds within it the contradictions arising from my reading around the subject and my attempts to make sense of these against the backdrop of the stories shared.

However, I was influenced by my findings, and found that I had no choice in this because my unanalysed desire to ‘eat well’ and ‘eat in conformity to an idea of community resilience’ or ‘eat as cultural identity’ meant that the sharing of identity led to a sharing of food practice. I found myself almost involuntarily picking up and purchasing food items that I had relegated to the too expensive or too distant to purchase, but which were made use of during the course of the exercise! I found that I missed them and needed to not only include them in my diet again but to encourage others to recall these items in their purchases!

Such reflections make me wonder about similar, overlapping ‘holding spaces’ that exist between each culture whose own migrants have fed the eclectic cuisine and food market which is now called Caribbean.

The more I read and reflected, the more I felt that it would be necessary to deepen and widen the scope of the research to sufficiently enable the voices of the researched to explore all connected aspects of their lives which inevitably mirrored, amplified and explained the newer foodways and evolving food lore of ‘Black Britain’: a newly landless people, in a rapidly changing landscape.

Twenty pounds per person was offered towards the preparation of the meals. This was in consideration of the costs of purchasing the often imported ingredients and the energy costs of preparation. In hindsight, costing the meals would have provided a commentary on different, less ‘cultural’ food choices. This would, perhaps, have provided a commentary on the costs of cultural resistance and resilience in the UK.

My initial ideas on why people made the food choices they did yielded ideas such as:

1. Tradition and pride: using food as an assertion of nationality and connection to bonafide culture

2. Availability of foodstuffs in the markets/ease of access: How far people would go to shop

3. Personal taste: the range of influences on preference produced by kinship choices, the media, assumed social class/social standing/politics and personal idiosyncrasies

4. Health reasons: Doctor or health worker prohibitions in cased of popular NCDs. Aspirations towards better health.

5 5. Affordability: cost of searching out ingredients and purchasing sufficient for all members of the family group

6. Age group: responsibility for making food purchases/reliance on others to prepare food/peer tastes and influences.

The predominant country of origin or association is Jamaica, with Martinique and Guyana for two people respectively.

Respondents were aged between 25 and 60 years old and only one of these was born outside of the UK (Martinique).

Questions arise:

 What is the influence, of not only birth, but having lived several of the formative years, say up to early teenager hood, in the tropics?

 Of the youngest, this was a male. What would a younger female consider a meal representing her cultural heritage?

I am also aware that there was a bias in the respondents. All of whom are either tertiary educated, well informed or in some way engaged in activities related to cultural resilience and resistances. These are ones who are: volunteering for the Black Cultural archives; founding a group looking at disappearing African diasporan assets; founding a group looking at cultural and environmental freedom and growth; running a project combining cultural music with the green economy; founding an African heritage user food co- operative; supporting an African heritage supplementary school and setting up enterprises relevant to the international African diaspora community.

Is the choice of food we eat is connected to our social status and activism? How can I capture this? What sense making can be arrived a in a short chapter of stories which sit atop an iceberg of little explored realities? What lessons can be gleaned concerning the transformative potential of Caribbean food systems?

The reflections: research on the actions of others and self

Those responding to my request to participate in this exercise often questioned my motives. We have become quite suspicious people: Diasporans with a history of betrayals from capture in Africa through to #BlackLivesMatter resistances. So I was already prepared with a response to try to assuage the fears of those I wished to cooperate with. It had to ring true to myself also. How can this research opportunity be used to grow awareness of opportunities to reclaim and transform a food system?

I began to notice how I was being influenced by what I was observing every time I had a meal.

I recalled my own history of food preparation in the family home and how immersed and central to that role I had been. I experimented a lot in cooking whilst at college and University.

Working in Africa and the Caribbean exposed me to even more styles of food preparation, source and presentation, as well as eating style. Many meals became interwoven.

Exposure to the Caribbean context of meal design with the seven respondents was, therefore, almost a coming home.

6 It linked me to the authenticity of type and source again. These were reminders of the way in which my parents would travel to particular outlets to get just the right kind of yam, the best fish of a particular type or a specific type of bean that would go with the preferred rice for a festive occasion.

My immersion in and reclaiming of the African, the yam, in my African Caribbean food-fare, had been so long a pre-occupation that discovering the deeper, yet subtle roles of the Spanish and American, the Cornish and the Yorkshire-man in defining my parental food culture was also an awakening.

Africans most certainly were responsible for the dispersal and cultivation of many African ‘home foods’ and culture of plantains, yams and an assortment of ‘ground provisions’ and other vegetable staples in the Caribbean region (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009). These same ‘ground provisions’ made up the bulk of what the research participants selected as being ‘culturally resonant’ to them and spanned Jamaica, Guyana and Martinique.

One participant prepared Callaloo, a greens based dish using an African – or Native American - amaranth but they also used salted codfish, which is inherited via the transatlantic slave ships stores.

Rice was prepared as part of what is referred to the Jamaican national dish of Jamaica: ackee and sal’fish (salted codfish). Rice is another of those crops that Africans have cultivated for millennia and the species Oryza glaberrina is a native of West Africa. It was the African expertise in its cultivation that supported the Southern American and Guyanese cultivation of rice Oryza sativa, imported from the Asian colonies, which was later exported to the different Antilles to enable the enslaved labourers’ working day to extend. Plantation owners did not always wish to offer the time or space for the production of supplementary food crops.

The type of rice was chosen, however, was white, basmati rice, a prized, aromatic rice associated with prestigious consumption. This too is part of the tradition of affluent creoles to imitate the social hierarchies of taste shown by those who owned the plantations, Wilk, 2009. Commonly the rice of the lower classes was imported from North America: long grain, parboiled or Guyana: long grain, ‘patna’ rice.

I observed how, for the older two respondents, specific retail outlets had been established as sources and this is where they always and regularly obtained their provisions from. With ‘gentrification’ of many areas of London, especially those in which the African Caribbean populations lived and worked, older members of the community are now finding it challenging to source, close enough to them, affordable, familiar foodstuffs from outlets who also understand their needs.1 As part of a profile of an ageing population more generally, Caribbean people will have particular difficulties when it comes to maintaining a semblance of food sovereignty or to contemplate issues of food system transformation, being largely landless and with poor access to land based assets and funding streams2.

The youngest respondent obtained his food through a food co-operative which he was establishing, so he was even more assured of his source. Is this the best option for Caribbean peoples in the UK to resource their larders with selections of ‘resistance foods’? How sustainable are the production and marketing systems of such products?

1 http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/TheFutureAgeingOfTheEthnicMinorityPopulation- ForWebJuly2010.pdf

2 http://locality.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/A-Place-to-Call-Home-report-final-version.pdf

7 Other participants were more concerned with cost and time available to shop. Most, or half their ingredients, were obtained from the local supermarket, a Tesco. Many people of African heritage have a strong history of reliance on traded foods which presents a major challenge to these communities when contemplating self- sufficiency and, in combination with the gentrification issue above, provide real obstacles to planning for food systems transformation.

The easy reliance on sourcing processed alternatives from ‘supermerchants’ itself has a history. Wilk, 2009, speaks of the rivalry between merchants in Belize and the islands of the Caribbean when importing, first staples and then a wide and astounding variety of luxury imports, many of which were based upon the initial export of raw produce from the colonial hinterlands of Africa, Asia or the Caribbean itself. These were then processed and packaged in the metropole industrial nations and re-exported back to the Caribbean as essential icons of luxury living.

Each year the Caribbean imports over 5 billion dollars’ worth of food3. In some circles, this is attributed to the results of failed crops due to imprecise rains, droughts and other natural hazards, such as hurricane damage. However, there are precedents in history. Much of what is imported is processed, facilitated by the descendants of East-Indians and Europeans ‘who stayed’ in the Caribbean or migrated to Europe and who have built fortunes upon successful food businesses. Much of what is sold consists of items exported in raw form from the Caribbean but which could be used, locally and more healthily, in more natural form.

How does this relate to the fare of Caribbean populations in Europe?

Market surveys indicate an active - but threatened by, ironically, processes of gentrification - marketing of a range of Caribbean spices, processed food products and tools being sold largely to a captive market of African Caribbean people resident in the UK.4

African Diasporans in the UK buy, and use, different processed grains as flour: the processed roots as flour; the processed plantains, legumes and seeds, all as flours and reconstitute familiar cuisines, with the aid of processed, but floury, spices and herbs into remembered meals of earlier dependencies. These reconstructions do not necessarily hearken back to an Arcadian connection with nature. Instead they are blemished by the harsh realities of slavery and the aspirations towards stations in the hierarchies of colonial time5

3 http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/11/caribbean-agriculture-looks-to-cope-with-climate-change/

4 http://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/NPD/A-place-in-the-sun

5 Colonial time is a device used by Wilk (2006, p 79-80) to understand how the structure of colonial society in the tropics created a process by which the underclasses could appear to achieve a similar status to their 'overclasses'. This would happen by creating the perception that the lifestyle and accoutrements of the wealthy, slaveholding classes were equal living an advanced or modern lifestyle, accessible by mimicry of their consumerist behaviour patterns by the ‘backward’ classes.

8 ‘Jesus Wept’

Gospel of John Chapter 11, verse 35

It is not always clear why Jesus wept. Was it sorrow, was it in sympathy or was it in rage?

Such was my sorrow during this action research. My tears were part of the action.

I have truly wept, severally, during the facilitating of the research, listening to the stories and reflecting on my own. In reading the literature and gaining insights into the architecture of the foodways of past and present day African Diasporans and whilst contemplating the state of entrapment in which we appear locked, I have wept.

My tears were provoked by felt, unresolved contradictions and frustrations, the wailing of the unheard griots of our food stories, cries held in chains by academic English and misperceptions borne of ‘otherising’ of cultures over generations.

Through all this I listened deeply, though, and watched intently, whilst savouring the aromas liberated from ‘Dutch’ pots which bore the insignia of a history carved out from the red, aluminium rich soils of Ghana or Jamaica. Red like a blood testament of the lands from which a journey of food, wrought with both pains and gains, has been repeatedly translated through multiple transformations from past to present.

I resolve my ‘eye water’ into twin calabashes.

One catches, drop by drop, the tales of resistance foods, the foods that enabled the crossing: African roots, grains, leaves, legumes and fruit which travelled with us in the blood encrusted, fetid holds of slave ships from Guinea to Caribbean and were nurtured by women’s foodways into remembered dishes, made in familiar styles to feed and nourish. These dishes formed the basis not only of survival and insurrection, but are, even today, in yam, associated with the prowess and victory of latter day athletes and champions6.

The second calabash is no less fragile for its own weight of the foods of resilience: the variety of foods we embraced from the people that converged in the islands. Ranging from the buccaneers’ salted pork to the Amerindians cassava flatbreads; the East Indian curry spices and roti, the Polynesian breadfruit and the Chinese rice cooking styles. The colonists also brought, via the kitchen and industrialising merchants, a range of food preparations styles and dishes from Cornish coasts: spicy patties from pasties and a neo-traditional black, rum cake, as well as Yorkshire hams and Spanish escoveitch7 fish and from there to today’s preoccupation with re-naturalised fast foods8.

It is this second calabash that catches each story of how Africans in the Caribbean juggled the desires of ‘backra’9 with other ‘cross-cultural’ or creolisation10 processes in themselves mediated by:

6 http://tamersoliman.net/the-usain-bolt-yam/

7 A style of preparing fried fish which makes use of vinegar, pimento, scotch bonnet peppers and thyme as marinade

8 See Wilson in Garth, 2013, p 107-117

9 Colloquial term for the slave overseer, also used interchangeably to denote the master of the plantation and his family

10 See Wilk, 2009 p.108

9  Supplying fieldworkers with imported rations to enable on-going productivity in the plantations or forests

 The competing desires of the gentrifying influences of the slaveholding classes to imitate the ways of the metropolis making an increasing variety of processed foodstuffs become available

 The imperative of the kitchen as wives sought to eat as they might in the colonial countries from which they or their forebears came

 The importation of replacement foodstuffs from North America to serve as substitute staples when insufficient time was afforded the enslaved workers to produce for themselves.

 The production of new foodways based upon fusions of identity and modernity of island populations trained on the ways of the ‘metropoles’.

(Wilks, 2006, Carney and Rosomoff, 2009 and Richards-Greaves in Garth, 2013).

I was forced to reflect upon the similarities between the brands of consumer goods favoured by my own family and the brands that I seemed to gravitate to and noticed the availability of, along my journeys in Africa and the Caribbean. In these reflections, it seemed, lay the birthplaces of modern trans-economy corporatism.

The chronic neglect of food production in the Caribbean as plantation economy burgeoned together with the absence of investment in local industry might be seen as offspring to the cheap opportunism of importation and the accelerated ‘western’ industrialisation (based often on Caribbean products) Wilk, 2009. This meant the evolution of conditions favourable to the birth of the transnational company. This meant a trading off of opportunities and threats11 that specifically operated in the region in relation to cheap or freely available raw materials and labour, which could act as a basis for ‘mother-country industrialisation, versus the risk of local uprisings and political instability.

Were these same sets of merchants establishing multi-national outlets in the colonial outposts across the globe? Was there some ‘selection’ of favoured companies to promote to the outposts of diplomatic missions and consuls established between them and rapidly industrialising Britain, France and Holland?

Wilk (2009) comments on the quandary of using tropical products to produce varieties of processed food and other items which are then sold back to the colonies, packaged in such a way as to render them invisibly sourced. Milo chocolate drink, Palmolive and Imperial Leather soap, Fussell's condensed milk are all brands of this nature still popular in the Caribbean.

These foods are also now popular in the Asian and middle Eastern grocery stores of the UK metropolises and have found their way into the ‘world foods’ niches of supermarkets located in the cities where African and Caribbean people have ready access and are target consumers.

11 http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-076.pdf

10 11 Each of my participants invariably drew upon the easy access to packaged spices, despite their knowledge of the preferential quality of whole and fresher ingredients in their cooking. Yet these were choices that were often genuinely associated with an assertion of culture: identification with that which has been part of ones upbringing, has shaped ones childhood and rites of passage; are used at times of celebration. Their use is associated with and reaffirmed in word, symbol and song, throughout the Caribbean, Africa and its diaspora: an experience which reinforces this ‘cultural identity of the can and the carton’.

How simple it is to reach for the packet of processed coconut cream, when wishing to prepare the popular dish of ‘rice and peas’ for Sunday dinner. One participant even used processed spices from Ethiopia to affirm his connections with that place!

How tied the African and African Caribbean to identities-of-food-culture wrought through the workings of trading systems in which they played but a passive role?

Where, in such a state of being caught up in a culture of consumption, in which there is little agency, can the people of the African diaspora find tools with which to transform this dependence and bring about sustainable transformation?

What can be said about the possible recourse, for example, to the foods of resistance?

“Our liberation starts because we can plant what we eat. This is food sovereignty. We need to produce to bring autonomy and the sovereignty of our peoples. If we continue to consume [only], it doesn't matter how much we shout and protest. We need to become producers. It's about touching the pocketbook, the surest way to overcome our enemies. It's also about recovering and reaffirming our connections to the soil, to our communities, to our land.”

Miriam Miranda, The Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH)

How does this action research process relate to food system transformation?

12 I have seen that during this action research process, my personal political choices, with a small p, are inextricably linked to the politics of food with a large P in as much as I could see that the niches I occupy as: Caribbean, vegetarian, living out of London, being of a particular age group and so on were all categories of being that influence from which part of the food system one operates. Overall, these choices produce a significant effect. So it is important to unpick, as much as possible, what are the narratives for each of these threads one holds and how each of them interweave into each other to produce a global tapestry.

Inevitably, after the meal was shared, the ensuing discussion involved certain reflections of what had just taken place and some attempt at sense making would follow.

One notable comment, as part of this, concerned the existence of the ‘Dutch Pot’ occupying a pride of place in the centre of the Caribbean kitchen, but being simultaneously symbolic of the centrality of an erosion of food sovereignty within the midst of the Caribbean family and community. Might it be too revolutionary to similarly point to the centrality of tea-drinking in British society as indicative of the primary role that unequal trading relations and production plays in the UK food system?

So, what then is ‘culturally resonant’ food?

The Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007 includes the following statement concerning food sovereignty (with my emphasis):

“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”

And further:

“It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”

It appears to me that culturally resonant food is food that the people have a say in bringing to the table, directly or indirectly. The Calabash of resistance which contains the foods that African Caribbean people can be shown to have actively engaged in defining for themselves and which are also sustainably produced are those foods which can be deemed to be food sovereign. It is the continued consumption of these foods which give credence to the farming systems that produce them. Somehow, it was these foods that the majority of my research participants selected.

However, in the UK, these foods are mainly not produced because of climate. They are not local, in the narrowest sense of that word. Do we need to redefine ‘local’, then, to enable a continuity of global sovereignty?

What are the implications of continuing to eat in support of the multinational trade in processed foods that are widely accessible? What colonial enclaves are being perpetuated by the existence of outlets for such foods in the Caribbean which support their re-export back to Europe?

There is an opportunity to understand the larger food systems brokenness through grasping the microcosm of what is happened and is happening in the Caribbean region and with the Caribbean diaspora in the UK.

How we currently think about British food and the system that defines it is inextricably linked to the relationships Britain has had and continues to have with its colonies. It is a subversive idea whilst also an emancipatory one, to work through such colonial relationships, sundering each shackled idea one step at a time to bring systemic liberation and healing to a fair food planet.

13 Understanding the relatedness of the subject to myself and the subject to the globe, is core to being able to ‘get’ this research and it’s potential. We ought to all ‘Eat Yam’ because it is emblematic of a sovereign food system choice in a way that coffee cannot be. It is also a food which denotes the resistance of the African diaspora to the dictates of imposed consumerism and unsustainable, global trading relations.

Sovereign choice in this sense is what ‘sustainable consumption’ means, both to me and to the UK Caribbean community. This is even though the foods choices it implies might seem to be significantly different to that of the wider UK communities. It still shares paradigms of resistance which bring it in harmony with the broader facing down of corporate capitalism.

Such consumption, in this sense, is strongly linked to a sense of resilience as cultural identity and resistance as survival, where there are felt to be health indications, or bonding and identity affirmations and where shared meals confer or affirm cultural relatedness and common roots. Yam, as the emblematic crop is a local food transposed, as has been its peoples. It signifies the contradictions that arise when capital moves humans and goods according to its own logic and not the logic of the planet. To seek to transform the systems which entrap us in non-earth sustainable relations implicit is the change that will have to take place in the system of capitalism.

We will always trade, it is human to do so. We can, though, be careful about what is traded, mindful to encourage earth-centric production and interdependent, diverse living systems. If we understand, from a range of perspectives, the reason why we eat, the consumer ethic, we can access another voice that can help us negotiate our way to healing the food system we are all part of. It is how understanding is gained, so that far from eschewing all tropical products traded in the UK, we can, perhaps, decide to discard the coffee but through understanding the implications for food system transformation, ‘Give me back my Yam’!

References:

Carney, Judith A and Rosomoff, Richard Nicholas. 2006. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World. University of California Press, London. England.

Garth, Hannah (ed), 2013. Food and Identity in the Caribbean. Bloomsbury, London

Wilk, Richard, 2009. Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food from Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Berg. Oxford.