buy local
The Food Citizen
I recently had the pleasure of traveling between Vancouver and Victoria aboard a seaplane for work- my god those planes are tiny! With each pocket of air pressure and gust of wind we hit, the tail of the plane swished around like a bald tire’d Mazda on a sheet of black ice. To keep my mind off the erratically shifting horizon and white-capped ocean below, I leafed through my complimentary copy of Douglas, a business magazine based out of Victoria, B.C.
A feature article titled “Relationships: Victoria’s changing perspective on food and community” was just enough to hold my attention. After starting off with the usual discussion about local food production and the 100 mile diet, I stumbled upon a new concept: food citizenry.
Despite the fact that I’m a gardener and a grow-your-own evangelist, the article didn’t dive into the concept much and I had to ask myself:
What exactly does it mean to be a food citizen? Technically speaking, aren’t we all food consumers?
Of course, this question goes back to the consumer vs citizen argument from media and culture studies, which states that we are “continually shifting away from involving people in society as political citizens of nation states towards involving them as consumption units in a corporate world.” (Thanks, Habermas!).
It certainly doesn’t seem like a stretch to think of our food culture in this way. Since the beginning of the 20th century, we have increasingly shifted away from producing our own food to buying absolutely everything we eat, effectively reducing our relationship with food to simple consumer interactions. (I mean, have you seen those commercials for Uncle Ben’s rice with chicken and vegetables that you microwave in the plastic bag and eat in 2 minutes? Wow.) Food is just another part of our consumer culture, so what does it mean to become a food citizen?
Cracked Pot Pix
