One World....

“Write down what you just said,” an old friend suggested in a phone conversation last week.  “What I wanted when I moved here was intimacy with a place,” I’d said, “and it’s come, largely through my poverty.”  


Like many, I often feel I inhabit two different worlds with an ocean separating them.  I sense it most when I talk with friends in the Bay Area or other urban ports-of-call, where the right to travel is guaranteed by the Constitution, a passport and a bank account. Living here, where many of my neighbors have had to assert the right to travel against the Border Patrol and enormous dangers with only a wad of bills in their pockets para progresar (“in order to progress,”) my life feels invisible to those far-away friends.


But it’s not only those far away whose lives seem remote from mine.  Recently, talking with a Visalia friend about land ethics and what might be required to instill better relations to land in our culture, he confided “We’re not going to give up our good lives.”  He was speaking in general, but it shook me to think he would draw the line between his life and mine, no matter what good might be gained from whatever good had to be given up.


In a dream last week I was trying to cross an ocean between the world I now inhabit and the one my grandparents inhabited, a world where most people still raised and killed the food they eat.  Many  people around the globe still inhabit that world; many of my neighbors have just recently left it, carrying with them only their recipes and appetites for food from home.  I’m privileged to witness this phenomenon secondhand as packages of beef tongue and tripe, calves hooves and pig skins pass through my hands at the market’s checkstand where I cashier.  Though it was hard at first, my need to understand that world got me through my initial waves of culturally-derived repulsion over my neighbors’ definition of “food.”


What’s the connection between “definitions of food” and “intimacy with a place”?  Most of those recipes and appetites carried by generations of immigrants, whether from Jalisco or Hamburg, Da Nang or Bombay, were cooked and eaten from plants and animals native to those places.  Those lands determined what plants and animals grew and how much, while the people learned how to make more and better.  Food is our primary connection to land, followed by shelter and territory.  Now that our recipes and ingredients have been globalized, our connection to land is less intimate, our sense of place minimized to road maps and weather reports.  


We are still dependent on land for our food  - now we just don’t know whose land it comes from, how it’s produced, or who gets to eat (or not) from the profits. There’s only one world that we all inhabit: Americans’ “good” lives are lived off the backs of others whose lives are not so good or even horrible by comparison.  If we are going to progress as humans - para progresar - we need to reacquaint ourselves with our own land’s productivity and adjust our recipes and appetites accordingly.