Climate Nausea

Drought, quinoa, and the experience of food writing in this moment.

It is interesting to think, isn’t it, about how we came to have all of this: flying over oceans on whims, foods from the other side of the world at the corner store, the earth-extracted minerals composing the phones in our hands, day-of delivery of the specific wire necessary to connect that camera to this laptop. It is interesting to think about because without this world, the one we have with all its mess and overconsumption and crisscrossing of oceans, I don’t even exist, not really. I don’t exist as myself—maybe there would be a soul in a body somewhere that stayed put that resembles mine. Do you exist in this fantasy of a world with limits? Or are you like me, a glass jar shattered across the tile floor? We are, most of us, probably, globalized. We are, most of us, glass.

“It was normal for goods to arrive from all over the world and freely circulate,” writes Annie Ernaux in The Years, “while men and women were turned away at the borders.”

The men with big boats hundreds of years ago got greedy and tried to ruin all the ways of life around the world that knew how to stay within limits, to take what was needed and leave the rest. We’ve been fucking it up ever since though luckily not enough not to know the old ways, to know they were right and this is wrong.

I’m being dramatic but this morning I dry-heaved while reading about drought. Drought, everywhere. Drought, more than ever. I dry-heaved and overcorrected by scrolling on TikTok for so long that I got served a video of a woman putting “dreaming” in quotes. “We’re actually projecting across the astral plane,” she said of what happens when we sleep. That was when I went back to my desk, back to work. That’s quite enough of that. I’d rather dry-heave. I’d rather be right here.

I’m reading about quinoa. Reading about quinoa teaches us so much about how food narratives function in the Global North: Those in affluent nations see something shiny, just like the men with the big boats, and because we want something new, because we survive by making more, more, more new, we fuck some people over who have no voice in the matter, then never think about it again. We say, Remember quinoa? I have defended Western consumption of quinoa before because people were saying that it was, like, vegans specifically gobbling up all this imported complete protein grain and ruining the food system of Bolivia. But vegans are too small a demographic to do anything, to change any national food system. How have you been personally and politically aggrieved by a vegan today? was a whole genre of internet take writing for a bit.

The quinoa market did ruin things, though, creating “a dual crisis of climate and market.” It just wasn’t only vegans who did this. It had long been an indigenous food grown for subsistence in Bolivia and Peru; in 1980, it started to become known as a “superfood” and had a stable export market under the fair-trade label until the quinoa boom began in 2008. This led to the adoption of intensive agricultural techniques, driven less by organic and fair trade markers than by higher yield, and more competition from Peru and even growers in the U.S., Australia, France…

Then, the bottom fell out of the market, and now Bolivian farmers have faced occasional drought conditions for years. Recovery has thus been difficult. Vegans didn’t do this alone; everyone with their little bursts of interest in certain “new” crops did it. I did it. The little interests, the cool factor, these have real implications when they lead to overproduction and changes to age-old agricultural practices. How cool can tinned fish or mountains of butter be before the bottom falls out? This “taste,” this “cool factor”—these are not neutral. They do not pour forth from nowhere, from nothing, from no one.

Abra Berens, chef, farmer, and cookbook author, knows this, that this happens and causes real problems. She writes in her 2021 book Grist, “I feel like every year some new ‘superfood’ grain bursts on the scene in glossy magazines with the promise that scoopful a day will make you lose weight and grow long lustrous tresses, and ensure general happiness. These grains are often imported, along with a colonialist-inspired marketing of their production in far-flung places by mysterious people who hold the secret key to overcoming our day-to-day woes.”

As you might imagine, I appreciate this kind of pointed truth appearing in a cookbook, a space where we might expect the author to gently take our hands and usher us toward better living without a harsh word. She continues, “The problem is not with exploring ingredients from other areas; in fact, that is one of the true joys of a globalized world. The problem is in mass consumption with little regard for how the crops are produced, how they function within the society of origin, or for folks who grow and depend on the ingredient as a daily diet staple.”

It’s an old story, we know. Dr. Zilkia Janer writes in The Coloniality of Modern Taste: A Critique of Gastronomic Thought (emphasis my own):

A historical narrative is a story that connects and gives meaning to events. The meaning of historical events is not inherent in them; it is constituted in the structure and language of the narrative. The foundational narrative of gastronomy cast gastronomy as the first culture of taste to acquire certain characteristics that made all other ones outdated. This is not just a harmless Eurocentric ego-trip, it is an example of the coloniality of knowledge. The narrative of gastronomic progress is an expression of the European paradigm of rational knowledge which, in the words of Aníbal Quijano, “was not only elaborated in the context of, but as a part of, a power structure that involved the European colonial domination over the rest of the world.”

There’s a coloniality of knowledge; there’s also a coloniality of “cool” in food that, clearly, fascinates me endlessly because—like the coloniality of knowledge—it’s absorbed and bought into so easily, replicated without question or any analysis that goes deeper than ironic distance.

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Before I was reading about quinoa, I was reading about nutrition in Romania after World War II. When I read about Romania, I google one of my favorite writers, Iulian Ciocan, who writes in Romanian and lives in Moldova. I keep wanting more of his work to be available in English, but there’s still just Before Brezhnev Died. I found an interview with him from last year where he says, “[Russian writer and dissident Venedikt] Yerofeyev said about Russia that it is hell for a citizen and heaven for a writer. This is exactly how it is in Moldova.” And I think, So is this whole world, this whole world.

Paid Subscriber Notes

This Friday, From the Desk Recommends… the monthly roundup of articles, podcasts, and more, plus my monthly playlist and a selection of three books for a giveaway.

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The Desk Book Club is currently reading Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala. The first discussion thread will take place on May 31. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!

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If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.

News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Here’s a new great review that I just read at The Cook’s Cook!

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I’ll be in conversation with SOURCED about No Meat Required on Tuesday, May 15. You can find out more and sign up to attend at their newsletter.

Reading

Meatless Days by Sara Suleri