Saeed Husain
Of all the things I have learned from my uncle, he taught me one critically important lesson: always finish the food on your plate, and do not take more than you need. This was never taught in mild terms, and more often than not was a strict reprimand from a man who has been a police officer for nearly all of his adult life.
That message was a necessary precept. Every single day, there are far too many people in the world who go to sleep hungry. Whenever I look at a plate of food, I feel blessed that I was given a chance to eat. However, that blessing came at the cost of so many others who have to survive on a growling stomach. If I have taken this food away from someone else, I should respect it.
Another lesson I received was from my grandfather (who passed away last January and whose death still haunts me. Abu, I love you and miss you so much). When I was ten years old, my sister Alizeh and I were at our grandparent’s home for lunch when Abu asked us what we thought of the food. At that young age, I didn’t quite appreciate vegetables, so I said that they were bad. Those words feel venomous today.
Alizeh, two years younger than me, replied that the food was alright, though it was very apparent she wasn’t enjoying it either. Abu, knowing that both of us didn’t appreciate what was in front of us, just quietly said while motioning to Alizeh, “That’s good. I know you don’t like it, but one should never call food bad.”
I felt wildly embarrassed then, and that sentiment has carried on to this day. My grandfather did not say why we should not call food bad (always the academic, he consistently made it a point to create more self-inquiry, rather than explaining it then and there) but it was a very appropriate message. Since then, I have answered that question in my own way.
Let us begin with raw and uncooked food. To transform that to what we eat, there are critical resources involved. Hard manual labour (even in a world of automation, farmers still primarily work outside) land, water, nutrients, packaging and transport. Then, once that raw food arrives, we depend on someone else’s skill to feed us. Simply put, calling food “bad” ridicules the painstaking work of each and every person involved in making sure that we do not go hungry. From the person who chose the seed to the human who ensured that the crops grew well, and from the person who transported them to the human who prepared them to finally be cooked. When I called the food served at my grandparent’s home “bad,” I belittled the hard work of each and every person who was involved in making sure that I did not go hungry.
Then there are times when the food presented before me carries heavier burdens. Last year, in Pamela Frese’s class on Peoples and Cultures of the Contemporary U.S., we read the multi award-winning book “Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies,” by Seth Holmes, a cultural and medical anthropologist at UC Berkeley. It is a book which I would encourage everyone to read, and explains just a small part of the social hierarchy involved in food production in the U.S. Holmes writes powerfully about indigenous Triqui migrants from Mexico who come to the U.S. to work as farmworkers, and essentially become hostage to the global market demand for food. He documents and discusses the pitiful wages, lack of healthcare and countless instances of harassment. For the book, Holmes does fieldwork in Washington, California, Oaxaca and the U.S.-Mexico border which he “illegally” crosses with his Triqui collaborators.
Due to the vivid description by Holmes, I have felt uneasy looking at food grown and packaged in Washington and California. There is a lot more that I should do to help the Triqui migrants who live and work in terrible conditions, but for now I only find the strength to offer quiet respect. This is the conundrum: if I stop buying the food, I essentially end a source of livelihood for those migrants, while if I keep buying it, I support the exploitation.
We must fight for better care. When I look at a plate of food I am reminded time and time again how lucky I am to be sufficiently fed. I find that sometimes I have to be reminded of how delicate the processes of global food production are and how much stress we put on the most vulnerable of our societies. To each and every single one of our actions, there are incalculable human costs involved.
If TL;DR: stop wasting food.