I go grocery shopping early these days. The habit formed in March, when the world was still foreign. Back when putting myself, and others, at risk for pantry staples felt strange. Back when George Floyd was alive. Back when internet assholes got their kicks from taking shots at newfound bread-baking hobbyists.
In March, everyone was making sourdough. In March, the world was learning Breonna Taylor’s name. That was before major corporations and local governments embraced the optics, if not the message, of Black lives mattering. Before thoughts, prayers, blind eyes, and empty gestures led to over 180,000 dead in this country.
Food is a god. It gives life. It provides hope, satisfies the soul, and allows us to connect to our ancestors and elders. It serves as a vehicle to engage a world larger than ourselves. I get jealous when I look at Instagram. I see so many people using this unprecedented time to make food. They grow into accomplished cooks, and their recipes evolve.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in a morass, envious. I see them growing and evolving as I struggle to sustain any interest in the kitchen. I’ve lost faith. To me, food is dead. Food remains dead. And we have killed it.
I deify bread. But I never started that starter. I did try one in November last year. I had found myself back in Nebraska for an extended period before my annual hunting expedition, and I had the time and the opportunity for a project.
It was more than that, though. I knew the time that my parents would spend in the house I grew up in was drawing to a close. It is too much house for them, and they’ve earned a more relaxed lifestyle. What better way to preserve my connection to a place as important as my mother’s kitchen than a sourdough starter—an immaculately conceived memento of my childhood that I could take with me? It would grow, evolve, and be shaped by its surroundings years after leaving that kitchen. Much like myself. I put in the work. I pored over techniques. And it all went according to plan, until my flight back to Chicago from Nebraska. TSA did not appreciate my sentimentality as much as I did.
This past April, I couldn’t imagine wanting to create a starter out of the natural yeasts that surrounded me. Everywhere I looked, the world seemed like it was crumbling. Why would I want to take particles of that world and make them a part of me? In retrospect, to think the world was dissolving in April seems quaint.
I went from not wanting to ingest and be bound to those spores to not wanting a cozy distraction from the horrors all around me.
Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Ahmaud Arbery, Sean Reed, Tony McDade, Adrian Medearis, Oscar Grant, Riah Milton. The ceaseless stories of American-sponsored violence against innocent people under the guise of “law and order” have resulted in an abominable montage in my mind. News updates on the latest stolen life set off a barrage of images of death-by-cop. It all seems unending. It buries me. But I freely acknowledge the stress I’m feeling—within a generationally oppressive, white-supremacy-upholding system, built on the backs of people of color—is fractional in comparison to what others are confronting. It does not seem appropriate for me to feel satisfied or satiated right now.
Food is dead in my kitchen, and maybe in restaurants soon, too—especially the mom-and-pop places. You know the ones I mean: those tiny spots, great food, questionable service. These restaurants operate outside of most industry best practices, focusing on getting and keeping the doors open without corporate bankrolls and purchasing power. These restaurants serve joy and become places of community.
Under the best of circumstances, in order to survive the fall and winter, restaurants must bank money during the summer. If restaurants are only barely surviving this summer, how will fall and winter go? An essential part of our culture is being left to fend for itself in impossible circumstances, all due to a federal government whose best version of a restaurant bailout is to cover 100% of businesses’ three-martini lunches.
Service industry workers are everything that the majority party in this government claims it wants from a workforce. Politicians proselytize about careers unbound from an “elitist” four-year degree, an industry filled with workers willing to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and earn their way through hard work and diligence.
But the much-needed unemployment benefits for those who have been laid off have long since expired. The American government treats this crisis with the laissez-faire attitude we should expect in desperate times that primarily harm middle- and lower-class workers. Which is to say, with a “fuck off, you should’t be poor” attitude.
The days are noticeably shorter. The darkest year I can remember is about to get darker. My barely-air-conditioned apartment grows cooler, which generally marks the time when I want to cook more. This year, my kitchen remains dark and cold. I want to find someone to blame for taking away a part of me. A nemesis. Is he twirling a mustache? Is he a blathering orange fascist? Is he me?
In 2020 my life has been reduced to three rooms: bedroom, living room, office. This suction has left me living in my head more than anywhere else. Before the quarantine, I would have considered myself an introspective person. Now I am without distraction, immersed in reflection and rumination. I’m left to consider what I knew, and what I didn’t do.
Before March 2020, I knew that the business of food was exploitive. I’m from Nebraska—I grew up surrounded by farms and meatpacking plants that took advantage of people. I’m really fucking familiar with the all-too-common practice of hiring undocumented laborers because, apparently, individuals who aren’t citizens of this country aren’t owed a minimum wage.
I knew that agricultural workers experienced alarmingly high suicide rates. Lack of access to mental health care, extreme weather as a result of climate change, and shrinking margins have all created a secret scourge.
I knew toxic masculinity, unfair labor practices, and cultural appropriation fueled many restaurants.
I had all this information. What did I do with it? What did we do with it? Because I’m reasonably certain I wasn’t alone in my awareness of the world around me. A CSA in the summer, and a few trips to that one restaurant that proudly doesn’t accept tips? In other words, just enough to soothe a guilty soul.
The food chain is twisted and perverse, and the deck is stacked against the most conscious consumers. Yet if the only real vote available in a capitalist society is our dollars, for whom are we voting?
Food can give us beauty and nourishment while causing harm and perpetuating human nature’s worst behaviors. We avidly fight against a system rife with injustices while actively supporting and strengthening it. We live in a gray, gray world, darkening every day.
The last piece I published on this blog was also about death. My cousin’s death, specifically, and the demons that contributed to his untimely passing. His demons are mine. At the end of each day, while considering the world around me, and how hard it is to do good, I am tempted to escape into the night via a cocktail of beer, pizza, and delivery fried chicken. Since March 2020, I’ve turned to that cocktail more times than I am proud to admit. Now I’m focusing on hydration and staying home. I consume the latest writing by Alicia Kennedy, Cathy Erway, and Chris Newman. These actions put no one in danger.
Food is dead. Food remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Words by Mark Spence
