Plow Through The Stump

Life is simpler when you plow around the stump. You’ll avoid breaking a disc blade or two on your tractor. It’s cheaper and easier than buying a special attachment. And if the roots on that son-of-a-bitch are strong and deep—which they always are—getting rid of them can take forever.

But farmers tend to be meticulous aestheticians, and a stump in a row of tomatoes sticks out like a sore, unseemly thumb. Those who rightly have more urgent concerns than how their crops look should also note that the soil under and around tree stumps is so fertile that it might be worth breaking a couple disc blades.

My point is, it’s not easy to plow through the stump, but you should.

Last Wednesday, two representatives from the Real Food Challenge—an organization that leverages the purchasing power of universities to promote a more sustainable, local food system—led a workshop (that they will repeat in this weekend’s Harvard Food Justice Conference) on plowing through stumps in a less literal, but vastly more crucial sense. They told us to close our eyes and to imagine that we were in a room—a 30-by-30-foot, pitch-black room with cement walls illuminated only by the sliver of ocean peeking through the gated doorway. This was the last sight over 12.5 million Africans experienced before they were brought to the New World to be enslaved into the most stubborn stump the world has ever known: the modern food system.

Plantation farming, fueled by the colonial obsession with maximizing profit and volume to feed an increasingly insatiable motherland, required a cheap, inexhaustible labor force that only slavery could provide. Farm owners systemically sacrificed basic human decency by catalyzing the ugliest institution in American history for a some extra bucks. They broke the fundamental pact between man and farm by destroying the land with foreign crops and irresponsible agriculture practices. And in doing all this, they sowed the seeds for today’s corporate enclosure of food and instilled scary, harmful consumption habits in us, despite the ensuing moral and environmental impact.

The emphasis on profit and volume in the food system did not die with slavery, and it still necessitates systematically oppressed labor just as it did centuries before. More than half of the laborers who work on American farm are undocumented and many more are migrant workers, bearing employment statuses that allow owners to pay them below living wages and to have them work in inhumane conditions. One farm worker dies on the job every day, and those who survive try to feed themselves and their families on the lowest annual income of any U.S. worker. The food that they grow and pick is on land wrecked by practices that date back to plantation farming like monocropping as well as modern innovations in the art of unsustainability like industrial pesticide and herbicide use. We have lost a third of the world’s arable land since the 1960s and considerably more since the peak of plantation farming centuries ago.

It’s uncomfortable to think about how intertwined the system that produces our food today is with as revolting, seemingly remote an institution as slavery. It’s far simpler to plow around the stump.

But to do so is to ignore the fact that it’s not just modern food production that has inherited the logic of slavery. Our consumption practices—the way we eat, the things we buy—are devoid of thought or care about where that food comes from, about who picked the bananas in the d-hall or raised the beef in our burger, about what the land that bore the sugar in our candy bar used to be before U.S. Sugar Corp. turned it into fields. We need to make eating a hyperconscious activity, to recognize that only conditioning ourselves to compulsively think before we eat will chip away at the extant residual effects of the most shameful era of American history. We need to plow through the stump, and when that inevitably seems too tough and not worth the while, we need to plow harder.

Shubhankar Chhokra ’18, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Apley Court. His column appears on alternate Fridays.