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philoSOPHIA, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 2014, pp. 177-196 (Article)

P bl h d b t t n v r t f N r PrDOI: 10.1353/phi.2014.0011

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Toward a Queer Crip Feminist Politics of Food

Kim Q. Hall

In David T. Mitchell’s and Sharon L. Snyder’s film, Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (2001/1996), Harlan Hahn quips about the role of food in disability culture and identity. If disability is an identity with a culture, Hahn says, it has to have its own food. Every culture has its own food. “You know,” he continues, “. . . we do have a food—fast food! It’s so much easier to go to the drive thru than it is to park, get in and out of the car, and go into a regular restaurant to eat” (Mitchell and Snyder 2001/1996). Here, Hahn recalls countless conversations with other disabled people and presents a wonderful moment of crip humor, full of sharp critique for a society that makes dining out an exercise in various forms of tiresome hoop-jumping for many disabled people. Interestingly, Hahn’s comments differ from messages about fast food in films like Super Size Me (Spurlock 2004) and books like Fast Food Nation (Schlosser 2001) (also a film) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan 2006), in which fast food is criticized because it makes us fat, brings about early deaths, gives us food poisoning, destroys rainforests and nonhuman species, exploits poor people, and contributes to the needless suffering of nonhuman animals. In short, these sources advise us to avoid fast food because it disables eaters, workers, nonhuman animals, communities, and secure food systems.1 But what do these texts overlook? Might disability bring something else to the table?

In this article I critique assumptions about disability that animate the U.S. alter-native food movement. While I discuss examples of how disability functions as the background against which the alternative food movement defines its alternatives as good,2 my concern with disability and food doesn’t end there. The question of the

essays

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relationship between disability and food politics is not only a question of making available more nutritious food options to disabled people, though this is certainly important. Instead, a queer crip feminist conception of food justice remains criti-cally attuned to conceptions of bodies, identities, and relationships that so often inform distinctions between “good” and “bad” foods in the US alternative food movement. Here, I aim to develop a queer crip feminist conception of food and food justice that not only attends to the relationships that structure and are brought about by the production, distribution, and consumption of food but also critically engages the conceptions of community, relationship, bodies, and identity that are assumed, made possible by, or foreclosed by food discourse. Good food, I contend, not only sustains life, it enables flourishing. Flourishing, as Chris Cuomo notes, is not an accomplishment of autonomous, self-reliant individuals; real flourishing takes time and can be accomplished only with others (1998, 74). Flourishing, in other words, is made possible by our complex enmeshment in community with human and nonhuman others. A commitment to food justice requires critique of underlying assumptions that thwart flourishing of queer crip feminist lives and community. The goodness and desirability of food choices are inseparable from how we are positioned in and negotiate our communities and how ways of thinking about food and health can open and foreclose resistant possibilities.

In this article I critique the metaphysics of purity3 and alimentary ableism4 that inform assumptions about what makes a food good. In addition, I develop a queer crip feminist framework for revealing and questioning prevailing assumptions about food justice and propose an alternative conception. A queer crip feminist framework offers a critical vantage point from which to make visible the metaphysics of purity and alimentary ableism that inform dominant conceptions of food and food justice in the US alternative food movement. It is concerned both with coalitional possibili-ties between disability and other movements5 and with identifying and critiquing assumptions about what is natural and normal regarding food and food politics. The queer crip feminist food politics I propose here conceives of bodies and identities as sites of contested, provisional, situated, tentative negotiations and possibilities, not as fixed and stable. Food practices are sites where the meanings of community, identity, relationship, and the meaning of food itself are materialized and negotiated. These critical attunements make a queer crip feminist framework ideal for the development of a food politics oriented toward justice, not security.

From within the framework of a metaphysics of purity and alimentary ableism, “real” food is food that has ontological integrity: The boundaries that distinguish between it and the artificial and inauthentic are clear and transcend cultural and historical conceptions of food. Alimentary ableism posits eating “real” food as desirable because it prevents or cures disability. In this sense, the understanding of “real” food within the dominant discourse in the US alternative food movement uncritically relies on and perpetuates the notion that disability is undesirable and, thus, in need of eradication. As Alison Kafer points out,

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conceptions of disability that inform political work determine whether or not the imagined and desired future is a future that has disability and disabled people in it (2013, 2–4). In turn, the disavowal of disability in the future renders disabled people in the present as having no future, as having lives not worth living, a view that contributes to rather than challenges disability discrimination. Informed by a metaphysics of purity, food politics seeks to preserve boundaries between bodies and posits health as the realization of bodily integrity brought about by the absence of disability. Food security in this context is understood as a process of border control in which corporeal and national integrity must be protected from that which threatens to contaminate, corrupt, and dissolve it from without.

While food theorists like Michael Pollan aim to defend real food and health and make visible relationships that make up the industrial food system, their reliance on a metaphysics of purity and alimentary ableism offers an ultimately dematerialized conception of those relationships and, thus, food. Here, I instead argue for a queer crip feminist food politics informed by a metaphysics of compost, a transcorporeal conception of food and bodies. Building on Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) concept of transcorporeality and Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of entanglement, a metaphysics of compost understands bodies and food as interactively emergent,6 provisional, and contested sites where boundaries are questioned, negotiated, and open to transformation, not fixed. There are no pure bodies, no bodies with impermeable borders. Because reality is not composed of fixed, mutually exclusive, or pure bodies, a metaphysics of compost is more conducive to a food politics that remains accountable to real bodies and real foods/relationships.

Informed by a metaphysics of compost, a queer crip feminist conception of food justice would, minimally, have the following features: (1) a critique of rhetorics and ideologies of normalization and purity in existing food systems and imagined alternatives; (2) resistance to conceptions of food and food policy that understand food as medicine, prevention, and cure; and (3) critical attention to distinguishing between food and relationships that perpetuate existing global inequalities and entanglements that create space for transformative possibilities. In what follows I critique discourses of purity, food as medicine, and food security that inform the alternative food movement in the United States; discuss an example of queer crip feminist resistance in contexts of institutional eating; and outline an alternative I call a metaphysics of compost, a crip metaphysics that, I argue, is informed by the resistant imagination7 necessary for accessing food justice. My ultimate aim is to make a case for reorienting food politics away from purity and security and toward an understanding of food and bodies necessary for the cultivation of food justice.

Normalization, Purity, and the Alternative Food Movement

In opposition to the industrial food system, a number of counterpractices have emerged from the contemporary alternative food movement: eat local, eat

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organic, grow your own, learn how to cook and preserve foods, no factory-farmed animals, more farmers markets, and edible schoolyards. The movement has given rise to an ever-growing number of books and films,8 each offering advice about how to save the planet and ourselves through better food choices. A few rules from Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (2009) are worth mentioning here: (1) “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (2009, 7); (2) “Avoid foods that are pretending to be something they are not” (23); (3) “Eat foods made from ingredients that you can picture in their raw state or growing in nature” (31); (4) “Don’t ingest foods made in places where everyone is required to wear a surgical cap” (39); and (5) “It’s not food if it arrived through the window of your car” (43).

Of course, each of these claims is based on assumptions that are ques-tioned in queer crip feminist theory. Depending on one’s age, the first rule, as Aaron Bobrow-Strain points out, might commit one to a very homogeneous, ethnocentric eating practice (2012, 29). There may be many things one’s grand-mother wouldn’t recognize as food or eat (for example, my grandmother might not have recognized sushi as food), but that doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try new things. In addition, this rule exemplifies what Elspeth Probyn (2000, 2) calls “alimentary racism” and what Tracey Deutsch (2011, 167–168) describes as a problematic nostalgia, so frequently found in this literature, a nostalgia for women keeping food traditions alive in their kitchens. This alimentary racism and nostalgia are also key components of what Alison Hope Alkon and Christie Grace McCullen identify as a “white [and I would add able-bodied and heteronormative] farm imaginary” (2011, 938).

The second rule is based on an assumption that appearing to be something that one is not is always suspect and potentially dangerous, an assumption about food echoed in statements that purport to “ justify” violent attacks against transgender people. The metaphysics of purity informing Pollan’s second rule assumes there are clear and stable boundaries that distinguish between what is and isn’t food, what is and isn’t edible. This is similar to the assumption that there are clear and stable boundaries between genders that must be legible to others at all times. Transgender presents a challenge to this assumption about gender in general, and transphobia is informed by the assumption of an abiding gender that can be revealed through knowledge of the truth of the body’s sex. In both examples, there can be only one truth about what something is, and that truth is a reflection of what is taken to be the biology of the body itself.

Like the first rule, the third rule privileges homogeneity and ethnocentric foodways to the extent that it is quite difficult to imagine in either their raw or cooked states foods with which one is culturally unfamiliar and has no experi-ence. The third rule assumes familiarity with what foods look like as they’re growing in the garden, but this assumption ignores the many poor people who live in urban food deserts where the only sources of food are convenience stores.

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The fact that many poor people are also disabled means that many disabled people also live in food deserts, a fact that complicates Hahn’s claim that the lack of accessible buildings alone makes fast food the food of disability culture.9

In addition to its infamous negative effect on health, especially the health of poor people for whom fast food offers a lot of calories for little money, fast food presents additional risks to undocumented poor people. “The Border Patrol,” writes Gloria Anzaldúa, “hides behind the local McDonald’s on the outskirts of Brownsville, Texas or some other border town. . . . Living in a no-man’s borderland, caught between being treated as criminals and being able to eat, between resistance and deportation, the illegal refugees are some of the poorest and the most exploited of any people in the U.S.” (1987, 11–12).

Pollan’s concern for the preservation of foods in their natural or raw state also enacts a form of border policing that assumes that there is one natural/raw state of food, an assumption that relies on a metaphysics of purity that ignores the transcorporeality of food, the many border crossings that are part of the history and culture of food and eating.

Pollan’s fourth rule about surgical caps ignores the reality of various forms of institutional eating for many disabled people. References to the traditional, home-cooked family meal are ubiquitous in the literature of the alternative food movement. The romanticization of cooking and the family meal both perpetu-ates a heteronormative conception of ideal eating and constitutes an alimentary ableism in its presumption that all are able to cook and live at home. In his more recent book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Pollan builds on Lévi-Strauss’s work to suggest that cooking and social eating distinguish humans from animals (2013). Pollan’s claim reflects an interest in border maintenance, in this case between humans and animals, that characterizes a metaphysics of purity. It also, albeit unintentionally, reflects and contributes to the ableist assumption that in the absence of self-sufficiency and being able to cook for and participate in normalized modes of social eating,10 one’s life is something less than fully human, an assumption that has long informed what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2012) calls “eugenic logic,” a term that she uses to refer to any approach to disability that posits disability as a problem to be eliminated. This eugenic logic informs approaches to disability that emphasize cure. Finally, the fifth rule, “it can’t be food if it arrives through your car window,” makes impossible Hahn’s statement that fast food is the food of disability culture.

As my challenge to the assumptions informing Pollan’s food rules indicates, the meaning of food is caught up in intertwined networks of gender, race, class, nationality, heteronormativity, and disability. Nonetheless, critical perspec-tives offered by disability studies and queer theory have, with a couple of exceptions, been largely ignored in food studies. Only to a certain extent does the food movement recognize food as a disability issue. In fact, the literature of the alternative food movement is filled with references to disability as a

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consequence of industrial eating. In the alternative food movement, disability is portrayed as a “tragedy”11 that can be avoided through increasing access to healthier foods and learning how to make good food choices. As Alison Hope Alkon argues in Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy, the tendency to emphasize individual efforts and better consumer choices reflects the “neoliberal notion of sustainability” that informs much of the contemporary food movement (2012, 9).

My thinking about the possibilities of a queer crip feminist politics of food is indebted to Alison Kafer’s (2013), Robert McRuer’s (2006), and Carrie Sandahl’s (2003) understanding of the transformative and fraught alliance between queer and crip in a queer crip theoretical framework. The queer crip feminist framework I propose is an effort to create a curb cut12 into food studies and the alternative food movement. Feminism is an important part of this critical framework, because unexamined gender norms also frequently inform desired alternatives in food movement literature. An often-stated claim in this literature, a claim critiqued extensively by feminist food studies scholars like Tracey Deutsch (2011), is the claim that feminism played a role in the normalization of industrial eating. As this story goes, when (class-privileged, white) women began entering the workforce, their newfound economic inde-pendence came at the expense of preparing nutritious foods for their families. As a result of having less time for what had been their household responsibility of cooking food, these women turned to convenience foods offered by the industrial food system. Of course, one of the many problems with this story of feminist complicity in increased industrial eating is the fact that it ignores how white, class-privileged women have long relied on the domestic labor of poor women and women of color, who always worked outside the home.

Just because more white, class-privileged women entered the workforce doesn’t necessarily mean there was no one at their homes to prepare meals or clean. In fact, part of the meaning of whiteness, as Elizabeth Spelman (1999) notes, is derived from its reliance on the “shadow labor” of people of color. Shadow labor is work that is absolutely central to the functioning and existence of a system but remains invisible within that system. In the context of food, shadow work can refer to those who cook, grow, harvest, transport, and prepare our foods inside and outside the home. A queer crip feminist framework reveals that the ubiquity of convenience foods in US diets is not the fault of feminism alone (if at all), and this problem cannot be meaningfully addressed only by teaching people how to cook, preserve, and grow food for their families. While many food theorists seek to make visible certain dimensions of shadow labor in the industrial food system (e.g., by revealing how many miles one’s food has traveled, how little fast food workers are paid, and so on), the literature often treats gender, race, sexuality, and disability as discrete categories of analysis. Furthermore, the alternative food movement tends to present disability and the

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end of the heteronormative family meal as signs of the harm of the industrial food system and, thus, perpetuates ableist, heteronormative, and gendered assumptions about good lives and good food.

Food as Medicine

Whatever the particular differences in the advice they offer, alternative food movement enthusiasts share the belief that one’s food practice will make one “healthier and live longer” (Pollan 2009, 81). To support this claim, they inevi-tably list a series of various diseases that plague an unrepentant industrial eater: diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, and obesity, to name a few. Just as eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century conduct manuals offered boys, girls, and their parents advice for the disciplined achievement of gender conformity,13 contemporary alternative food movement enthusiasts prescribe “hygienic eating” as preventative medicine. In other words, they position food (the right kind, of course) as protection against disability. Interestingly, eating the right foods in an effort to immunize oneself against disease has informed racist and classist food politics as well as food politics aimed at resisting racism and classism.

In his cultural and historical analysis of white bread, Aaron Bobrow-Strain explores how an emphasis on the achievement of health and fitness through hygienic eating tends to reflect and reinforce existing social hierarchies. In the history of white bread, he writes,

Following expert dietary advice became not just a matter of good practice but a requirement of competent citizenship. . . . [I]ndividual decisions about bread didn’t just mark class differences, they placed eaters’ behavior in relation to the larger health of the nation and proclaimed, for all to see, whether one was fit and responsible—or in need of help. (2012, 37)

Despite the anti-capitalist, anti-military industrial complex, social and environmental justice–oriented beginnings of the alternative food movement, Bobrow-Strain points out that it quickly “morphed into an individual-centered, consumer-driven body project” (177). In other words, the mainstreamed alter-native food movement in the United States is a neoliberal hygienic eating project fixated on the achievement of virtue, health, and good citizenship through appropriate consumer choices at the table and in the (farmer’s) marketplace.

The contemporary emphasis on hygienic eating reflects ancient Greek emphasis on dietary discipline as a self-improvement project. As Foucault explains in The Use of Pleasure, in their preoccupation with the interrelationship between “health, life, and death,” ancient Greeks sought to define “the use of

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pleasures,” a preoccupation that “was much more ‘dietetic’ than ‘therapeutic’: a matter of regimen aimed at regulating an activity that was recognized as being important for health” (1990, 98).14 Food, Foucault contends, was how ancient Greeks understood the boundary between humans and animals. Health required eating foods best suited for the unique nature of human beings. In this way, Foucault asserts, “medicine . . . came into being as an appropriate ‘diet’ for the sick, emerging from a search for the specific regimen for their condition” (98). Self-improvement through eating “appropriate” food is a practice of bodily purification and boundary maintenance and, as such, is a food practice oriented toward security against others who are perceived as threatening.

Even well-intentioned efforts to expose discrimination against and harms experienced by people who work in various, more hidden sectors of the food industry can be appropriated into racist and anti-immigrant hostility fueled by concern to protect the public (read: white, class-privileged people) from contamination. For example, as Bobrow-Strain (2012) shows in his discussion of The Jungle (1905), Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé of unsafe working conditions for predominantly immigrant and nonwhite workers in the meatpacking industry provoked more concern about dangers to consumers than to workers. Rather than expressing moral outrage at despicable working conditions, many class-privileged whites worried about unsanitary conditions in which the food they consumed was produced (2012). Bobrow-Strain writes, “Sinclair had hoped to spark outrage over the inhuman conditions experienced by immigrant meatpackers. Instead, the country fixated on germs and the frightening immigrants who appeared to spread them into the nation’s food. ‘I aimed for the people’s heart,’ Sinclair is said to have reflected, ‘and by accident, I hit them in the stomach’” (18).

A similar concern for purity and security of the nation’s food supply seems to lurk in Saru Jayaraman’s recent book Behind the Kitchen Door (2013), a well-intentioned effort to expose exploitation of tips workers in the restaurant industry (the people who serve, prep, wash dishes, and bus tables). As in Sinclair’s The Jungle, most of the tips workers in US restaurants are immigrants (many undocumented and non-English speaking), poor people, and people of color. Contrary to what many people may assume, tips workers in US restau-rants are not mostly college students trying to make some extra money. They are people who make $2.13 per hour plus tips and who use that income to meet their needs and support dependents. In addition, tips workers have no benefits and most often receive no paid sick days. If they don’t show up to work because they are sick, they don’t get paid, and it is not uncommon for them to be told they will be fired if they miss work, even because they are sick (5, 14).

In Behind the Kitchen Door, Jayaraman explains the many instances of workers handling food while sick because they could not afford to stay home and take care of themselves and the resulting risk of infection for restaurant eaters. While Jayaraman is concerned that notions of sustainability include

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workers’ rights (and she is involved in organizing tips workers to improve their working conditions and wages), the book often appeals to consumers’/readers’ (those who can afford to eat at restaurants) concern for the purity of their food and their health. One paragraph is particularly revealing:

I want you, the consumer, to know that if you care about your health, thinking about whether your food is organic, sustainable, or locally sourced—or anything else related to how it’s grown or raised—is simply not enough. Consumers also have to consider the health and well-being of the people who actually touch their food before they put it into their mouths. (16)

In order to motivate readers to care about workers “behind the kitchen door,” Jayaraman relies on an appeal to concern about germs and food quality and purity, in short the restaurant eater’s own health (16). Historically in the United States, fears of contagion have been informed by and served as a vehicle for racism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Just as pharmaceuticals from outside the United States are characterized by the FDA as potential risks to consumers, so too is the idea of food as medicine characterized as threatened by sick workers. Like Sinclair, Jayaraman wants readers to focus on improving conditions for workers, but also, like the reception of The Jungle, her message taps into, albeit unintentionally, a longstanding discourse of purity that risks hitting white, class-privileged readers in their own stomachs instead.

A queer crip feminist perspective reveals the story about workers in the food industry as a complex story about disability. First, it is a story about workers who are disabled as a result of exploitative working conditions. Thinking about disability and the food industry in this way enables understanding that access in the restau-rant industry is not only about ensuring that restaurants are accessible to disabled workers and eaters, though this access is certainly important. Rather, access is also about understanding how exploitative environments disable workers. Far from being a preexisting body-mind condition upon which social, economic, cultural, and political forces act, disability is materialized in and through exploitative economic structures that characterize neoliberal global capitalism. Thus, encouraging eaters to “vote with their forks,” as many alternative food movement adherents do, does nothing to address the structured global inequities and US militarism that force people to leave their homes and professions to work for tips in restaurants in another country, and it does nothing to address the causes of poverty in the world that force one to endure deplorable working conditions in order to survive.

Food Security

Today, food is often characterized as a security issue, and the literature on food security identifies three major threats to food and security in the twenty-first

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century: nutrition, environmental change, and food safety (McDonald 2010). Bryan McDonald defines food security as “the idea that all people at all times have access (including physical, social, and economic access) to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food necessary to lead healthy and active lives” (2). Without question, all people in the world should have access to food. Nonetheless, from a queer crip feminist perspective, we might ask about the meaning of health, activity, and access in mainstream discourse about food security.

In order to gain greater understanding of a queer crip feminist critique of mainstream discourses of food security, I turn to a discussion of food insecurity by Will Allen, founder and CEO of Growing Power, an organization that seeks to return agriculture to food deserts in US cities; teach people who live in food deserts how to grow, tend, and prepare foods; and provide affordable, fresh, nutritious food choices to poor people and people of color who constitute the majority of people who live in food deserts. Allen’s work has been phenomenal and has clearly helped many people. Growing Power has provided jobs and fresh, affordable food in communities where they were nonexistent. While not intending to diminish the importance of these accomplishments, I also turn to Growing Power as an example of how food movements can be appropriated in ways that ultimately diffuse their revolutionary potential. As in the case of workers in food industries, I contend, the discourse of disability that informs food movements can either diffuse or generate their transformative potential.

Will Allen is one of very few black farmers in the United States. Documenting the decline of black farmers, Allen points out, “In 1920, there were more than 900,000 farms operated by African Americans in the United States. Today, there are only 18,000 black people who name farming as their primary occupation (2012, 5–6). Allen discusses many of the causes of the Great Migration of African Americans from rural areas in the South to urban centers in the North. Allen explains that African Americans left the South in search of a better life, and many associated a better life with liberation from farming. Farming, for many African Americans, was and continues to be associated with slave labor. Another cause of the dwindling number of black farmers in the United States is the racist lending practices that favored white farmers over black farmers. Unable to feed themselves and their families, main-tain their farms, and pay debts, many black farmers lost their farms. As a result of these factors, less than one half of 1 percent of today’s farmers are black (100–103). Allen contends that through the paucity of black farmers coupled with black desire to escape the associations of agricultural labor with slavery and a lack of access to land, there has been a great loss of knowledge in black communities about how to plant, care for, harvest, and prepare foods to feed oneself and members of one’s community. In the absence of this knowledge passed down through generations, black people have become dependent on the availability of foods for purchase. But due to the high levels of poverty among

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black people and ongoing racism in employment and the prison industrial complex, many black people have no choice but to rely on cheap, unhealthy food for their calories. Because grocery stores in the 1970s and 1980s left inner cities for the suburbs where they would have wealthier white customers and more parking spaces, poor people of color were left in inner cities with no fresh food options (20).

Good food, by which he means “equal access to healthy and affordable food,” is, Allen contends, a civil rights issue as crucial as “clean air, clean water, or the right to vote” (7). One of the many interesting things about Allen’s discussion of the history and work of Growing Power is the pervasiveness of disability. For instance, as a result of their lack of access to good food, Allen points out, “One in two African Americans born in the year 2000 is expected to develop type II diabetes. Four out of every ten African American men and women over the age of twenty have high blood pressure. Blacks are 30 percent more likely to die young from heart disease than whites” (7). Allen also talks about DeShawn Parker, who suffered severe burns as a five year old and endured teasing and staring throughout his life. The opportunities provided by Growing Power enabled DeShawn Parker to discover a love of cooking, come out as gay, and pursue a career as a chef. There are also stories of people with cancer, including Allen himself, who found strength and sustenance in healthy foods. These and other stories about disability pepper Allen’s defense of the values and virtues associated with agricultural labor. But while there are many other opportunities in Allen’s story to consider how disability is interwoven with feminist, queer, race, and food politics and can, in fact, open new possibilities for conceptual-izing food justice, Allen doesn’t take those opportunities. Disability in his account merely functions as what Mitchell and Snyder (2000) call “narrative prosthesis,” a backdrop against which normalcy can be achieved.

Throughout the book, Allen extols the ability of agricultural labor to address food insecurity in poor communities of color to the extent that it cultivates the virtue of self-reliance. For him, food insecurity can be addressed by empowering people with the knowledge and skills to grow and prepare their own food. Allen turns to his own childhood as an illustration. His family had nothing but the land they lived on in exchange for taking care of a white widow, her house, and her land. His parents knew how to grow and prepare food, knowledge they imparted to their children. While they were poor, they were not hungry, and they always ate nutritious food they grew and prepared themselves.

Interestingly, Allen compares himself to his hero, George Washington Carver, a black agricultural scientist famous for discovering the many uses for peanuts and who taught under the supervision of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute from 1896 to 1943. Allen shares Carver’s (and Washington’s) commitment to self-sufficiency through agricultural know-how as the key to black success. Of course, for Washington, this meant resigning oneself

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to living in a white-dominated society. The virtue of self-sufficiency strives to meet personal needs but ignores structural realities that shape needs and disproportionate access to opportunities for meeting needs. Ultimately, Allen prioritizes self-sufficiency and overlooks the resistant possibilities that can be found in valuing interdependence and coalition.

From a queer crip feminist perspective, self-sufficiency is an illusion rooted in the able-bodied assumption of control over one’s body and life (Wendell 1996), and a food politics oriented toward the goal of self-sufficiency enacts a form of alimentary abelism. A community of self-sufficient actors is ultimately a community shaped by interactions between independent actors who are assumed to have equal access to meeting their needs. But as Eva Kittay (1999) points out, the human condition (and, I would add the condition of nonhuman worlds) is interdependence, not dependence. This observation, long central to disability studies analysis, critiques the hubris of the rhetoric of self-sufficiency as the goal of alternative food movements. In actuality, one could say that many stories in Allen’s account are stories of interdependence, not self-sufficiency. From the worms in his compost bins to all members of his community, thriving is ultimately achieved interdependently.

Interdependence, like farming, can be a ground for food justice based not on security and self-reliance but on the transformative potential of openness to the not yet. As Allen himself writes about farming, “Farming had taught me to have trust in the unseen. You plant for a harvest that you hope will arrive but that is never guaranteed” (18). It is this anticipation of an openness to the not yet that Robert McRuer associates with “the crip commitment that until the other world that is possible is accessed, the sites or locations where disability identities emerge will always be interrogated and transformable, sustaining and understanding that who we are or might be can only have meaning in relation to who we are not (yet)” (2006, 72).

A queer crip feminist politics of food attends to the fact that questions about what makes a particular food “good” for one cannot be answered by uncritical appeals to health, the natural, purity, or self-sufficiency. A queer crip feminist politics of food attends to the interactive emergent nature of foods and their rela-tionship to well-being. In this sense, it is not the absence of artificial ingredients that necessarily makes a food “good.” There are no pure foods, no foods that are not implicated in networks of relationships that are beyond one’s control (Heldke 2012). Real food security requires food justice, not the illusion of self-sufficiency.

Queer Crip Feminist Resistance and Institutional Eating: Toward a Metaphysics of Compost

Consider Catherine Kudlick ’s (2007) discussion of her experience with a shopper’s assistant who refused to get frozen burritos and kept insisting that

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carrots would be a healthier choice. Despite her own “gourmand” rejection of frozen burritos, Kudlick finds herself arguing for the frozen burrito. She writes,

Relying on others sucks! I wanted to shout over the PA system. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have spent the past twenty minutes running after a slab of low-fat cream cheese, only to be told by some snotty bitch that what we’ve chosen isn’t good for us! You don’t know how good you have it, strolling in, walking right up to each thing you want, and putting it into your cart. (para. 31)

Once back at the Colorado Center for the Blind, a ravenous Kudlick searches for something to eat but can find nothing that is not frozen, packaged, artificially flavored, and full of salt and preservatives. When even a Snickers Bar cannot be found, she settles for a couple of chips and chocolate cake. But even these choices place her in unanticipated, fraught entanglements with other people at the center.

Kudlick ’s account brilliantly captures the illusion of control regarding our food choices. While our lives are interdependent, interdependence is considered disabling in an able-bodied society. Nondisabled people ignore their own interdependence and respond paternalistically to disabled people. In this context, relying on others certainly does suck! Still, in Kudlick’s account, self-sufficiency is experienced as a fraught desire. Some absences of control are rooted in the self-righteous paternalism of an able-bodied society; others are rooted in relationships and histories that entangle one in ways that can neither be anticipated nor avoided. No pure food; no pure food choice. Sometimes, from a certain critical perspective, processed food can be good for you. To be clear, I’m not trying to defend processed food or the industrial food system. There are many reasons why we should critique the industrialized food system. My point is that what it means for a food to be good is, in part, its place in the creative realization of desired community, a community that remains contingent, imperfect, and ever changing but nonetheless vital for queer crip feminist lives. In Kudlick’s account finding food to eat is, all at once, a matter of satisfying hunger; negotiating relationships; and asserting a sense of self and agency in an institutional, able-bodied context that denies both to disabled people. The shopping assistant who paternalistically insists upon the goodness of carrots over the frozen burrito is operating under the assumption that good foods are pure, natural, raw foods, in other words a metaphysics of purity. However, Kudlick’s account brilliantly conveys that, in this context, the frozen burrito is better than the carrots.

Rather than a metaphysics of purity, a queer crip feminist politics of food is rooted in a metaphysics of compost. In her excellent argument for an alternative ontology of food, Lisa Heldke proposes rejecting the conception of food as an

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edible substance and adopting a conception of food as “loci of relationships” (2012, 70). Because food is a mode of complex being with others, a conception of food as “loci of relationships” has the potential to lead to a more complex food ethics. I think Heldke is right about this. At the same time, I propose a metaphysics of compost, because it suggests a process of becoming that is simultaneously a coming into being (building good soil, for instance) and decomposition or loss. Compost is all these at once—never pure, never fixed. As I understand it, compost is less a composite of multiple sites of relationship than it is a Deleuzian assemblage that is constantly being transformed by these relationships. In this sense, a metaphysics of compost has the potential for thinking of food as a network of relationships, not all of which can be repaired through “good” choices and not all of which can be known or assumed in advance. Understanding food through a metaphysics of compost continually places the being of food itself into question in ways that enable both a sustained critique of alimentary racisms and ableisms and the emergence of queer crip feminist food politics that resist pathologizing disability.

While a metaphysics of purity depends upon an ableist temporality—a linear, progressive sense of time oriented toward a future of bodies and commu-nities in which disability has been eliminated15—crip time is the temporality of a metaphysics of compost. Rather than ceaseless, linear progression, crip time reflects the phenomenology of disability in a world that privileges able-bodiedness. In other words, crip time is the time of hesitation, tentativeness, and what Nancy Mairs (1996) refers to as “excessive dawdling” in a world that expects and rewards the seamless, quick, and harmonious activities of bodies and minds.

As evidenced by Nancy Mairs’s account of frequently being parked in airports while others rush about, crip time provides an opening for the emergence of a critical and resistant perspective on reality, a perspective that draws Mairs’s attention to “the queer choices people make in traveling costumes” (37). Of course, Mairs most likely uses “queer” in the ordinary sense of “odd”; however, from a queer crip feminist perspective her statement invites contemplation of the entanglement of queer and crip, a critical engage-ment with the ordinary, the normal, and the boundaries between worlds. As J. Jack Halberstam reminds us, both airports and toilets are sites of border anxiety and gender transgression (1998, 20–21). Parked in her wheelchair inside an airport, in between bodies and borders, Mairs gains a critical perspective on ableism and cultivates the resistant imagination necessary for alternative, “habitable” bodies and worlds, “a world,” as Mairs puts it, “that wants me in it” (63).

Crip time has much in common with Alia Al-Saji’s (2012) characterization of philosophy itself as prosthesis.16 As prosthesis, philosophy does not offer or rely on “a fixed or assured view” (351). Instead, philosophy waits and “thinks

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hesitantly, for the temporality it inscribes is not foreseeable development but the unfolding of life as tendency, zigzag and winding, as that which creates its own possibility as it comes into existence” (352). Similarly, within crip time, the meaning of disability, like the future itself, cannot be known in advance. Crip time is the time of compost, a time of becoming.

Given my discussion of crip time, one might wonder if the slow food movement17 is premised on a conception of food that is actually consistent with the conception of food justice I advance in this article. Despite the promise of its name, the discourse of the slow food movement also relies on a metaphysics of purity and alimentary ableism. There are ironies here, of course. The slow food movement emerged in opposition to fast food, the very food Harlan Hahn identif ies as the food of disability culture because of the inaccessibility of most restaurants. Slow food celebrates that which is authentic because it is tied to one place. In addition, it champions self-reliance (e.g., cooking, hunting, or foraging for one’s own food) as the most moral relationship to food. Within the slow food movement, self-reliance and authenticity are the ultimate values that sustain health, bodies, and just food systems. But, as Parama Roy (2010) and Sarah Jaquette Ray (2013) remind us, places and the foods associated with them are not f ixed. They are frequently fraught sites of becoming. The idea of authentic foods is informed by a metaphysics of purity that seeks security in preservation of foods and places. This approach assumes the self-evidence of distinctions between authentic, place-bound, natural foods and inauthentic, hybrid, unnatural foods.18 Contrary to the assumptions of the alternative food movement, food and places are interactively emergent in ways that defy efforts to achieve authenticity and purity.

Like queer and crip, compost is not a singular, fixed thing. It is a process of decomposition, a process of becoming. Compost is simultaneously a mate-rialization of decay and life. It teems with many varied organisms. Compost even challenges the assumption that there are only two sexes in nature; one prominent participant in the compost process, the worm, has both ovaries and testes. All worms are capable of producing new worms. And compost certainly isn’t pure; it’s dirt. Dirt, Ladelle McWhorter writes, “circulates, it never stays put or settles down. That’s the trouble with dirt. Dirt has no integrity. Dirt isn’t a particular, identifiable thing. And yet it acts. . . . Dirt perpetuates itself ” (1999, 162). “Becoming dirt” for McWhorter involves acting in the midst of uncertainty, tension, and contradiction.

Thus, thinking with compost can facilitate a reorientation of our concep-tion of food and food politics. Conceptualizing food from the perspective of compost provides a critical position from which to understand the connections between mainstream discourse about food security, hygienic eating campaigns, and the maintenance of existing social and class hierarchies. A queer crip

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feminist politics of food informed by a metaphysics of compost conceives of food justice as access to the food we need to flourish, and, in so doing, to resist normalization and create a less pure, more livable world.

—Appalachian State University

Notes

1. In this article I critique prevailing assumptions about disability within the US alternative food movement. My critique should not be taken as a rejection of the value of its insights regarding industrial food systems. The industrial food system is harmful, and the alternative food movement’s commitment to critiquing it and advancing alternatives is vital. Nonetheless, a commitment to food justice must also attend to the implications of norms that are left unquestioned within the alternative food movement lest its proposed alterna-tives ultimately perpetuate rather than work against ableism and other forms of injustice. It is crucial to offer critiques of the harms of the industrial food system while resisting the stigmatization of disability and other nonnormative bodies and identities.

2. In The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture (2013), Sarah Jaquette Ray argues that disability discourse has long been central to the US environmental movement’s distinctions between what is good and bad for the natural world. By constituting disabled people, immigrants, and American Indians as “ecological others,” Ray contends, the dominant discourse of the US environmental movement has relied on and reproduced existing social hierarchies. Here, I consider some of the ways in which dominant assumptions about disability, sexuality, race, and gender intersect within the alternative food movement in the United States.

3. In her thinking about mestizaje, María Lugones (1994) contends that lived, embodied hybridity cannot be understood within a “logic of purity.” Furthermore, she argues that resistance of interlocking oppressions requires refusal of pure categorization that inform a politics of purity. As Bergin (2009) points out, Lugones’s “logic of purity” is a metaphysical perspective (264).

4. Here, I borrow from Elspeth Probyn’s (2000) concept of alimentary racism and Parama Roy’s (2010) analysis of the alimentary dimensions of colonialism and postcolonialism. As they demonstrate, distinctions between the edible and inedible (and between foods that one “should” or “shouldn’t” consume) enact rituals of purification, a desire to clearly distinguish between self and other.

5. Here, I build on Alison Kafer’s (2013) understanding of feminist queer crip as an approach conducive to coalitional politics due to its understanding of the contin-gent nature of identity. In this sense, coalitions are grounded in shared politics rather than shared identities.

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6. Here, I build on Stacy Alaimo (2010) and Susan Oyama’s (2000) understanding of entities as manifestations of interactions between nature and culture, interac-tions in which no sharp distinction can be made between what is inherent in an entity and characteristics made possible through its involvement in social, cultural, and political environments. In the case of food, as Elspeth Probyn (2000) notes, alimentary racism has informed distinctions between food and nonfood. My point in this article is that alimentary ableism has informed distinctions between good and bad foods in the alternative food movement.

7. See José Medina (2013) for more about the “resistant imagination” at the heart of epistemologies of resistance, an imagination necessary for the conception and realization of transformative possibilities.

8. See, for example, Will Allen (2012), Novella Carpenter (2009), Saru Jayaraman (2013), Robert Kenner (2009), Kristin Kimball (2010), Michael Pollan (2006, 2009), Eric Schlosser (2001), Peter Singer and Jim Mason (2006), Morgan Spurlock (2004, 2006), and Chris Taylor (2008).

9. While Pollan does not use the term “disabled” to refer to industrial eaters (his term for people who eat processed, factory-farmed, and heavily subsidized foods that make up what Peter Singer and Jim Mason call “The Standard American Diet”), his critique of unhealthy eating practices and food systems is consistent with the ableist assumption that health and disability are mutually exclusive.

10. See G. Denise Lance’s (2007) discussion of social capital and assisted eating.11. The paramount example of this is the persistent stigmatization of obesity in the

alternative food literature. An example is the f irst season of British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s television program, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution (2010), set in Huntington, West Virginia. A common theme of this show is Oliver visiting a family’s home where he asks a mother to put every food item the family eats for a week on the kitchen table. Oliver is often teary as he exclaims over the amount and quality of foods on the table, making a connection between the family’s food choices and obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. Each episode portrays Oliver as the hero on a mission to save children and prevent obesity by educating their ignorant parents and reforming school lunch programs. While it is certainly important for school lunch programs to offer nutritious foods, it is also important to argue for those reforms in ways that resist further stigmatization of disability. See Sarah Jaquette Ray (2013, 2–5) for more about Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution and disability discourse in the US environmental movement.

12. McRuer’s (very material) metaphor for the queer crip framework he provides is a chunk of concrete, an artifact of disability resistance aimed at opening public space to disabled people by taking a sledgehammer to the sidewalk to create a curb cut. “The chunk of concrete,” McRuer insists, “highlights paradoxes” of a perspective that remains critical of identity based–movements while simultaneously refusing to “dematerialize” identity (2006, 38). He continues,

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“If from one perspective the chunk of concrete marks a material and seemingly

insurmountable barrier, from another it marks a necessary openness to the acces-

sible public cultures we might yet inhabit. Crip theory questions—or takes a

sledgehammer to—that which has been concretized; it might consequently be

comprehended as a curb cut into disability studies and into critical theory more

generally.” (38)

13. For example, Dr. John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, first published in 1774, continued to be popular into the twentieth century. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft offers an early feminist critique of Gregory’s text and Rousseau’s Emile.

14. See also Elspeth Probyn’s discussion of food and Michel Foucault’s reading of the ancient Greek notion of ethics as the practice of self (2000, 5–6).

15. See Alison Kafer’s (2013) discussion of futurity and crip time.16. Al-Saji’s discussion of philosophy as prosthesis builds on the insights of Bergson

and Merleau-Ponty. She does not intentionally engage with disability studies in this essay. Nonetheless, I find her discussion generative for thinking about what it might mean to crip philosophy.

17. I am grateful to one of the anonymous readers of this essay who suggested thinking about the implications of my analysis for slow food.

18. See Lisa Bergin (2009) for more about how suspicion toward hybridity informs mainstream critiques of genetically engineered organisms. In contrast to the rejec-tion of hybridity in the name of preserving the natural state of organisms, Bergin argues that concepts of ambiguity and hybridity and critiques of purity found in the work of many Latina feminists offers a perspective that better reflects the impurity of nature itself.

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