Extractive Ag | Food + Solidarity | Recipe: Chocolate Pistachio Oat Breakfast Cookies
Extractive Ag | Food + Solidarity | Recipe: Chocolate Pistachio Oat Breakfast Cookies
Issue No. 44
In this week’s edition, cookies for breakfast! But no dessert until you read about extractive capitalism.
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Here’s a baking tip: want to make more money off of each loaf of bread? Just steal all the flour you use. Lower production costs = more $$$ in your pocket! 🤑
That may seem like a ridiculous (and illegal!) profit-making scheme, but it’s not that far off from how many large companies operate. This is called extractive capitalism, in which wealth is extracted through the exploitation of people and the planet, with little concern given to potentially destructive consequences. Much of the U.S. food system would fall under this definition. A couple people at the top make a killing, and to the rest they say “Let them eat Tastykakes.”
There are a number of ways in which the food system bypasses or cheats the true cost of food production in order to widen profit margins. Agricultural workers, from migrant field hands to incarcerated laborers, are too often paid far less than they deserve (and in some horrific cases, nothing at all). There is also the hidden cost to human and planetary health, from antibiotic resistance in those living near CAFO operations to soil erosion to widespread diet-related illness.
Another way in which Big Ag obscures the cost of food production is through farm subsidies. Subsidies are the reason that food seems cheap at the register, even when it was wildly expensive to produce (all those crop-dusting planes and tractor fleets and chemical inputs cost big bucks!). Subsidies are government funds distributed to farmers. And like the oil and gas industry, industrial agriculture could not turn a profit without the aid of corporate welfare. They are funded through tax dollars, and are meant to cushion farmers from the risks associated with weather, disease, and the commodities market. In 2019, we doled out $22 billion to farmers.
By and large, subsidies go to businesses that are already turning a huge profit, not struggling rural farmers. Between 1995 and 2019, 1 percent of recipients received 26 percent of the funds. In 2019, fifty people on the Forbes 400 list received farm subsidies. 62 percent of U.S. farms received nothing.
This drive to increase profit while ignoring the present and future impact on people and planet has been baked into our DNA since the heyday of the cruelest extractive industry: slavery. It is literally the foundation on which the United States’ wealth and power was built.
Writer Saeed Jones says that we are living in a clarifying time. No one should be feeling comfortable and complacent. Instead, this can be a moment of bold cultural reimagining — for ourselves and our systems. U.S. agriculture and food production might look and feel a world away from its antebellum origins, with its space-age technology, mammoth scale, and promises to feed the world. But at least philosophically, it's still the same rigged system — one that prioritizes profits over the health and wellbeing of a (predominantly BIPOC) labor force, consumers, and the planet. It’s about time we started paying attention to the consequences.
love,
Jackie
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Earth, in pictures
Food as a form of communal solidarity
There have been hopeful moments during the current (and international!) Black Lives Matter protests. Demonstrations over racial injustice and police violence have been seen throughout the United States, including in tiny towns of no more than a few thousand residents. A couple hundred protesters even showed in Vidor, Texas — a place once called Texas’ “most-hate filled town”. Public opinion has shifted in the past two weeks, with voters showing major support for the BLM movement. And it’s been heartening to see community members support each other through mutual aid and other forms of solidarity during the unrest.
Food remains a key part of that support. Black communities have always used food as protest. In these past weeks, grieving communities have been aided by hot meal giveaways and grocery donations (and Pub Subs), including in the Minneapolis neighborhood where Floyd was killed. The conversations on racial justice have even forced a reckoning within food media. These moments all feel like a long-delayed step forward. Let’s keep the momentum going.
-matt
Photos of food solidarity in the United States:
Fresh Links
🥚Artist Stephanie H. Shih Eats Between Protests | Grub Street
The Grub Street Diet feature usually features an interview with a successful person — for example director Lulu Wang or chef J. Kenji López-Alt — about what they’ve been eating lately. But in Stephanie Shih’s entry, she touches on all the ways food has been important to her as she goes out each night in New York City to protest against state violence at the hands of police.
She brings hard boiled eggs as energy boosts. When coming home each night, sore and emotionally exhausted, she shovels into her mouth Pocky and a cake made for her by a friend. During one fraught night, when riot cops kettled in a group of peaceful protesters and friends were arrested, Shih ran into a couple of acquaintances who invited her into their home for a cathartic dinner as she checked in on friends who had been lost in the chaos.
Shih uses food to create a moving recounting of how food and activism are linked.
🗒️Restaurants Must Use This Moment to Change, Too | Eater
I learned a helpful term from this essay by South Carolina-based chef Amethyst Ganaway. To describe how the restaurant industry should use this moment to make their own spaces more welcoming to Black people, she explains a sociological concept called the “third place”:
According to the Brookings Institution, “third places” are the spaces where people spend time between home (the “first place”) and work (the “second place”). They are places of communion, where we exchange ideas and have conversations with one another. It’s no surprise that bars, restaurants, and cafes are defined as third places, but they are often spaces where Black people aren’t welcomed or don’t feel safe. So with the call for change within our communities and government institutions, we also need change to come from within the restaurant industry. New third places should be created, tearing down old racist and classist ideologies and putting systems in place that represent true inclusivity and compassion.
Restaurants can and should be a welcoming third place. They should pay fair wages; hire locals; sourcing from BIPOC farmers and producers; and use their voice and resources to support their new community.
🍖Louisville BBQ owner David McAtee Killed in Police Shooting Fed a Food Desert | NY Times
Lolis Eric Elie wrote this tribute to the barbecue chef who fed a predominantly black neighborhood in Louisville. At his takeout restaurant YaYa’s BBQ, David McAtee provided dishes like country ham and collard greens and turkey dressing to everyone, even those low on cash who couldn’t pay the full price,as well as to the police.
On June 1, 53-year-old McAtee, the youngest of nine children, died under murky circumstances “amid a volley of bullets fired by two police officers and two National Guard members enforcing the city’s curfew on a group of people who were mingling and having a good time.” The Louisville police chief was fired after it was discovered that none of the cops involved in the shooting had their body cameras on. McAtee’s death comes a few weeks after the death of Breonna Taylor, a black EMT who was killed in her own home by white police officers in March during a no-knock raid.
McAtee managed to succeed and feed Louisville’s West End — an area that one local activist describd as “a food desert, or food apartheid.” As Elie describes Yaya’s BBQ:
The menu included hamburgers, hot sausage links, hot dogs and ribs, but Mr. McAtee told his nephew that the key to success was the barbecue sauce, which was thick but not too spicy because Mr. McAtee wanted it to appeal to everyone.
Chocolate-Pistachio-Oat Breakfast Cookies
These cookies are inspired by Heidi Swanson’s thinnest oatmeal cookies, which are an extremely classy treat. They remind me of something my fanciest aunt would eat at an afternoon tea in a garden. My version (which in truth has trayed quite far from the original, so be sure to try that recipe too) is like the girl next door version. Since they are so easy (one bowl!) and quick, I’ve taken to making them for breakfast.
Makes 10-12 cookies
Ingredients
1 egg
1/2 cup unpacked brown sugar
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tablespoon sourdough discard (or 1 tablespoon whole grain flour)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon crunchy salt
1 cup rolled oats
2 tablespoons chia seeds
1/3 cup chocolate chips
1/4 cup pistachios, roughly chopped (or nuts of choice)
optional: 1/4 cup dried cherries
step-by-step
Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a cookie sheet with parchment or a silicone baking mat.
In a bowl, whisk together egg and sugar until smooth. Add olive oil, sourdough discard, baking powder, and salt. Whisk to combine. Mix in oats, chia seeds, chocolate chips, and pistachios until combined. It will be a fairly wet, loose mixture.
Spoon heaping tablespoons of the mixture onto baking sheet, leaving plenty of room for the cookies to spread.
Bake for 10-14 minutes, until the edges start to brown. Let cool for 5 minutes and enjoy!
I scream, you scream, we all scream cause there’s an alligator in a T-shirt going into that ice cream shop.
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Sunshine + Microbes team
Jackie Vitale is the current Chef-in-Residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation. and co-founder of the Florida Ferment Fest. Her newsletter explores the intersection of food, culture, environment and community.
Matt Levin is a freelance reporter based in Colombia. He edits Sunshine + Microbes and contributes other scraps to each issue.