Creating community and consciousness around food
Are you ready to “renew?”
Not your mortgage or your passport, both of which are hot topics these days. We’re talking about renewing our perspectives. That’s the theme for this year’s TEDxToronto, which is banking on the notion that, after a couple of years of retreat, people are looking to get back out there and get inspired.
Ten speakers are tasked with helping us renew our outlook, including on opening night Tuesday, Indigenous food activist Chandra Maracle, who advocates making food a focal point in our conversation about how we care.
Aside from her work as a PhD student at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, Maracle is the “nutrition motivator” at the Six Nations Skaronhyase’kó:wa, also known as the Everlasting Tree School. Situated near a former residential school that was known as the “mush hole” for its atrocious food, the Everlasting Tree addresses this legacy by making food — cooking, eating, growing, gathering, and its connection to language and culture — a core component of the curriculum.
We had a chance to speak with Maracle so readers could get some insight into what’s on the TEDx program this year and learn about her vision for renewing how we care for community.
Can you give our readers an example of how we need to rethink access to food for a larger community?
When I helped create the food program at the school — which is still, to my knowledge, one of the only schools in Canada that has a builtin food provision program — part of my rationale for it was that if we all came together and everyone did it as part of the curriculum, that takes the onus off individual parents and begins to create a community and a consciousness around food.
We often hear that school lunch or breakfast programs address systemic inequality. You’re arguing that it goes beyond that, right?
Yes. It’s not always the socioeconomic stuff. People are busy, you know, so you can take kids that go to well-to-do private schools and they’re not all eating breakfast in the morning either. Food sometimes goes by the wayside for a lot of folks. So I don’t like to even call it a “program,” because it’s really just meant to be a whole way of being around food.
Is this a way of working toward food sovereignty?
I find myself gravitating away from narratives that revolve around terms like “food sovereignty” and the “global food system.” Because, while you wait around forever for the global food system, or distribution or accessibility and all those things to change, you still have to eat. You still have to feed your kids today and learn how to be a savvy eater and a savvy shopper in this crazy climate and environment where we’re bombarded with all kinds of images and all kinds of strange foods and all kinds of packaged foods.
How do you teach people to become savvy shoppers and eaters?
I realized quite a long time ago that me doing healthy food workshops for people is not enough. I can talk till I’m blue in the face, but it wasn’t moving the needle that much. So, that’s what really led me to the idea of actually feeding people versus just looking at and thinking and talking about food.
So what does inspire people to change the way they eat?
Sometimes it really entails exploring someone’s psychology in ways that I’m not qualified to do. Sometimes it has more to do with the quote-unquote “weight” that you’re carrying. It could be your childhood trauma, or this traumatic event or whatever it is that you’re carrying: the ongoing legacy of residential schools, for example. Any number of things could be manifesting themselves in your physical body.
You also have a background in the psychology of eating, right?
Yes, but also, at the same time I was learning about that, I was learning about Haudenosaunee history and culture and, for me, that always included food, because the Haudenosaunee were the foodists of the northeast. The Haudenosaunee had this wonderful society that centred around corn. So it was agriculture coupled with the gathering of so-called wild foods and hunting and fishing. All these things together made this wonderfully rich and complete food system built around the three sisters: corn, beans and squash.
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I can talk till I’m blue in the face, but it wasn’t moving the needle that much. So, that’s what really led me to the idea of actually feeding people.
How can learning about this history inform caring for community?
CHANDRA MARACLE FOOD ACTIVIST
It’s about reminding us that society can be structured in ways where no one is hungry, no one is homeless, women are in charge of food production and women are in charge of their bodies.
But for us to imagine a society today where those four simple things are happening is pretty far out there. Name me a society where no one’s hungry, no one is homeless, women are in charge of food production and women are in charge of their bodies. This is what was happening here before colonization. This is the society that had been created and that’s not the society we have now.
So looking at ways that we can do that again is where we should be spending our time. And one of the ways we can do that is actually feeding people, not just talking about food. Not just talking about food sovereignty but doing it.