Begin in the self and build out: love in the heart, love in the home, love in the block, love in the community.
I've written a lot about Orphaning, Fabricating Legitimacy
What does it look like to come in from an "orphaning"?
--refugees
--homeless
--people struggling with poverty
--people struggling with health problems, including mental anguish
--people experiencing destabilizing health effects (hello Covid!): nutrition, housing, basic needs
--people who have been systematically exploited and excluded from supports intended for people like them--survivors of human trafflicking (including adoptions)
Residential schools with graveyards--as an educator, it galls me to think of running an organization that has so many deaths of children that it has to set aside a plot of land to bury them.
Internment and concentration camps, prisons, detention centers.
Naive pollyanna Karen suggests perhaps this coming in can look like relational food.
I draw a binary between relational food and branded food.
Relational food is food that I know and acknowledge and trust all of the relations who produced it--I trust who managed the soil, who picked it in the field (and who "supervised" that person was just and fair, paid a above-table living wage), who washed it, prepared it, served it, cleaned up after it, composted it.
Branded food--all those relational trust points are obscured by a STORY about the food. Photos of a heritage farm. Price points that indicate luxury, which surely must imply that if I pay this much for this steak or whatnot then everyone down the line has also been paid well. That this isn't in fact raccoon meat ground in with what it is supposed to be because some USDA inspector never has the resources to actually inspect the meatpacking company.
Either I have relationships with food producers
or
I have brand stories which are placeholders for relationships. Sometimes deceptive by intention.
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