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Vegan Tamales Bring It All Together

To celebrate Cesar Chavez Day a couple years ago, I developed a vegan tamale workshop that explores social justice along the food chain. As participants cook together, we discuss the issues faced by various demographics and anchor them in the different components of the tamales, e.g. masa=farmers and relleno=farm workers.

Partnering with the nonprofit 18 Reasons (2017)

Conversations on food justice often focus on one group, like farmworkers and low-income consumers, so this approach allows to build on the pre-existing knowledge of participants and to expand their understanding of our food system. We stress the interconnectedness of the issues facing everyone along the food chain, and by extension, the common solutions and the need for a radical approach in working towards social justice.

Participants also get to cook and eat vegan tamales, which seems to be the main draw. Whether they care about animals or their health, veganizing tamales is something that people get excited about. And what we show them is that we are not creating a novel dish but rather a more traditional, pre-Columbian one. As we peel away past European influences, we see how they echo the very changes happening today through forced migration and the corporatization and Americanization of Mexican food systems.

This workshop has been a perfect Cesar Chavez Day celebration, as we wanted to include animals in our consideration of those suffering in our food system. Cesar Chavez was a Mexican-American farm worker and a labor and civil rights organizer. After his death in 1993, he became a major American icon. Cesar Chavez Day became a national holiday (San Francisco has a yearly Cesar Chavez Day parade) and a movie was even made about his life. Sadly and predictably, most accounts fail to mention that he was a vegan and a strong advocate for nonhuman animals. At a farm conference in 1996, United Farm Workers president Arturo Rodriguez said “Cesar took genuine pride in producing numerous converts to vegetarianism over the decades. You’re looking at one of them. He felt so strongly about it that sometimes I think he took as much personal satisfaction from converting people to vegetarianism as he did to trade unionism.”

Co-facilitator Chema Hernández Gil at our first workshop in 2016

It is not always clear from accounts whether Cesar Chavez was vegetarian or fully vegan. Chema Hernández Gil, who teaches the vegan tamale workshop with me, met Cesar Chavez’s niece last year; she confirmed that her uncle was vegan and told Chema that Cesar Chavez was so passionate about animal rights that when people would eat meat in his presence, he would make animal noises to unsettle them.

Learning about food justice as the tamales steam (2017)

The past two years, we partnered with non-vegans in organizing this workshop, and seeing their openness to a vegan message has been heartening. Next month we will present this workshop (slightly modified as it will be a demo) at UCLA. This time, a vegan professor invited us. I don’t know whether many of her colleagues are vegan, but the workshop has elicited wide support. I look forward to learning about the interests of students and faculty and connecting these with Seed the Commons’ perspectives on decolonization, radical food activism and animal liberation.

If you’re in SoCal, don’t miss it! Find out more.

Kneading tamale dough is serious business (2017)

Farmers’ Love and Soy Myths: More Nonsense to Retire in 2018

No, veganism doesn’t require destroying the Amazon, and no, farmers’ “love” for animals doesn’t justify killing them.

The Guardian published an article titled Cows are loving, intelligent and kind – but we should still eat them. It follows Rosamund Young, a farmer who wrote The Secret Lives of Cows. She bonds with her cows, observes the richness and complexity of their social and inner lives, and even provides this memorable quote “The animals themselves are by far the most qualified individuals to make decisions about their own welfare.” She also brings her cows to the slaughterhouse, despite this being the most extreme and violent opposition possible to the decisions that cows would make for their own welfare.

This trope of the farmer who loves their animals and has a zen-like maturity about death has been fed to us for a loooong time. Already in 2000, I remember meeting a guy who, upon learning I was vegan, told me he had been vegan for a while. He had started to eat meat again when he met a farmer who really, really loved his animals – but would kill and eat them. He figured that if the farmer, who really, really loved his chickens, still ate them, it was a green light for him to also eat animals. We’re supposed to see farmers as the example to follow, since they are actually in close communion with animals whereas us urban folks have led a disconnected life of Disney movies and supermarket food.

It would be just as ludicrous to look to men who beat and rape their wives as experts on the validity of women’s emancipation or on how to treat women. They live with them right? And they love them. So if they think patriarchy and male domination of women is ok, then it is. There is so much to deconstruct here in the concept of “love” when applied by a dominant class, but what I want to comment on is the soy – yet something else that is peddled out like truth again and again.

Rosamund Young justifies killing animals because “Britain’s climate and geography make meat production the only truly sustainable land use on its grasslands. Her slopes are too steep to grow crops and vegan diets dependent on imported soya beans from ex-rainforests don’t appear to be sustainable”.

First, vegan diets do not necessarily depend on soy. I spent most of my years as a vegan living in Switzerland and for the most part I ate very little soy. When I did, it was not imported from monocultures in South America; it was organic soy that was grown in Europe. When small farmers and other anti-vegans of that milieu speak of the evils of soy in the Amazon, they conveniently omit that most of that soy goes to feed cattle. Granted, they are not advocating for European cows to be raised on soy either, but that is the inevitable result of the consumption levels in the West today. Grass-fed “beef” is land-intensive. Its proponents sometimes give lip service to the idea of decreasing meat consumption but never center that message in their work.

512px-Ful_medames — Egyptian breakfast with the fava-based ful medames. Delicious, vegan, and lo and behold! Not a soybean in sight.

Going back to soy, people love to wag the finger at vegans but genetically engineered soy is ubiquitous in processed foods consumed by non-vegans. On the other hand, even in the United States, many of the soy products marketed specifically to vegans are non-GMO. And it’s not like pulses don’t grow in the UK. Before they were snubbed as low-class, beans and peas were staple British foods. They’re still grown – now as feed for cattle and for export. Britain is one of the largest exporters of fava beans and Egypt, of all places, is one of its main markets. It’d be wiser for the British to learn to make the delicious Egyptian ful medames and keep their fava beans at home.

You can run around in circles justifying cruelty, but the litmus test is this: would you be ok with dogs being raised and slaughtered like cows? If not, it befalls you to explain why you draw a line between cows and dogs.

There are plenty of veganic growers in the UK, in fact I’ve been told that one of the reasons veganics are more accepted and developed in the UK than in the US is precisely because of the relative lack of land. I hope to see the Guardian start covering their proposal for a compassionate and sustainable food system.

Visit Veganic World for interviews with veganic farmers.

Read my short Defense of the Humble Bean.

White People in the Caribbean?

When I moved to the US, I was surprised by the common representations of Latinos held by Americans. Latinos are often thought of as racially homogenous and Latino is likened to a racial category. Like the United States, Latin America is racially diverse, so this is as ridiculous as thinking that the citizens of the US are racially homogenous.

In Latin America, like in the United States, Indigenous lands and peoples were colonized by Europeans. Like in the United States, Africans were brought as slaves to many regions. Like in the United States, Latin America continued to attract immigrants from different parts of the world after the end of the colonial era. Consequently, there are people who are of Indigenous, Black and European descent, with various combinations of the above depending on the specific history of their region and family. There are also people of Middle Eastern, Asian and other origins. So yes, there are white Latinos. There are even Asian Latinos.

In Mexico, the majority of the population is Mestizo, which refers to someone who is a mix of European and Indigenous. Since many of the Latinos in California are Mexican or Central American, they often are the face of “Latino”, to the extent that white and Black Latinos are sometimes not recognized as such. But even in Mexico, there are white and Afro-Mexican populations.

This conflation of ethnic and national categories with a racial one largely stems, in my opinion, from US-centrism. Part of this is the sense that diversity is the purview of the US and that all people south of the border are the same. US-centrism also shapes how the categories of “white” and “people of color” are conceptualized and delineated. I plan to devote a post to discussing the US-centrism of American racial categories and when and how it leads to confusion, but in the meantime, I want to leave y’all with this great commentary:

First World Problem?

Neurotica Ayuda Mutua uses the First World Problem meme to advertise their group therapy sessions for those suffering from solitude, depression, anxiety, jealousy, and other “neuroses”.

Not sure it was the social commentary they were going for!

Pope in San Cristobal

Big day today! The pope is in San Cristobal and will be giving mass here, then in a sports stadium outside the city, and finally in Tuxtla. I’ve been having difficulty using Twitter so here are a few pictures.

For the past couple weeks, people from autonomous communities had been camping out in front of the cathedral to bring attention to their requests.

Police in the Zocalo on Saturday, preparing to kick out the remaining campers.

Indigenous women selling their products to the police.

Prohibited objects at the entrance of San Cristobal. El San Franciscan thinks some lucky selfie stick salesman has an in with the local government.

A warm welcome by Coca Cola FEMSA. If I weren’t here studying milk I would be studying soda. At the risk of being flippant – genocide is ongoing and it tastes like sugar.

Get your minion in time for mass!

I was told that wearing one of these T-shirts would get me into mass for free.