What is “food praxis”?
Praxis - comes from both Greek and Latin as doing, acting, action, practice. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as action or practice, “the practice or exercise of a technical subject or art, as distinct from the theory of it, or alternatively as habitual action, accepted practice, or custom.” Interpreted in radical political traditions as critical practice… doing things, but thinking critically about what is done, before and after.
Term used first, by all we can find, by feminist Penny Van Esterik: Food touches everything and is the foundation of every economy. It is a central pawn in political strategies of states and households. Eating is an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships. Food sharing creates solidarity; food scarcity damages the human community and the human spirit… … FULL
Insurgent American’s basic strategic premise is that our current system is unsustainable and will collapse — not be overthrown, collapse; that the consciousness that corresponds to whatever works where this system frays will be determined by practices that survive or are used to survive this system’s collapse. The vanguard of post-industrial-capitalist-patriarchy will not be an ideological vanguard. It will consist of the communities composing expanding islets of intentional independence from the existing system. The opposite of independence is dependence.
No issue related to dependence and independence crosses more social and cultural borders than food.
Food dependency is the basis of many kinds of political power.
It is easier to get a few people to change the way they acquire and consume food than it is to ask them to oppose the whole system upon which they now abjectly depend. Growing food, sharing and trading home-grown food, and consuming home-grown food changes how people know their world in important and potentially revolutionary ways. Learning about food, in every conceivable way, from how it is metabolized in the body, to the ecosystem that is soil, to the world’s current systems of food production, is always and in every case learning about much more than food.
That is why Insurgent American takes such a keen interest in organics, permaculture, suburban food gardening, intentional communities, and household debt (which threatens people with the loss of the little bit of land they live on, even in the US suburbs). That is also why IA believes that everyone needs to understand in detail what Penny Van Esterik outlines:
Food touches everything and is the foundation of every economy. It is a central pawn in political strategies of states and households. Eating is an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships. Food sharing creates solidarity; food scarcity damages the human community and the human spirit… …