How Does it Feel?

For the past 2 weeks I’ve struggled to write a post about food insecurity.  Food insecurity has been the core focus of my studies the past 4 years and is a fundamental aspect of my research. Not being able to write fluently about my engagement with the topic was a bit disturbing. Yesterday, after another attempt that left me agitated, I came home and begrudgingly began to do some ironing (a chore I NEVER do in the US, but Ghanaians always look well pressed and as you know, “I’m trying, oh!”).

To make the ironing less tedious, I put on some Bob Dylan.  At the outset of my research I “joked” that I was going to make What Would Bob Dylan Do? the mantra of my fieldwork.  I made this declaration because it is inevitable to have intellectual and logistical crises during fieldwork that necessitate some sort of spiritual guidance.   Because of my everlasting commitment to Mr. Dylan, WWBDD? seemed appropriate.

As the wrinkles in my blouse refused to un-wrinkle and my fated destiny of being an anthropologist who studies food insecurity but can’t even write about food insecurity seemed sealed, Like a Rolling Stone came on.  

WWBDD?  He wouldn’t struggle to regurgitate and explain the Food and Agricultural Organization’s definition of food insecurity.  He’d write a brilliant song that captures the very essence of food insecurity, that of an experience of poverty. Take the first stanza:

            Once upon a time you dressed so fine

            You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

            People’d call say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”

            You thought they were all kiddin’ you

            You used to laugh about

            Everyone that was hanging out

            But now you don’t talk so loud

            Now you don’t seem so proud

            About having to be scrounging your next meal

How does it feel to be scrounging your next meal?  It feels shitty. Being food insecure is more than feeling hungry.  It is feeling shame.  It is feeling worried about where that next meal is going to come from.  It is feeling left out.  As John Madeley puts it in his book Hungry for Trade: How the Poor Pay for Free Trade, “Lack of food is the ultimate exclusion.  When people don't have food they are excluded from what the rest of society is doing regularly--eating.”  My intent in researching food insecurity is to look at this experiential aspect of it.  I’m not so much interested in the nutritional consequences of food insecurity as I am the emotional, the psychological.  This first stanza so defines that experiential aspect of poverty. 

Being food insecure is to feel part of nothing, to feel all alone.  Perhaps nowhere in the world is this more apparent than the US.  I give myself a lot of grief because I’m not studying food insecurity in my own cultural context.  National food insecurity rates in the US stand at around 16% While I will eventually become more involved in food insecurity advocacy and research in my own country, I know that part of the reason I’ve decided to do the research in Ghana is because the concept of food insecurity is not segregated from the concept of poverty. In Ghana it is easy to engage with food insecurity as a topic because it is acknowledged and addressed.    Food insecurity in Ghana has its own aspects of politics and power to contend with, but at least it is not an issue swept under the rug. Food insecurity is conflated with poverty.  And poverty is talked about A LOT here.  Poverty is at least part of the national discourse, so there is at least an extension to engage. 

In the US food insecurity has to battle its way into the national discourse in order to be acknowledged as a piece of American reality. The fact that Lily, a food insecure Muppet introduced on a Sesame Street special on hunger induced scorn and controversy shows how we refuse to acknowledge the problem of food insecurity. The fact that Congress recently cut funding to food stamps shows how we deal with food insecurity.  In the US we conflate food insecurity with laziness. And laziness is punishable.

If I did my dissertation research in my own country I imagine I would become so mired within the discourse of ignorance and intolerance that I would burn out.  If I burn out before I earn these damn letters I’ll be terribly upset.

I’ve always used Like a Rolling Stone as a way to think about my own progress through life.  My interpretation of this song when I first really listened to it in my early 20s was about rolling through the ups and downs of life.  I was completely oblivious to the greater political and economic context. I know, I know--what a D’oh moment. But at the forefront of 33, and at the forefront of my research on inequality, what seems so apparent to me now is how this song is about how American progress is made and lost--how the winners take wherever they have leverage to take and make more losers.

Take stanza 3:

            You used to ride a chrome horse with your diplomat

            Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat

            Ain’t it hard when you discover that

            He really wasn’t where it’s at

            After he took from you everything he could steal.

American policy does not tolerate losers. This is the attitude we show to poverty despite the fact that the transition from winner to loser can be perilous and beyond your ability to control. 

What makes my Like a Rolling Stone epiphany all the more timely, is the recent release of the first official music video.  The setting of the video is a TV, and we the viewer of the video are also the viewer of the TV.  We control the channels and can change the channels—from The Price is Right to sports shows to programs that pass as news to housewives enmeshed in desperateness.  All along the way, the people involved in these shows sing the lyrics.  We change the channels and we watch our everyday TV programs relay powerful lyrics about everyday life in America. 

This so perfectly captures this moment in time.  As the Trans Pacific Partnership bulldozes over us what is the hope that inequality will ever be properly addressed? As the tar sand oil fields of Canada continue to be “debated” what are our hopes of doing what we can to slow climate change?  As citizens of our nation can’t afford to feed themselves, what are the hopes for health care?? 

We hear the music.  We know the music is there.  We flip channels.