To Be Agronomic…
This is actually the only real physical book I took back with me from the classes I took at University of Ghana and Ashesi University in the Spring semester of 2007. This book is Managing Agrodiversity the Traditional Way edited by Edwin A. Gyasi – the professor of the course I took with him, Sustainable Agriculture in the Developing World – and Gordana Kranjac-Berisavljevic, Essie T. Blay, and William Oduro. This course, a graduate-level class in the Geography department at Legon, was only attended by three students that whole semester – two of us from America (including a white woman from Northern California) and a young Ghanaian woman. It’s troubling, at best, that matters of agronomy, food security, and sustainable land management are not attended to by more students, particularly right in Afrika. But I consider it to have been a great honor to have studied the contemporary thought around sustainable development with Prof. Gyasi.
That is the man himself, during our field trip to Aburi Hills, where we visited Ebua Danso’s farm, the one I mention three posts down, where organic agroforestry impressed the hell out of me and blew my mind. And Ebua Danso wasn’t a master, world-renowned organic Afrikan farmer because of something he learned in a Western-oriented agronomy program somewhere. He was simply reproducing the beautiful and effective methods of traditional, local farmers in Ghana and elsewhere in West Afrika. I come back to all this subject matter and these past events in my life as I reflect on being a raw vegan/ fruitarian, an Afrikan, and a revolutionary concerned with food security, sustainable and plentiful food production and transport, and justice. Raw Vegans/ fruitarians like me eat a lot of tropical fruits and nuts. Bananas produced for the Bonita, Dole, and other big US corporations that maintain banana republics in Latin America – I eat them. I live in North Jersey, just outside NYC where I work and conduct all my business. And I enter the market and select all sorts of tropical fruits that were grown many thousands away, in the very tropics I am native to (and would probably rather be most of the time). If the Afrikan situation was correct, I would be there today with no looking back, doing work, being free, eating right off the land and most likely growing most of my own food. I know activists here in NYC that want to do something like establish organic herbal gardens in Cameroon which will grow medicinal herbs to be exported to the US. Yet the cost of such transport, and the relationship of cash-cropism – an economic practice I approach with some ire – might not be overturned in such an arrangement.
It is likely very impractical to imagine, at this point, a world which, in concern for the pollution and waste of intercontinental food trading – and realizing the injustice of cash-cropism imposed on the (tropical) third world by the (temperate) first world – moves to locovorism, where everyone is eating locally-grown whole foods. In New York state or New Jersey, what do we grow that I dig, apples? A lot of salad crops, yes? Many sorts of berries? Well, that is excellent and I eat the local varieties of those, and have visited apple farms in South Jersey, where I was impressed and felt my innate desire to be a rural, food-growing, simple-ass man, reinforced. But me, I eat a whole lot of tropical fruits. I eat citrus grown in Florida, avocados grown in California (as well as a lot of salad greens), pecans grown in Texas, as for this country. I eat avocados from Mexico, too, Ecuadorian bananas, Brazilian cashews, Chilean blueberries, Peruvian cacao beans, Canadian hemp-seed, Spanish unpasteurized almonds, even New Zealand Kiwis. And that’s certainly not all I eat. I feel concerned about being a non-locovore, a man eating from the global kitchen assembly line established long ago by European mercantilism and colonialism, the antecedents of contemporary cash-cropism. I don’t even eat fair-trade bananas (not even organic).
Does one like me just keep going this way? Agronomy is one of my many, many interests. I’m an urban-ass person, something I can’t apologize for because I was born into that, though I have friends who have moved on from that, and at least tried to dedicate more of their lives to agronomy and food security issues. In the meantime, I suppose we must be advocates for, aside from revolution, or in until its occurrence, clean-green-energy means of international shipping and sustainable locovorism to the extent that it is possible and practical. Surely those in cities and towns with land should say fuck a lawn, and grow food on their free land. Lawns are the invention of retards. Food security is undermined by lawns. Whenever I get a true place of my own, best believe I’ll be growing food on it like a hardcore farmer. But it could be the case, some day down the line, and within the context of repatriating, that I just move to the tropics, to Afrika, where everything grows, and grow durians, pineapples, avocados, mangos, oranges, cashews, cacao, and all that good shit, alongside other Afrikans, a beautiful sista, some little ones, sweating under the palms and sipping fresh juices by the sea (or in the valleys). Ah, to aspire to the good life…
On Medjool Dates
So today was interesting. Before attending a critical planning meeting with some elders, I scoped out a capoeira class which met in bourgeois-ass Soho. But they asses didn’t start on time, so I left. I hate lateness, have no tolerance for CP-time and what not. Matter of fact for the record I’ma say it twice: motherfuck CP-time!!! And of all things to start late, a martial arts class? My kung fu never ever starts late. And I’ve only been late once – last week in fact. Time is of the essence! You see that quote over to the right now – take heed. Discipline is sweet like desert blues; indiscipline is bitter like the evening news.
So with extra time to kill I rode my bike up them snow-plowed Manhattan streets and popped into Westerly Natural Market (on 54th and 8th), all trendy and organic and shit. But I doubt I’ll ever go there again – $5.39 for 4.4 ounces of organic blueberries? The fuck are they smoking? They got them trendy white liberal prices – yes. Nonetheless I picked up some organic medjool dates, which I never had until today. Ten bucks for 13 ounces of them – sheeit! I said fuck it, lemme try this.
I almost wanna say it’s like candy (in good ways).
I munched on the dates all day and finished them as my dinner. They really something, so sumptuous, of a most delicate texture, uniquely and profoundly stimulating to an Afrikan palate. In other words, they the shit. I probably won’t go after them too often. They was grown in California, why they cost so damn much? Their expensive price is strongly related to where I bought them, methinks.
Dates are very serious foods. Raw vegans/ fruitarians can have maad fun. It’s a shame I wasn’t introduced to that shit much earlier in life; people been growing dates for thousands of years (in Afrika!). The conventional household is full of such a limited selection of foods. But the curious and adventurous fruitarian almost never runs out of species to taste and flavors to enjoy.
We fruitarians are living in a world of plenty, in other words the real world. Everyone else is stuck in plastic meat trays and cardboard cereal boxes.
New Blog
I’ve started my third blog, Hip Hop Dharma, which branches off the last entry in Project New Palmares to allow me to do really free-associative thinking on hip hop, the arts, my arts, the real world/ samsara/ the burning house, and other juju/ kensho shit. Take a look. This definitely relates to Afrikan revolution, and to being human.
Hood Diet
This new joint by Loer Velocity and DonnanLinkz out of Brooklyn presents a simple reality of the limited access to healthy foods in the American ghetto where Afrikans dwell. This simple reality is to me one of the saddest characteristics of all of our downpression in these United Snakes and all over the planet. Let’s just take the health-foods giant, Whole Foods, which is not to be found in the hood. It is to be found in Columbus Circle, Union Square, and Chelsea in NYC; in North Jersey you’ll find them in wealthy white suburbs like Montclair, West Orange, and Millburn. You don’t find them in Crown Heights, Bed Stuy, East New York, Brownsville, or elsewhere in Central Brooklyn, or anywhere in the Bronx or Harlem; you don’t see them in the whole city of Newark, NJ, nor in Irvington, East Orange, Hillside or even Jersey City. Just by the example of Whole Foods one can see that healthy eating in America is associated with communities of highly-educated, wealthy white folks. As the mc’s state in this song “Hood Diet,” we don’t even hardly get the farmer’s markets.
I sometimes volunteer at an Afrikan People’s Farmer’s Market (it’s at 456 Nostrand Ave in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn – please visit on Saturdays!). There is not enough of this sort of food offered in locations conveniently accessible to Afrikans in this area, though. I’ve spoken about food security to revolutionary comrades and to Afrikans who farm, and we agree that we are falling far, far behind in terms of access to healthy whole foods, and in terms of food security itself. Shut down the grocery store/ bodega industries in the ghettos of America, and Afrikans might starve en masse, so far removed we have become from the notion of growing/ cultivating food. And Afrika and the Caribbean grow maad cash crops for export to the West in exchange for crappy American white rice and 4th-rate shitmeat. This is part of what is killing us, raising our blood pressure, reducing our life-spans to half what they are in Japan, Sweden or Hawaii, giving us maad diabetes and Cancer. The Hood Diet – common to Afrikans whether in urban America or urban and increasingly rural Afrika – is killing Afrikans! And it is deliberate! It is a function of our colonial existence!
We better start growing more real and quality food. We better open some of our own chains of whole foods-based groceries in our own communities. We better expand and serve our own farmer’s markets where we live. All this if we are really serious about living, about surviving, about thriving.
Junk food, MSG-laden cheap Chinese food, fast food, shitmeat, food colorings, etc. – all these are not foods. These are, as Micheal Pollan said last week on Democracy Now!, “food-like substances.”
FUCK THE HOOD DIET!
DEATH TO THE HOOD DIET!
