Diary 10

Diet related disease is not based on poor individual choices, but on the food apartheid resulting from zoning and urban planning methods, mortgage-lending practices, wage discrepancies, and other social inequities that all work to confine communities of color to environments lacking basic amenities.
Because Black people have been stripped of land to own and operate, and in turn blocked from the means of their own food production, they are most reliant on the violence of agribusiness despite being disproportionately harmed by it.
Solutions will not be found through corporate innovation, but through dismantling the patriarchal and racist mechanisms that define our current food system, ultimately returning land, seeds, knowledge, access, and power to the Black and brown people essential to- and historically sacrificed in- making it.

Lexie Smith, “Why and How the American Food System Represents and Upholds Structural Racism,” Bread on Earth, 06/20/2021.

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02.13.21

We set out to get Dan a new house plant on one of the coldest forecasted days of my visit. Snow was accumulating in walls bordering the sidewalk where people had shoveled the day before, and where there was no visible path we staggered through, up to our shins, the powder sloughing flakes into our vision with each gust of sharp wind. I stepped into the footprints Dan left in front of me, the gauzy blizzard impeding our ability to walk alongside one another or to maintain conversation. Occasionally we would check in with a nod. We reached Home Depot and entered a room of various potted flora, loosening our outerwear while condensation built on the inside of our masks, and searched the aisles for a plant that would bring life to his midwinter apartment. The money tree caught his eye with its braided trunk and lively leaves. We didn’t ask any questions about its origin before paying and putting it in a garbage bag, reassuming our walk home. By the time we returned the plant had unfortunately, wilted, and while Dan made some efforts to revive it through light and temperature adjustments, the stems only sagged further. A quick google search confirmed that it had either been shocked or killed by the extreme cold, was native to tropical climates in Central/South America and parts of Asia. It kept its long face for the remainder of my stay despite Dan and I’s optimism each morning.

02.12.21

I’m struggling to stay afloat on an empty stomach. When I close my eyes, the images that flicker before me are unrestrained and abstract; landscapes and shapes strobed in a single train of thought. It’s hard to focus or follow anywhere my brain is going and I can’t shut it off even though I’m fatigued.

02.08.21

I received a blouse from a stranger’s closet in Spain today that smells musky, like woodfire and tobacco, maybe a hint of sweat. I hung it in my closet without washing it because I decided I liked the scent. Though while I write about it now I’m prodded to think about the seller’s life, remembering the language in Glenn Adamson’s book Fewer Better Things, “empathy in materials, empathy in objects, material intelligence,” his assertion that every object retains evidence of how it was made, or hints of previous ownership, and says that it’s our responsibility to seek out that information. He claims that our material items are conduits to humanity; and his argument, although made before the pandemic, seems positioned for this moment. The blouse dangling in my closet connects me to a human that I will probably never meet, carrying evidence of them in its scent, and while I’ve been so estranged from interactions with people outside of my immediate bubble I’m grateful for small opportunities to feel close to them.

02.03.21

Silence humming in my ears. Occasionally a mouse will scutter in the walls or the floorboards upstairs will creak as my neighbors shuffle, sweating last night’s liquor. Both sounds insist on other life. Both sounds give me company.

01.28.21

I wandered a horse trail in the middle of a valley that I’d been to in high school, except then we’d had beer and tobacco and made a day out of swimming and sunbathing and now I was here alone, sober, unprepared to spend more than an hour in the direct sun. Anyways our old perch was densely overgrown. The bank that I recalled as a long stretch of sand was now slim and composed of soft dirt. I waited for it to become familiar again and waded through the creek, the water purling around my ankles. Couldn’t stand for very long without losing feeling in my feet.