Food for the People

author: J.T. Roane

As the recent exhibition “Food for the People” at the Smithsonian Institute’s Anacostia Community Museum demonstrates, food touches every aspect of daily life. From its production, distribution, consumption, and disposal it has a wide geographic and social profile that entangles it within wider economic, social, and ecological relations.

Essex County faces a deadly contradiction. While the county and surrounding communities continue to produce large quantities of grain and other raw material for the national and global food systems—symbolized and materialized in the grain silo at the center of town--food security and basic access remains elusive for many residents. Indeed, nearly twenty percent of its youth face challenges with basic nutritional attainment and food emergencies remain disproportionately common especially for seniors. These conditions have been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic and its disruptions of labor and food supply distribution that have revealed further the limits of the current system to sustain us except in constant states of emergency. The lack of basic guarantees to access and the resulting nutritional deficiencies affect the long-term wellbeing of our communities as studies show the connections between nutritional violence, interpersonal and communal violence and lower educational outcomes. Additionally, the current organization of the food system through global markets and distribution favors large farmers as well as corporations and other economic interests that reside outside of the area, with deleterious effects on the local and wider ecological systems. The runoff from industrial farming including synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides affect the wider hydrological system including the creeks and the county’s central geological feature, the Rappahannock River with consequences for subaquatic and nonhuman land species’ survival.

We seek support for the creation of a county and regional project that will cultivate and enhance food sovereignty by supporting stronger connections between Indigenous efforts to reinstitute the regenerative agricultural practices of their ancestors through contemporary heritage gardens and ongoing Black efforts led by churches and in the more informal networks of family and community to sustain community through a commitment to feeding one another.

We do not romanticize this connection between Indigenous and Black communities given the complex social-historical dynamics affecting these two communities mediated often through the terms of the racialized terror at the heart of the local plantation-complex’s historical emergence and its recalibrations. Current Essex County is part of the unceded territory of the Rappahannock Nation and constituted part of their winter hunting grounds. In the 1640s, first illegally in relation to Crown Law and later with the force and authority of the King’s authority, white settlers began to encroach in larger numbers on the area, pushing north along the Chesapeake Bay and into these lands along navigable rivers and creeks driven by emerging markets in tobacco. As part of the violent reterritorialization of this land and the displacement of the Rappahannocks who were pressed to rural areas furthest from the rivers and the best land for growing, settlers imported indentured servants and after the 1650s a large population of enslaved Africans to transform what they considered a wilderness into a profitably cultivated landscape. During the onslaught of genocide especially during the Powhatan Wars and Bacon’s Rebellion as well as with the everyday reinforcement of plantation ecologies, Rappahannocks and other Indigenous nations continued to cultivate their own relationships with the area’s land, water, and foodscape, never succumbing to the violence that sought their destruction and removal. In this context, settlers forced enslaved Africans to transform Indigenous land into a new plantation ecology centering the commercial cultivation of tobacco and later wheat to feed the West Indies where many planters cultivated sugar for export but rarely reserved land for the cultivation of food. In Virginia, plantation owners tasked enslaved Africans with clearing the forest, filling swamps, building canals, and transforming Rappahannock lands into an extensive tobacco complex. Enslaved Africans faced severe nutritional violence under slavery. Plantation owners distributed inadequate food supplies to slaves for the amount of labor they were required to do under the threat of the lash or other potentially life-ending violence. As colonial court records for Essex County document a number of slaves were publicly whipped and mutilated for “hog stealing” registering their desperation for basic nutritional autonomy. Grand feasting associated most often with Christmas celebrations further reinforced the violent power of slave owners by punctuating quotidian starvation with glut.

Despite this nutritional violence, Africans and their descendants, cultivated relations of reciprocity and collectivity that exceeded the demands of subduing of the earth into land to be worked and discarded. At the edges of plantation ecologies, often in the trash lands, in the slave quarters, and swamps, creeks, and along the river, ancestral Black communities cultivated intimate knowledges of food resources, growing practices, and engagement with nonhuman land and water-based life outside commercialization and extraction. They used their plots and their intimate knowledge of the forest, swamps, and other areas out of the view of enslavers to foster resistance to the conditions of slavery, mobilizing a partially indigenized knowledge of the ecology to approach food sovereignty.

While Africans are not indigenous to the region in the sense of Rappahannock cultivation for time immemorial, we understand that through the histories of genocidal removal and forced cultivation our bodies, our health, and our intimacies with the land and water through eating and sharing are intricately connected.