How can ecofeminism help us envision the future of food?
“Livestock production is a major cause of desertification,” write Greta Gaard and Lori Gruen in a 1993 speech titled “Ecofeminism: Toward Global Justice and Planetary Health” from 1993, “as more and more forests are cleared to provide rangeland for cattle.” Earlier this year, that same Amazon deforestation contributed to catastrophic floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.
When I read the early writing of ecofeminists like Gaard, Vandana Shiva and Carol J. Adams, I find myself wanting to check the publication date: Wait, this wasn’t published yesterday? The concerns around how the capitalist use of the planet’s land, animals, and workers are extensions of feminism’s focus on the patriarchy are so consistent — the problems never seemingly change.
Ecofeminism is a framework that sees the subjugation of nature and animals by humans as akin to the dominance of marginalized genders by patriarchy — that, indeed, patriarchy is at the root of all destructive domination because of its belief in and enactment of a hierarchy in which cisgender men are at the top. The term itself was coined in 1974 by French writer Françoise d’Eaubonne, but it was borne out of both theory and activism taking place around the world: “As d’Eaubonne was publishing her books,” wrote Barbara T. Gates in 1996, “women in the United States were protesting the atrocities at Love Canal and analyzing the shock waves of the nuclear leak at Three Mile Island, and still others, in Northern India, were initiating the Chipko movement, hugging trees to save them from felling.”
By marrying a specifically international feminist agenda with ecological concerns, ecofeminists have created a framework that truly marries the political and the personal. This perspective is most clearly demonstrated in its critiques of the global food system, which don’t only exist on the page; they have been enacted in spaces such as the Bloodroot Collective vegetarian restaurant and feminist bookstore in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
When I went to visit in 2015, I was able to witness this inclusive approach in real time, and it made my ecofeminist readings come to life. Recipes drew from the cuisines of the restaurants’ cooks who shared their cultures, focused on local and seasonal ingredients and invited patrons to bus their own tables. It was a lesson in ecofeminism put into practice — interconnected, interdependent and non-hierarchical — with food as the vessel.
82
cents earned by women in agriculture, for each dollar earned by a male counterpart
There is a strong internationalist bent to ecofeminist thought, one that recognizes the significance of women’s labor in agriculture — an industry that employs more than one quarter of the world’s workforce and also accounts for one third of greenhouse gas emissions. For ecofeminists employing a non-hierarchical perspective, it’s important to look at the full global scale of agriculture rather than discrete nations; a hierarchical approach tends to prioritize Western perspectives and obscure or totally miss the important issues facing the majority of the world who live in poorer countries.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, women in agriculture earn 82 cents for each dollar earned by a male counterpart (which is, it should be noted, more than the average of 77 cents to the dollar), while also enduring a greater burden of unpaid care work, cooking and cleaning — the social reproductive labor that enables wage labor — and being “underrepresented in climate policy decision-making at all levels.” Men own more land, have more access to resources such as technology and tend to money-making crops and livestock, while also having to do less of that unpaid reproductive labor that’s understood as the realm of women. These conditions, wherein women working in agriculture have less power and money, make them more vulnerable to violence and hunger.
Many ecofeminists are also concerned with the labor of animals — seeing nonhuman animals as part of the same subjugation that is destructive to women and to the natural world. Vegetarian ecofeminism was perhaps most deeply articulated by Carol J. Adams’s book “The Sexual Politics of Meat,” which argues that animals become the “absent referent” when they’re made into food, similar to how women have historically not had much say in their own lives and wellbeing under patriarchal capitalism. It is not seen as a necessity to abstain from meat, but the choice is understood within ecofeminist analysis as a way of making the personal political — or bringing the political to the plate. It is also clear that livestock farming on a large scale causes much of the ecological destruction that is significant to ecofeminist analysis: to destroy nature and dominate animals and workers for the sake of meat and profit is to destroy humanity. The motive toward making money and meat at any cost is connected to that hierarchical, masculine domination that ecofeminism breaks apart.
An ecofeminist analysis brings a critical eye to the constant thrum in environmentalist circles today that so-called “fake meat” — also known as ultra-processed meat alternatives — is the most significant or perhaps only means to ending the U.S. consumers’ dependence on cheap, industrially produced meat. As writer and founder of the Plant-Based Foods Association Michele Simon has pointed out, while the plant-based food industry has been dominated by men in positions of power, the plant-based food movement has long been the domain of women and other marginalized people. This includes the chefs and proprietors of vegan restaurants, cookbook authors and activists who have worked to get the word out about shifting diets away from meat and innovated in terms of protein replacements that aren’t mass-produced, but made from recognizable ingredients that anyone can prepare in their kitchens. These accessible, less profitable, and non-corporate are based on small-scale food systems that have less of a deleterious effect on the planet and workers. These are recipes that don’t provide a corporation a profit, but that do ensure affordable, nutritious options for folks who want to de-center meat in their diets. Tempeh, the fermented protein from Indonesia commonly made with soybeans, can be made with any legume or grain that grows well in a given region — that’s not true of a Beyond sausage. (It’s also worth noting that as of 2019, only 3 percent of agri-food tech investment dollars went to female-founded companies.)
Shiva, in an introduction to the 2014 edition of “Ecofeminism,” her 1993 book with Maria Mies, predicted this moment of plant-based food tech through her critique of genetically modified organisms, which can be patented and thus owned, and are often grown in monocultures: “Turning the living wealth of the planet into the property of corporations through patents is a recipe for deepening poverty and ecological crisis,” she writes. “Biodiversity is our living commons—the basis of life. We are part of nature, not her masters and owners. Bestowing intellectual property rights on life forms, living resources and living processes is an ethical, ecological and economic perversion.”
As these products lose market share, we have an opportunity, as we search for new solutions, to apply the lessons of ecofeminism to how we envision the future of food. This future should be equitable, accessible and doable by anyone in their kitchen. This would be a future that enriches biodiversity rather than destroying it, that saves, shares and plants seeds rather than commodifies them. It’s a framework that also invites us not just to culturally value the work of the home cook and person who shares their know-how, but to consider the ways in which social reproductive work can be compensated in a real way. The conditions for an ecofeminist analysis continue to become more urgent as the decades wear on. Are we ready to really apply the lessons?
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