All is Fair in Food and War

On cooking, eating, and growing in times of crisis.

This week, the United States approached a sobering statistic—half a million deaths due to COVID-19.

This is a jarring sentence, made only worse by the underlying notion that it all could have been avoided. It is easy to point fingers at subpar or absent leadership, or at our peers who have chosen to throw care and caution to the wind. But regardless of blame, as we draw nearer to the universally anticipated one-year mark, it becomes hard not to reflect back on what has happened, and what the COVID-19 pandemic has done to our lives.

In typical fashion, the New York Times printed this staggering statistic on Sunday in yet another striking front page design. The graphic shows the speed at which the pandemic has accelerated through the winter, with deaths rising by increments of 50,000 in increasingly smaller time windows. A subtitle to the side of the page equates the total count to more than three wars in less than one year.

In many ways, this is a war. It is not a traditional war, marked by gruesome battles or missile strikes. There was no formal declaration or choosing of sides. For the most part, the enemy has been invisible.

But it is a war, nonetheless.

For the last year, the frontlines of our fight have been filled with armies of grocery clerks, farm workers, food distributors, and delivery drivers. The casualties have been too many to count, with unemployment and food insecurity skyrocketing as people are unable to access support from a floundering government. Restaurants have converted into food banks and refugee centers with lines that span many city blocks, while industrial meat plants have surfaced as one of the most dangerously overlooked battlegrounds.

Just last month, a violent insurrection was staged at our nation’s capital. In November of 2020, businesses in major cities across the country boarded their windows in anticipation of violence in the streets. This past summer was marked by a national tide of protest against police brutality and deep social inequalities, as armed militias met with peaceful demonstrations for racial justice. We have watched in collective terror as skies turned red and power grids failed, revealing our mortal weakness against the forces of nature which we have waged war on for decades.

There have been comparisons made to the American Civil War and even to another World War as similar uprisings and natural disasters have cropped up in nations across the globe. All the while, the COVID pandemic has raged on, bringing with it an underlying current of fear and sickness.

Throughout all of this, food has remained a constant. Our need to eat has not diminished, nor has our desire to share meals with one another. In the same way that war touches all corners of our lives, so does our food. And as these two forces interact, our society and its patterns begin to change.

To consider this relationship between food and war is to consider some of the most fundamental components of human nature. It is to call into question our deepest values and most foundational needs.

What do we eat while coping with disaster? How do we feed ourselves in times of crisis?

In the earliest days of the COVID pandemic, the most universal fear was simply about how long supplies would last. Concerns were raised about ruptures in our food distribution chains as grocery store shelves went empty and panic set in. Conversations revolved around stockpiling and rationing, though still no outright war had been proclaimed.

Through later months of social isolation and uncertainty, food has also served as a source of comfort. Cooking became popular again, as one of very few ways to pass the time indoors and nourish bodies and souls. Home gardens were a refuge from early spring to late fall, providing a much-needed form of emotional support and self-sufficiency.

Now, the relationship has become slightly more unclear. We are all eager for something new, whether it be spring weather, a dinner party with friends, or herd immunity. We are tired of cooking for ourselves, desperate for a meal from our favorite restaurants that are still shuttered for the winter. We are ready for it to all be over—this much is certain.

With peacetime on the still-distant horizon, it is natural to yearn for a return to “normal,” but what of “normal” still remains? And how much of it should we really be yearning for?

In an annotated copy of How to Cook a Wolf, MFK Fisher explains this complex and intertwined relationship in the eloquent and interrogative style for which she is known. She notes the beastly nature of war, but also our ability to learn from it, and how to better exist when it eventually ends:

It is hard to know whether war or peace makes the greater changes in our vocabularies, both of the tongue and of the spirit…Of course, it is difficult, in spite of the obvious changes in our physical problems since How to Cook a Wolf was first published in 1942, to say truthfully and exactly when we are at war…One less chilling aspect of the case for War II is that while it was still a shooting affair it taught us survivors a great deal about daily living that is valuable to us now that it is, ethically at least, a question of cold weapons and hot words. There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution… and that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.

At the root of this “period piece” is the drastic way in which wars—and particularly global wars—impact our daily lives, and our gastronomical habits. This is because, like other sources of conflict such as land or faith, food holds power. It holds the key to the heart, body, and soul of both an individual and a nation. It comes down to something as simple as access to nourishment, while also reaching farther into the more abstract evolution of cuisines in times of turmoil.

With this excerpt—as with all of her work, really—Fisher was well ahead of her time. World War II is widely referenced as a major turning point in our United States food system, and for good reason. The modern popularity of chemical fertilizers and industrial agriculture was born in large part from the remnants of large-scale weapon production and wartime crop planting. The deployment of men overseas fundamentally altered our labor force, and emphasis shifted towards consumerism and food marketing.

But as the freshness of war faded from global memory, so too did the freshness of produce and culinary creativity. Instead, Americans turned towards convenience and processed or manufactured foods; victory gardens became factory farms; surplus became waste.

I can only hope that in this current period of rebirth and recovery, we do things differently. I hope that we learn from our mistakes.

There is a pervasive American mentality that we are somehow superior—that we are “better” than countries living under oppressive governments, or nations caught in an endless cycle of civil wars. We are “better” than military coups, food shortages, or corrupt politicians who seek to overthrow systems of democracy. We are “better” than countries where animals are butchered fresh at the market, or where people eat with their hands.

But our food systems have been built on the backs of mistreated immigrant workers and “unskilled” kitchen laborers. We have grown disconnected from the things we consume and ingest, accustomed to meat that is wrapped in plastic and flavorless tomatoes that are sold in the dead of winter. Something as foundational as tipping in the US is rooted in a history of slavery, while land access is still greatly determined by our earlier days of colonization and genocide.

According to the USDA, food waste in the United States still hovers at around 30-40% of the food supply. In contrast, nearly 35 million Americans struggle with hunger, a statistic which has only increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many cases, our problem is not the absence of food entirely, but rather the inability to get food to the people who need it. And in these times of crisis, we have turned to mutual aid networks, not to our government.  

The fact is that aside from our supremely large egos, we as Americans are most definitely not “better” than just about anyone or anywhere else. Alongside the rest of the world, we are still fighting (and losing) against an invisible enemy. On our own soil, we are living through a war being waged on levels so deep they are often going unseen.

Finally, some of these cracks have started to show. We are being faced with the tangible reality of food shortages, and the increasing number of community fridges. We are able to visualize worker strikes and uprisings that are rippling across the frontlines, and the disparities in our traditional models of service and hospitality. We can see that mistakes have been made, and that we must try to emerge on the other side at least a little bit better.

For now, optimism can be found in things like community supported agriculture, worker-centric restaurants, and other more collaborative business models. It manifests in increasingly local and resilient food supply chains rooted in seasonal growing and small-scale distribution. Hope lies within grassroots organizations seeking to provide meals for their communities, or for their comrades on the frontlines. Perhaps optimism will even prevail through increased government investment in education, social welfare, and sustainable production methods. Perhaps.

For now, we are also still in the throes of battle, one that is being fought by “essential” workers and our allies who are still trapped at home. We are doing what we can to stay afloat, and to survive a long, hard, lonely winter. We are leaning on comforting dinners and simple pleasures, like the fact that the season of rhubarb and asparagus is just around the corner.

This week, the United States approached a sobering statistic—half a million deaths due to COVID-19. Next week, perhaps things will be a little less bleak.

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