Food Sovereignty Part I: Urban and Rural Perspectives
working in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley provide her with many opportunities to expand her
culinary horizons and continue to learn and grow through hunting, fishing, foraging, and farming.
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Ever since I was a kid, I was fascinated to learn that you could pick a plant, catch a fish or shoot a deer, and it could be your food. Your food. Your food. Those first feelings of awe and wonder would inspire a lifelong journey to the source of our sustenance and how it makes us a part of nature — even though we try to set ourselves apart from it.
I didn’t know it at the time, but what captivated me was a basic understanding of food sovereignty. Part of the definition of food sovereignty is the right of people to produce their own food and control their own food systems. It’s complicated — deeply tied to geographical location, background, and sociopolitical factors. Marginalized groups, indigenous people, and people contending with poverty are among those for whom food sovereignty is disrupted.
For early humans, food sovereignty was a necessity. We had no choice but to go out and procure food, and eventually produce it. There were no agents that deliberately interfered with it; it was us and nature. We ate to live, and food became essential to our culture. And for those who seek wild foods — whether it’s through hunting, fishing, foraging, or related activities — we can maintain some food sovereignty through these pursuits.
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I live in “the country,” and this area’s economy is largely agricultural. Many people, myself included, actively work within the local food system, making a living from the land in varying degrees of involvement. Out here in the mountains, woods, fields, and rivers, nearly everyone hunts whitetail deer, chases panfish, or picks mushrooms. Food acquisition is our work and play.
But what about people living in cities? Urban and rural perspectives of food can be quite different, as urban and rural food systems tend to be. There are shared challenges and problems unique to each population.
Wild food is the perfect place to start reclaiming food sovereignty. Responsibly and ethically harvested — with knowledge and care — wild food is safe and sustainable. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a surge of interest in wild food, with social media influencers encouraging people to eat outside the box.
“As the Harvesting Nature community develops the narrative we’ve grown, we’ve started to focus on wild food’s inclusion into a larger societal trend,” says Justin Townsend, founder of Harvesting Nature. People have begun to realize that “the outdoors” is much more approachable than they think — and that it has some delicious offerings that are available to anyone who’s willing to try them, regardless of where they live.
“A large part of our audience comes from urban environments. On the rural side, a large part of the hunting community will come with the rural perspective, when the urban communities themselves are like, “Well what do we do?” Justin said.
What do you do? In the country, you don’t think twice about the sounds of gunshots in November, or the camo materializing in stores alongside sausage ingredients and meat processing equipment in the fall. It’s what we do here – and it’s because we’re here, where we live.
Unfortunately, location can be yet another barrier to entry for aspiring wild food scholars. And since the metropolitan food system is based largely on convenience and instant gratification, wild food’s seasonality and slower pace take some getting used to. In cities, there are stores, supermarkets, eateries, and a foodservice network that manifests endless choices with minimal effort on the eater’s part. Justin urges us to overcome the persistent notion that food is something that we offhandedly “get.”
“You have to be able to get over that over-reliance on this mental concept — if you’re like, ‘Man, I’m hungry! What am I going to do?’ — go to the store, pop open the Uber Eats app, get something out of my refrigerator that I purchased. But in reality, the way human culture was before we had these industrialized systems is that you were like “I’m hungry, what am I going to do? I’m going to go find some food. Whatever is around you.”
I know I can go outside any time of the year and eat something from my yard. But what’s around you in the urban foodscape? Amidst so many familiar options, opportunities for hands-on, wild food are not always so apparent. But for urban populations, wild food needn’t be out of reach. You may be able to enjoy wild ingredients on a restaurant menu, or find them at a farmer’s market. Some farmers deliver meat and produce shares. Green spaces can be foragable. Urban gardening and farming programs exist – and there are even urban archery seasons to manage overpopulated deer. Coastal cities have an abundance of fresh, wild-caught seafood. There can be excellent fishing or shellfish harvesting in local waters.
Access, opportunity, and availability shape our food systems perspectives differences. Another element is our perception of our place in the food system itself. I spoke with Sam Bliss, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, who focuses on home and wild food procurement and non-market food systems in New England.
“The main thing between urban and rural people is the connection with food production,” Sam observed. A desire to reconnect, he says, motivates people to get involved.
“There’s an aspect of “right relationship”…Where all the beings on earth pretty much hunt, fish, and forage that which they eat, there’s this recently-evolved creature called the modern human who doesn’t. The food just kind of ‘arrives.’ And that’s historically novel, and so there’s a sense that there might be something wrong with getting all your food that way, and that it’s important to maintain these relationships with other beings — the beings that become our food.”
This was something that I came to understand when I transplanted to rural Virginia in 2019, after spending most of my life in urban New Jersey. Here, the production and consumption of animal foods are visibly happening everywhere, all the time. It’s not romanticized or sugarcoated; it’s business, it’s a very real way that many people make a living — including myself.
Being in a city, you don’t get to see behind the scenes so much — you are much more on the receiving end of the food system, rather than at the helm. Due to the relationship between farmers and hunters, the acquisition and sharing of farm-raised or wild protein is built into rural life, and nobody has any misgivings about killing animals for food.
But as Sam points out, sentiments differ in the city.
“When you go to rural communities and people are more in touch with the eating of animals, I find that people are more willing to eat meat. And it might be because they see where it comes from.” he says. And that’s often not a factory farm, or a big chain store — it might be from a friend or neighbor or their own backyard.
Knowledge plays a role, too. While many urban people understand the problems of industrialized animal food mass production, they might not see the whole picture. People are vegetarian and vegan in cities because they perceive it as the ethical and environmental thing to do. They are able to get food that supports their lifestyle. They can seek meatless takeout and shop plant-based aisles at the health food store, and generally draw from a much wider selection than a typical country town.
But being removed from some aspects of food production can create gaps in awareness. “Vegetarians in cities, for example, who eat eggs and drink milk but won’t eat meat, often don’t know that the egg industry kills a bunch of male baby chicks. Or, the milk industry involves separating mothers and children of cattle and slaughtering the children for meat separately, so that you can take the milk from the mother for humans. In rural communities, people just know that stuff. And they live with it,” Sam says.
I haven’t had to purchase meat from a grocery store in years, even though that was once the only place I could fathom getting it from. Where I used to have fun going out to eat, now I’m enjoying eating from the outdoors. Personally, I find it challenging, fulfilling, and satisfying to procure my own food. It’s practical and ethical.
“Producing your own food gives you control over your food supply,” Sam stated. “People have control over how the organisms that become their food are going to be treated; agency over being able to eat wild beings who get to live their own lives until the moment that they’re captured by a human hunter or forager.”
People want to reconnect with nature through food, and it doesn’t need to be difficult. A first foray into wild food might be as close as your doorstep; as simple as harvesting edible weeds or as dramatic as a guided hunt with an outfitter. Hands-on immersion is the best way to learn; I decided to delve deep into the food system rather than study it in a graduate school program. My professional journey has since been enriched by my experiences, and my perspective has broadened and changed.
Anyone who eats for any reason beyond survival should care. No matter who we are or where we’re from, we have the right to know how our food is produced, to have access to the best quality and most nutritious food available, to support sustainable and regenerative methods of food production, and to participate in ways that work for us. The future of food is in our hands. We just need to reach for it.
Urban and rural populations have their differences, but food doesn’t need to be yet another thing that divides us. We all need to eat, and many of us want to eat better. Let us understand and empower each other through the shared right to be the hands that feed us. Whether you live in a bustling burg or a sleepy village, you are a part of your food system, and food sovereignty is achievable if you’re willing to put in the work.
Stay tuned for Part II, coming next month!
