Peter Ivey | Decoding ancestral food matrix to address food insecurity

Food insecurity is defined as the lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. Around 735 million people globally grapple with this issue. The Caribbean stands out as one of the hardest-hit regions. hhh

The latest Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report paints a grim picture for Jamaica: more than two-thirds of the population can’t afford a healthy diet, and more than two million Jamaicans are food insecure. But has Jamaica ever truly been food-secure? In the days of the transatlantic slave trade, racial and economic disparities left many without reliable access to food.

Today, Caribbean food insecurity is still driven by structural inequalities and economic constraints, coupled with climate change vulnerability and an over-reliance on imports. Governments and multilateral organizations often resort to handouts and short-term fixes, but these Band-Aid solutions do not address the underlying issues.

The real solution lies in our history - in the survival tactics of our ancestors. We can learn from how they navigated scarcity, and their resilience in the face of adversity.

SMUGGLING SEEDS, PLANTING HOPE

Two historical factors have played a major role in the region’s legacy of food insecurity— European colonisation and the existence of plantation societies that used forced labour by Africans and Indigenous peoples.

Colonisation and the transatlantic slave trade resulted in the plunder of lives, history and culture. The Europeans didn’t just colonise lands and people. They also attempted to colonize African and indigenous peoples’ culinary identity— to the detriment of the enslaved. There are historical accounts of enslaved Africans getting severely ill, many fatally, from being fed unfamiliar foods on slave voyages.

In their book, In The Shadow Of Slavery, Carney and Rosomoff note that one slave trader literally said they had to primarily feed the slaves yams, as foreign foods disagreed with their stomachs. Slave ship owners had to include indigenous African foods, such as root crop tubers, peas and rice, in the ship’s rations. These were the very same foods that were being smuggled by the enslaved aboard ships. There are historical and oral records of enslaved Africans, especially women, smuggling seeds and root tubers in their clothes as well as their hair.

Some historians note that enslaved Africans often brought leftover foods from the ships to plant in their new settlements. As culturally skilled agriculturalists, they had extensive knowledge of soil, plants, and crop cycles. When tasked with feeding themselves or given subsistence plots on the outskirts of plantations, they planted specially selected foods that would meet their nutritional and medicinal needs.

The book recognises this as a fundamental practice of displaced communities of people. These prized foods were deliberately chosen, and can be found in large volumes on lands that used to be plantations, near great houses and in Maroon enclaves, where free Africans engaged in rich and diverse farming strategies.

Some of these foods are yam, dasheen/taro, plantain, banana, okra, tamarind, and black-eyed peas. These nutrient-rich staples sustained our ancestors despite the many hardships they had to endure, and they remain essential to the nutritional well-being of our people today.

CULTURAL RELEVANCE

Within these historical accounts lie valuable insights into overcoming food insecurity. They highlight a concept I believe is crucial in combating hunger and undernourishment globally: cultural relevance. Culturally relevant foods are foods that identify an individual as part of a culture, and which the culture has identified as vital to its own survival. These foods represent a shared culinary tradition and diet, forming the backbone of a community’s identity and resilience. Embracing and nurturing these cultural foods can pave the way to a more food-secure future.

For Jamaicans, these foods are all around us: green banana, plantain, cassava, dasheen, yam, sweet potato... Our ancestors didn’t plant and consume these foods just out of familiarity; they chose them for their nutritional value, high yield, and versatility. As a society, moving away from these traditional staples that nourished our grandparents and great-grandparents has diminished our ability to feed, nourish, and sustain ourselves. The rise in consumption of imported and processed foods, laden with sugar and sodium, has coincided with a decline in our collective health and resilience.

From time immemorial, our elders have been encouraging us to eat a certain kind of food and have chided us when we do not (“Den yuh nah eat good food! How yuh suh fluxy? Yuh nah nyam up the yam and banana”). The foods they encourage us to eat are the very same ones that our ancestors smuggled into the island and planted everywhere they went. It’s time for us to lean in and truly listen to this ancestral wisdom.

People should eat not only for their own betterment but also for the betterment of future generations. This was a principle our ancestors adhered to with great effort and sacrifice. If we acknowledge that we have, in many ways, lost our cultural identity, it stands to reason that we have also lost our culinary identity. This culinary identity is closely linked to the consumption of culturally relevant foods. A more targeted focus on the expansion of our production of culturally relevant foods— as recommended in the heritage and legacy of our wise ancestors— might be a revolutionary start to solving our nation’s hunger problem.

Peter Ivey is a food security activist. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com