A supplementary essay to my time in Valencia
Fri 27 Aug
Solidarity not charity
Super early start – I cycle to Carles’ for 7am and we drive to the squatted Alqueria (hamlet) in Benimaclet, headquarters for CSOA Horta (El Centre Social Okupat i Anarquista l'Horta / Anarchist and Occupy Social Centre of the Horta). The plan is to join Grama, a volunteer-run food recycling program, in their weekly quest for surplus fresh produce from MercaValencia. MercaValencia is an out-of-town corrugated-iron-and-concrete produce market (like New Covent Garden in Vauxhall, London) where wholesalers buy, sell and trade their crops, almost exclusively grown by a mixture of provincial, organic farmers from the Horta, or shipped in from Latin American specialist farmers.
All reclaimed food is sorted, packed and redistributed in plastic crates to their members (volunteers, organisers), as well as low-income and no-income families, and the street homeless in the locale. Recipients can collect from the Alqueria, or request a drop-off. I often forego explaining why this sort of work happens, because it’s been such a big part of my life over the past four years, particularly with the Brixton Pound, where we transformed piles of surplus food destined for landfill into vegan and vegetarian pay-what-you-can meals in a community that was being aggressively displaced. Why is a question I stopped asking a long time ago, though there is an answer. Every single person deserves access to healthy, affordable and culturally appropriate foods as a human right. They don’t fix the larger problems – income inequality, cost of food, obscene waste – but highlight them while practically dealing with the matter at hand. Members of their community going hungry, and piles of waste. It’s crisis management not crisis aversion.
The significance of food justice projects like Grama and Brixton Pound is that they are pretty unspectacular, even undesirable, when compared to the “zero-waste” movement, or smartphone apps that allow peer-to-peer movement of goods. Praxis is messy, clunky, uncertain, enriching. The work can be thankless, but we must ask ourselves whether this matters. Is not everyone deserving of food? No-one is indebted to those giving, neither should we insist they appreciate it, we are merely using a very small portion of our energy and time to give a basic requirement to survival. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her essay The Serviceberry,
“A gift economy nurtures the community bonds which enhance mutual well-being; the economic unit is “we” rather than “I,” as all flourishing is mutual.”
This is our stigma to break, and our broken system to fix.
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A list of terminology I pre-emptively learnt in the build-up to today:
la fresa / la frutilla – strawberry
la sandía / el melón – watermelon
la piña / el ananá – pineapple, ananá is only used in Argentina
el damasco / el albariquoque / el chabacano – apricot
el durazno / el melocotón – peach
el pelón – nectarine
el arándano – blueberry
la frambuesa – raspberry
la cereza – cherry
el zapallo / la calabaza– squash, although calabaza may instead mean pumpkin
la berenjena– eggplant
la espinaca – spinach
la papa – potato
la remolacha / la betarraga / el betabel – beets
el repollo – cabbage
el apio – celery
la lechuga – lettuce
la coliflor – cauliflower
el pimentón / el morrón / el pimiento – bell pepper
el pepino / el pepinillo – cucumber
el tomate – tomato
los espárragos – asparagus
la cebolla – onion
la caja - box / crate
Llevar - to carry
Yo puedo llevar la caja - i can carry the box
Aqui - here
Alli - there
Pesado - heavy
No es pesado - not heavy
Mas - more
Menos - less
?Puedo ayudar? - can i help?
Dejar - to put down
Nostramos llevamos ocho cajas de frambuasa - we carry 8 boxes of raspberries
Elevando - lifting
Accionimiento - drive
La coche - car
Trafico - traffic
Ocupado - busy
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The pick-up
After an initial problem with the van (it wasn’t moving) we reshuffle passengers and take Sadiq, who often leads this operation, and a van would follow later to collect the booty. Sadiq speaks five languages fluently (including local Valencian) and has multiple degrees, so the journey was colourful and I phase through participating, listening and studying for tips. Upon arrival, we don hi-vis jackets with “Grama” written in sharpie over the heart and approach vendors asking for “food to recycle”. I think the word “charity” was used also, but found out later from Grama literature, this was for functional ease. Many recognise either Sadiq or his vest and oblige with a vague wave towards a stack of crates, while others rummaged for singles, point to a pile on the loading bay, or politely decline.
We have no trolley or van (both still stationary at the Alqueria), so there is lots of lifting and moving in the bright and quite aggressive sun, piling up the boxes in a parking space and filling Carles’ hatchback with massive watermelons. We do some initial sorting too, filtering off overripe, rotten or severely damaged fruit and veg to go in the industrial composter, then sit in the shade and rehydrate. When the van arrives, we pack the produce into uniform crates scavenged from the yard for effective stacking.
I find out later that the operation Grama carry out is actually illegal, and can and occasionally does result in a fine if they’re caught in the act. Is the “privatisation of abundance” purposefully creating political and physical barriers to accessing free resources in order to further alienate citizens and force them into the marketplace, or a technique to reinforce planned obsolescence and scarcity economics? I suspect both, with a side order of overzealous health and safety regulations tied up in bureaucracy. The threat of persecution for collecting leftover food, when said out loud, seems ludicrous, yet here we are. Within commodity capitalism, there is violence at every step of a plant’s lifecycle.
Back at Grama, crates are unloaded on the earth under a large tarpaulin strung between the HQ building and a large oak. A physical graph of produce details the quantities collected. Moving around mostly non-verbally, save for some grunts, monosyllabic approvement or corrections, the team click into formation: laying out boxes for recipients and filling them, starting with heavier and dirtier items like potatoes and onions, then cucumbers, nectarines, plums and bananas. Witnessing it as a guest (and non-Spanish speaker) made it impossible to tell whether the operation was well-rehearsed or purely intuitive, although many seem to know each other enough to fist-bump or back-slap. Watching intently, I had to wait for an ebb in the flow so as to approach the dancefloor with a box of courgettes. With multiple bodies scurrying around, it doesn’t take long. Once the crates are brimming, any surplus-surplus is considered for preserving on Saturday mornings, saved for public events, or chopped and composted in the community garden. Cash donations for member food boxes are encouraged but not obligatory, to cover the Police fines and purchase communal items for the kitchen.
Dynamic organisation
Division of labour seems to be centrally delegated. All anarchist and “non-hierarchical” projects I’ve worked with rely on a core team who do more than their fair share, while those on the periphery (and this is an observation without judgement) can be inconsistent, self-interested or in need of extra support. There is, of course, a place for everyone, as the kernel of learning in this type of environment often arises from the interaction and intra-action between those who share differences. The open nature of horizontal organising creates a co-didaction web, whereby skills and knowledge are passed on in sporadic fragments from multiple sources, and new members grow in intuition and confidence when filling in blanks or guessing next steps. Ultimately, as the operation is morally against productivity and efficiency, there is no time-money agenda, and tasks are completed by the organism moving as one. Why, when there is no arbitrary “goal” other than to share food, would there be need for competition or shame?
Opt-in culture is gentle and accommodating, but can produce labour imbalance. Grama are currently restructuring to ensure that receipt of food boxes for members is warranted by fair participation in organisational and land-based tasks. Each must commit to two tasks a week, by signing up on a whiteboard inside a bricolage classroom, and honour their word. Farming tools have been donated by local landworkers and are kept in an old toilet with tiles intact. A lizard darts from behind a poster detailing the seasonal planting schedule. Some of the current tasks include:
Farming in the allotments
Building maintenance
Dropping off food boxes
Organising a seed bank
Running a workshop
Deep cleaning the kitchen or classroom
Financial or administrative aid
Since 2012, when the empty building was first occupied by anarchist squatters, the core organisers have increasingly sought to open it up to other projects without access to space. Although many self-organised groups who meet and work at CSOA l’Horta are anarchistic, it’s not a political requirement. There is a general understanding that most groups are at least left-leaning, and as a bonus ecologically-driven and anticapitalist, though not necessarily all three. Organisations vary wildly in size, purpose and meet frequency, illustrating the open-doors policy in play, and there is a busy schedule of events like gigs, community meals, protest organising, banner-making, panel discussions. In the main building there’s a shared kitchen and pantry, an events space, bathroom and cloakroom. Upstairs there’s an Anti-Shop where you bring and take items as needed, an archive of propaganda, a music practice room, and a meeting zone. The grounds are welcoming to families too, with a wendy house and tree house both made from brightly-painted scrap wood, as well as plenty of toys and picnic benches.
For me, the inclusion of food justice work in the context of anticapitalist solidarity enacted at CSOA l’Horta is important. It is the fuel we need for fighting, the tool we use for connecting, the gift we receive from the land. Social struggle must include food decommodification in the prism of intersectionality, in the sense that Diana di Prima wrote
“NO ONE WAY WORKS. It will take all of us shoving the thing from all sides to bring it down.”
As I walk back outside to wash my hands and drink some water, the late morning sun beats the back of my neck. Time to go.