Action Research and food systems transformation
Chapter: Give me back my yam: Caribbean staple foods and the crisis of the
'uncommons'
Mama D
Summary
This is an ongoing piece of action research. Too often as I sit down to a meal, I recognise how far
removed it is, as evidenced by the paucity of Caribbean staples on the plate, from the food of my
forebears. Food Sovereignty and food justice implies I have a right to these foods but the many
contradictions of what truly is 'Caribbean food' means that all is available to me is food injustice,
and no sovereignty, together with insecure access to a selection of food that supports a telling of
my cultural journey. What are the wisdoms that link both me and my food to a respect of the earth
and how might I gain insights into the food transformations that I scarce have control of through a
brief exploration of the foodways of others in a similar situation here in the UK?
Here are soundtracks to my thoughts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MssS_SiyBpQ&list=PLoG5B2sdUQYRkyR3JJrKcTTP1yQmLP0Q&index=29
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCpTkfYVHpQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfseWHf4d-g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_1AeVAoVk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMigXnXMhQ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGBXvI_65nc
A critical objective for this piece was to explore, across generations and geographies of the Caribbean, as
relocated to the UK, what insights and what lore is associated with sitting down to a ‘good’ culturally resonant
meal. That meal is one that to the cook conveys a sense of cultural well-being and satisfaction and about
which they might have something to say.
As a product of Britain’s diasporan Caribbean family, I have had a lifetime access to those generations who
had made their home here in Britain post the second world war or, as I stated in my questionnaire guidance
preamble:
‘Those people of African Caribbean heritage who, as migrants, STAYED but who are only partially absorbed
into the fabric of European existence’.
I have, so far, interviewed 7 individuals within households of different types, ranging from a single person
through to a member of a whole family.
I had chosen 11 families to represent the number of days it took me to sail to the Caribbean when I was nine
years old. It was both an eye and palate opener. Though I was accustomed to the dishes prepared by my
elders, the freshness of the ingredients and variety of them, as well as the island cultures they related to, left
me with a yearning for deeper insights into the food of my forebears and this excites now, the taking of a
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mindful journey into our eating and sourcing of food. It is a journey I hope to expand on properly when time
and space permits.
This is a personal contribution towards gaining insight into the food sovereignty of a people who responded to
a call of empire, but who have, it seems, little to show of the foodways which underscored their ability to
survive the passage. A passage little documented. If this is food systems transformation, then who and what
are causing it? Does it confer a greater ability to make further meaningful food choices for those concerned
especially within a regional context or that of a movement? How does being in Britain affect this potential role
and what are the specific challenges that people face in being active players in the food system as African
Caribbean descendants?
How did it go?
To speak of food in an objective way, to my respondents, always seemed strange, almost met with some level
of embarrassment. Yet we are a people for whom food is a central part of our lives. As Wilk, 2006, suggests,
food ingredients and meals have been a defining part of Caribbean people’s identity. It is an act of resistance
to define oneself by something as sensual and as relevant to everyone as food. Especially when so little else
could be claimed as one’s own, given that the ‘holocaust’ of enslavement damaged or degraded many
important, self-affirming cultural forms and norms.
Each respondent had a different story to tell from their position in the Caribbean ‘family’.
My brief questionnaire was designed to encourage the respondent to share as much as they could about their
understanding of the food they were shopping for, preparing and eating. It elicited a great deal more in
stories at a tangent than it was designed for and somewhat less than I had intended in terms of ‘formal’ food
responses.
In most cases we shopped, at their preferred outlets, together, before the meal was prepared and I recorded
this activity.
We then went to where they lived, to prepare the meals, which I again recorded whilst they described their
ingredients and preparation styles, and shared stories and memories.
Of the seven, four were women, three were men.
Of the men, one lived with a family (mum and siblings), one was a bachelor, living with a tenant and one was
in a relationship but lived on his own.
Of the women, one was on her own but living as part of a shared household (elders), one lived with her
daughter; one lived with her children and one with her partner and child.
The markets/food sources visited were Brixton (Brixton Village, Electric Avenue, Brixton Station road), Forest
gate (High road), Peckham (Rye Lane), Tottenham (West Green Road and Tesco), Tooting Broadway (indoor
markets). These food outlets/markets represent areas in London of traditionally significant domicile by
Caribbean people arriving post war.
The names of the seven respondents are given below. Not all respondents wished to be identified. The filming
reflects this, as do the images. Alongside the name is the dish that was prepared, with an image of it.
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What the
respondent is
called
Queenie
Name or description of dish
prepared
Vegetable stew with hard food
Country of
Origin
associated
Jamaica
Bro Daniel
Chicken curry with hard food
Jamaica
Sis Yve
Ackee and saltfish with Basmati rice Jamaica
Ras Levi
Ital Stew with Hard food
Martinique
Seba Verna
Chicken soup
Jamaica
Image of dish prepared
3
Zawadi
Saltfish and callalloo and Ackee and Jamaica
Callaloo patties with fried plantain
KMT
Pholouri with Tamarind sauce
Guyana/UK
and
Metemgee: a hard food stew with
Salt fish
A mini glossary:
What is hard food?
Hard food is the colloquial reference to root crops plus banana or plantain starchy staples that form the basis
of a meal of many of the Caribbean islanders. These foods might include yam, sweet potato, eddoes,
cocoyam, cassava, pumpkin and breadfruit. Dumplings made of wheat and any combination of the above or
other grains might also be categorised as hard food. Hard food is also known as ‘ground provisions’.
Ital stew: In this case, the ital ingredients consisted of: pumpkins, spinach, onions, garlic and tomatoes
Metemgee: a dish based upon ‘hard food’ plus salted codfish in a coconut sauce.
Pholouri: a wheat-based, semi-sweet, fried dumpling.
From the images above: 5/7 participants cooked hard food; 1 rice dish (not rice n’ peas); 2 ackee dishes
3/7 salted codfish. Of the ‘hard food’: green banana, plantain and ‘white’ sweet potato featured 3/7
Purple aubergine featured twice, pumpkin 5/7 times
Conspicuous in its absence was rice and peas and stewed chicken and anything ‘jerked’.
Spices and spice mixes were common throughout, as was the use of coconut fat.
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Some reflections on the approach
The journey of Action Research within these exchanges was both personal and shared. Shared in that the each
meal seeks to capture the essence of a conscious, reflected food conversation within the interview, where the
respondent seeks to make sense of the choice made, mixed in with a weave of memories and personal
narratives.
Each meal was associated with the respondents country of origin as well as any personal journeys that
respondents have taken since which have exposed them to different cultural food nuances and ingredients.
Some respondents spoke of family journeys that have led them to a recreation of a remembered dish.
I was mindful not to make any personal input at this stage. A subsequent sharing between all respondents and
myself is planned.
My own learning, as part of this exposure to others’ narratives of their food, forms a separate, but connected
discussion. It is raised by way of drawing out deeper, shared reflections on how people of Caribbean heritage
have interacted with the wider food system and it holds within it the contradictions arising from my reading
around the subject and my attempts to make sense of these against the backdrop of the stories shared.
However, I was influenced by my findings, and found that I had no choice in this because my unanalysed
desire to ‘eat well’ and ‘eat in conformity to an idea of community resilience’ or ‘eat as cultural identity’
meant that the sharing of identity led to a sharing of food practice. I found myself almost involuntarily picking
up and purchasing food items that I had relegated to the too expensive or too distant to purchase, but which
were made use of during the course of the exercise! I found that I missed them and needed to not only
include them in my diet again but to encourage others to recall these items in their purchases!
Such reflections make me wonder about similar, overlapping ‘holding spaces’ that exist between each culture
whose own migrants have fed the eclectic cuisine and food market which is now called Caribbean.
The more I read and reflected, the more I felt that it would be necessary to deepen and widen the scope of
the research to sufficiently enable the voices of the researched to explore all connected aspects of their lives
which inevitably mirrored, amplified and explained the newer foodways and evolving food lore of ‘Black
Britain’: a newly landless people, in a rapidly changing landscape.
Twenty pounds per person was offered towards the preparation of the meals. This was in consideration of the
costs of purchasing the often imported ingredients and the energy costs of preparation. In hindsight, costing
the meals would have provided a commentary on different, less ‘cultural’ food choices. This would, perhaps,
have provided a commentary on the costs of cultural resistance and resilience in the UK.
My initial ideas on why people made the food choices they did yielded ideas such as:
1. Tradition and pride: using food as an assertion of nationality and connection to bonafide culture
2. Availability of foodstuffs in the markets/ease of access: How far people would go to shop
3. Personal taste: the range of influences on preference produced by kinship choices, the media,
assumed social class/social standing/politics and personal idiosyncrasies
4. Health reasons: Doctor or health worker prohibitions in cased of popular NCDs. Aspirations towards
better health.
5. Affordability: cost of searching out ingredients and purchasing sufficient for all members of the family
group
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6. Age group: responsibility for making food purchases/reliance on others to prepare food/peer tastes
and influences.
The predominant country of origin or association is Jamaica, with Martinique and Guyana for two people
respectively.
Respondents were aged between 25 and 60 years old and only one of these was born outside of the UK
(Martinique).
Questions arise:


What is the influence, of not only birth, but having lived several of the formative years, say up to early
teenager hood, in the tropics?
Of the youngest, this was a male. What would a younger female consider a meal representing her
cultural heritage?
I am also aware that there was a bias in the respondents. All of whom are either tertiary educated, well
informed or in some way engaged in activities related to cultural resilience and resistances. These are ones
who are: volunteering for the Black Cultural archives; founding a group looking at disappearing African
diasporan assets; founding a group looking at cultural and environmental freedom and growth; running a
project combining cultural music with the green economy; founding an African heritage user food cooperative; supporting an African heritage supplementary school and setting up enterprises relevant to the
international African diaspora community.
Is the choice of food we eat is connected to our social status and activism? How can I capture this? What
sense making can be arrived a in a short chapter of stories which sit atop an iceberg of little explored
realities? What lessons can be gleaned concerning the transformative potential of Caribbean food systems?
The reflections: research on the actions of others and self
Those responding to my request to participate in this exercise often questioned my motives. We have become
quite suspicious people: Diasporans with a history of betrayals from capture in Africa through to
#BlackLivesMatter resistances. So I was already prepared with a response to try to assuage the fears of those I
wished to cooperate with. It had to ring true to myself also. How can this research opportunity be used to
grow awareness of opportunities to reclaim and transform a food system?
I began to notice how I was being influenced by what I was observing every time I had a meal.
I recalled my own history of food preparation in the family home and how immersed and central to that role I
had been. I experimented a lot in cooking whilst at college and University.
Working in Africa and the Caribbean exposed me to even more styles of food preparation, source and
presentation, as well as eating style. Many meals became interwoven.
Exposure to the Caribbean context of meal design with the seven respondents was, therefore, almost a
coming home.
It linked me to the authenticity of type and source again. These were reminders of the way in which my
parents would travel to particular outlets to get just the right kind of yam, the best fish of a particular type or
a specific type of bean that would go with the preferred rice for a festive occasion.
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My immersion in and reclaiming of the African, the yam, in my African Caribbean food-fare, had been so long
a pre-occupation that discovering the deeper, yet subtle roles of the Spanish and American, the Cornish and
the Yorkshire-man in defining my parental food culture was also an awakening.
Africans most certainly were responsible for the dispersal and cultivation of many African ‘home foods’ and
culture of plantains, yams and an assortment of ‘ground provisions’ and other vegetable staples in the
Caribbean region (Carney and Rosomoff, 2009). These same ‘ground provisions’ made up the bulk of what the
research participants selected as being ‘culturally resonant’ to them and spanned Jamaica, Guyana and
Martinique.
One participant prepared Callaloo, a greens based dish using an African – or Native American - amaranth but
they also used salted codfish, which is inherited via the transatlantic slave ships stores.
Rice was prepared as part of what is referred to the Jamaican national dish of Jamaica: ackee and sal’fish
(salted codfish). Rice is another of those crops that Africans have cultivated for millennia and the species
Oryza glaberrina is a native of West Africa. It was the African expertise in its cultivation that supported the
Southern American and Guyanese cultivation of rice Oryza sativa, imported from the Asian colonies, which
was later exported to the different Antilles to enable the enslaved labourers’ working day to extend.
Plantation owners did not always wish to offer the time or space for the production of supplementary food
crops.
The type of rice was chosen, however, was white, basmati rice, a prized, aromatic rice associated with
prestigious consumption. This too is part of the tradition of affluent creoles to imitate the social hierarchies of
taste shown by those who owned the plantations, Wilk, 2009. Commonly the rice of the lower classes was
imported from North America: long grain, parboiled or Guyana: long grain, ‘patna’ rice.
I observed how, for the older two respondents, specific retail outlets had been established as sources and this
is where they always and regularly obtained their provisions from. With ‘gentrification’ of many areas of
London, especially those in which the African Caribbean populations lived and worked, older members of the
community are now finding it challenging to source, close enough to them, affordable, familiar foodstuffs
from outlets who also understand their needs.1 As part of a profile of an ageing population more generally,
Caribbean people will have particular difficulties when it comes to maintaining a semblance of food
sovereignty or to contemplate issues of food system transformation, being largely landless and with poor
access to land based assets and funding streams2.
The youngest respondent obtained his food through a food co-operative which he was establishing, so he was
even more assured of his source. Is this the best option for Caribbean peoples in the UK to resource their
larders with selections of ‘resistance foods’? How sustainable are the production and marketing systems of
such products?
Other participants were more concerned with cost and time available to shop. Most, or half their ingredients,
were obtained from the local supermarket, a Tesco. Many people of African heritage have a strong history of
reliance on traded foods which presents a major challenge to these communities when contemplating self-
1
http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/TheFutureAgeingOfTheEthnicMinorityPopulationForWebJuly2010.pdf
2
http://locality.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/A-Place-to-Call-Home-report-final-version.pdf
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sufficiency and, in combination with the gentrification issue above, provide real obstacles to planning for food
systems transformation.
The easy reliance on sourcing processed alternatives from ‘supermerchants’ itself has a history. Wilk, 2009,
speaks of the rivalry between merchants in Belize and the islands of the Caribbean when importing, first
staples and then a wide and astounding variety of luxury imports, many of which were based upon the initial
export of raw produce from the colonial hinterlands of Africa, Asia or the Caribbean itself. These were then
processed and packaged in the metropole industrial nations and re-exported back to the Caribbean as
essential icons of luxury living.
Each year the Caribbean imports over 5 billion dollars’ worth of food3. In some circles, this is attributed to the
results of failed crops due to imprecise rains, droughts and other natural hazards, such as hurricane damage.
However, there are precedents in history. Much of what is imported is processed, facilitated by the
descendants of East-Indians and Europeans ‘who stayed’ in the Caribbean or migrated to Europe and who
have built fortunes upon successful food businesses. Much of what is sold consists of items exported in raw
form from the Caribbean but which could be used, locally and more healthily, in more natural form.
How does this relate to the fare of Caribbean populations in Europe?
Market surveys indicate an active - but threatened by, ironically, processes of gentrification - marketing of a
range of Caribbean spices, processed food products and tools being sold largely to a captive market of African
Caribbean people resident in the UK.4
African Diasporans in the UK buy, and use, different processed
grains as flour: the processed roots as flour; the processed
plantains, legumes and seeds, all as flours and reconstitute
familiar cuisines, with the aid of processed, but floury, spices and
herbs into remembered meals of earlier dependencies. These
reconstructions do not necessarily hearken back to an Arcadian
connection with nature. Instead they are blemished by the harsh
realities of slavery and the aspirations towards stations in the
hierarchies of colonial time5
3
http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/11/caribbean-agriculture-looks-to-cope-with-climate-change/
4
http://www.foodmanufacture.co.uk/NPD/A-place-in-the-sun
5
Colonial time is a device used by Wilk (2006, p 79-80) to understand how the structure of colonial society in the tropics
created a process by which the underclasses could appear to achieve a similar status to their 'overclasses'. This would
happen by creating the perception that the lifestyle and accoutrements of the wealthy, slaveholding classes were equal
living an advanced or modern lifestyle, accessible by mimicry of their consumerist behaviour patterns by the ‘backward’
classes.
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‘Jesus Wept’
Gospel of John
Chapter 11, verse 35
It is not always clear why Jesus wept. Was it sorrow, was it in sympathy or was it in rage?
Such was my sorrow during this action research. My tears were part of the action.
I have truly wept, severally, during the facilitating of the research, listening to the stories and reflecting on my
own. In reading the literature and gaining insights into the architecture of the foodways of past and present
day African Diasporans and whilst contemplating the state of entrapment in which we appear locked, I have
wept.
My tears were provoked by felt, unresolved contradictions and frustrations, the wailing of the unheard griots
of our food stories, cries held in chains by academic English and misperceptions borne of ‘otherising’ of
cultures over generations.
Through all this I listened deeply, though, and watched intently, whilst savouring the aromas liberated from
‘Dutch’ pots which bore the insignia of a history carved out from the red, aluminium rich soils of Ghana or
Jamaica. Red like a blood testament of the lands from which a journey of food, wrought with both pains and
gains, has been repeatedly translated through multiple transformations from past to present.
I resolve my ‘eye water’ into twin calabashes.
One catches, drop by drop, the tales of resistance foods, the foods that enabled the crossing: African roots,
grains, leaves, legumes and fruit which travelled with us in the blood encrusted, fetid holds of slave ships from
Guinea to Caribbean and were nurtured by women’s foodways into remembered dishes, made in familiar
styles to feed and nourish. These dishes formed the basis not only of survival and insurrection, but are, even
today, in yam, associated with the prowess and victory of latter day athletes and champions6.
The second calabash is no less fragile for its own weight of the foods of resilience: the variety of foods we
embraced from the people that converged in the islands. Ranging from the buccaneers’ salted pork to the
Amerindians cassava flatbreads; the East Indian curry spices and roti, the Polynesian breadfruit and the
Chinese rice cooking styles. The colonists also brought, via the kitchen and industrialising merchants, a range
of food preparations styles and dishes from Cornish coasts: spicy patties from pasties and a neo-traditional
black, rum cake, as well as Yorkshire hams and Spanish escoveitch7 fish and from there to today’s
preoccupation with re-naturalised fast foods8.
It is this second calabash that catches each story of how Africans in the Caribbean juggled the desires of
‘backra’9 with other ‘cross-cultural’ or creolisation10 processes in themselves mediated by:

Supplying fieldworkers with imported rations to enable on-going productivity in the plantations or
forests
6
http://tamersoliman.net/the-usain-bolt-yam/
A style of preparing fried fish which makes use of vinegar, pimento, scotch bonnet peppers and thyme as marinade
8
See Wilson in Garth, 2013, p 107-117
9
Colloquial term for the slave overseer, also used interchangeably to denote the master of the plantation and his family
10
See Wilk, 2009 p.108
7
9




The competing desires of the gentrifying influences of the slaveholding classes to imitate the ways of
the metropolis making an increasing variety of processed foodstuffs become available
The imperative of the kitchen as wives sought to eat as they might in the colonial countries from
which they or their forebears came
The importation of replacement foodstuffs from North America to serve as substitute staples when
insufficient time was afforded the enslaved workers to produce for themselves.
The production of new foodways based upon fusions of identity and modernity of island populations
trained on the ways of the ‘metropoles’.
(Wilks, 2006, Carney and Rosomoff, 2009 and Richards-Greaves in Garth, 2013).
I was forced to reflect upon the similarities between the brands of consumer goods favoured by my own
family and the brands that I seemed to gravitate to and noticed the availability of, along my journeys in Africa
and the Caribbean. In these reflections, it seemed, lay the birthplaces of modern trans-economy corporatism.
The chronic neglect of food production in the Caribbean as plantation economy burgeoned together with the
absence of investment in local industry might be seen as offspring to the cheap opportunism of importation
and the accelerated ‘western’ industrialisation (based often on Caribbean products) Wilk, 2009. This meant
the evolution of conditions favourable to the birth of the transnational company. This meant a trading off of
opportunities and threats11 that specifically operated in the region in relation to cheap or freely available raw
materials and labour, which could act as a basis for ‘mother-country industrialisation, versus the risk of local
uprisings and political instability.
Were these same sets of merchants establishing multi-national outlets in the colonial outposts across the
globe? Was there some ‘selection’ of favoured companies to promote to the outposts of diplomatic missions
and consuls established between them and rapidly industrialising Britain, France and Holland?
Wilk (2009) comments on the quandary of using tropical products to produce varieties of processed food and
other items which are then sold back to the colonies, packaged in such a way as to render them invisibly
sourced. Milo chocolate drink, Palmolive and Imperial Leather soap, Fussell's condensed milk are all brands of
this nature still popular in the Caribbean.
These foods are also now popular in the Asian and middle Eastern grocery stores of the UK metropolises and
have found their way into the ‘world foods’ niches of supermarkets located in the cities where African and
Caribbean people have ready access and are target consumers.
11
http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/10-076.pdf
10
Each of my participants invariably drew upon the easy access to packaged spices, despite their knowledge of
the preferential quality of whole and fresher ingredients in their cooking. Yet these were choices that were
often genuinely associated with an assertion of culture: identification with that which has been part of ones
upbringing, has shaped ones childhood and rites of passage; are used at times of celebration. Their use is
associated with and reaffirmed in word, symbol and song, throughout the Caribbean, Africa and its diaspora:
an experience which reinforces this ‘cultural identity of the can and the carton’.
How simple it is to reach for the packet of processed coconut cream, when wishing to prepare the popular
dish of ‘rice and peas’ for Sunday dinner. One participant even used processed spices from Ethiopia to affirm
his connections with that place!
How tied the African and African Caribbean to identities-of-food-culture wrought through the workings of
trading systems in which they played but a passive role?
Where, in such a state of being caught up in a culture of consumption, in which there is little agency, can the
people of the African diaspora find tools with which to transform this dependence and bring about
sustainable transformation?
What can be said about the possible recourse, for example, to the foods of resistance?
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“Our liberation starts because we can plant what we eat. This is food sovereignty. We need to produce to
bring autonomy and the sovereignty of our peoples. If we continue to consume [only], it doesn't matter how
much we shout and protest. We need to become producers. It's about touching the pocketbook, the surest
way to overcome our enemies. It's also about recovering and reaffirming our connections to the soil, to our
communities, to our land.”
Miriam Miranda, The Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH)
How does this action research process relate to food system transformation?
I have seen that during this action research process, my personal political choices, with a small p, are
inextricably linked to the politics of food with a large P in as much as I could see that the niches I occupy as:
Caribbean, vegetarian, living out of London, being of a particular age group and so on were all categories of
being that influence from which part of the food system one operates. Overall, these choices produce a
significant effect. So it is important to unpick, as much as possible, what are the narratives for each of these
threads one holds and how each of them interweave into each other to produce a global tapestry.
Inevitably, after the meal was shared, the ensuing discussion involved certain reflections of what had just
taken place and some attempt at sense making would follow.
One notable comment, as part of this, concerned the existence of the ‘Dutch Pot’ occupying a pride of place in
the centre of the Caribbean kitchen, but being simultaneously symbolic of the centrality of an erosion of food
sovereignty within the midst of the Caribbean family and community. Might it be too revolutionary to
similarly point to the centrality of tea-drinking in British society as indicative of the primary role that unequal
trading relations and production plays in the UK food system?
So, what then is ‘culturally resonant’ food?
The Declaration of Nyéléni, 2007 includes the following statement concerning food sovereignty (with my
emphasis):
“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through
ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems.”
And further:
“It puts the aspirations and needs of those who produce, distribute and consume food at the heart of food
systems and policies rather than the demands of markets and corporations.”
It appears to me that culturally resonant food is food that the people have a say in bringing to the table,
directly or indirectly. The Calabash of resistance which contains the foods that African Caribbean people can
be shown to have actively engaged in defining for themselves and which are also sustainably produced are
those foods which can be deemed to be food sovereign. It is the continued consumption of these foods which
give credence to the farming systems that produce them. Somehow, it was these foods that the majority of
my research participants selected.
However, in the UK, these foods are mainly not produced because of climate. They are not local, in the
narrowest sense of that word. Do we need to redefine ‘local’, then, to enable a continuity of global
sovereignty?
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What are the implications of continuing to eat in support of the multinational trade in processed foods that
are widely accessible? What colonial enclaves are being perpetuated by the existence of outlets for such
foods in the Caribbean which support their re-export back to Europe?
There is an opportunity to understand the larger food systems brokenness through grasping the microcosm of
what is happened and is happening in the Caribbean region and with the Caribbean diaspora in the UK.
How we currently think about British food and the system that defines it is inextricably linked to the
relationships Britain has had and continues to have with its colonies. It is a subversive idea whilst also an
emancipatory one, to work through such colonial relationships, sundering each shackled idea one step at a
time to bring systemic liberation and healing to a fair food planet.
Understanding the relatedness of the subject to myself and the subject to the globe, is core to being able to
‘get’ this research and it’s potential. We ought to all ‘Eat Yam’ because it is emblematic of a sovereign food
system choice in a way that coffee cannot be. It is also a food which denotes the resistance of the African
diaspora to the dictates of imposed consumerism and unsustainable, global trading relations.
Sovereign choice in this sense is what ‘sustainable consumption’ means, both to me and to the UK Caribbean
community. This is even though the foods choices it implies might seem to be significantly different to that of
the wider UK communities. It still shares paradigms of resistance which bring it in harmony with the broader
facing down of corporate capitalism.
Such consumption, in this sense, is strongly linked to a sense of resilience as cultural identity and resistance as
survival, where there are felt to be health indications, or bonding and identity affirmations and where shared
meals confer or affirm cultural relatedness and common roots. Yam, as the emblematic crop is a local food
transposed, as has been its peoples. It signifies the contradictions that arise when capital moves humans and
goods according to its own logic and not the logic of the planet. To seek to transform the systems which
entrap us in non-earth sustainable relations implicit is the change that will have to take place in the system of
capitalism.
We will always trade, it is human to do so. We can, though, be careful about what is traded, mindful to
encourage earth-centric production and interdependent, diverse living systems. If we understand, from a
range of perspectives, the reason why we eat, the consumer ethic, we can access another voice that can help
us negotiate our way to healing the food system we are all part of. It is how understanding is gained, so that
far from eschewing all tropical products traded in the UK, we can, perhaps, decide to discard the coffee but
through understanding the implications for food system transformation, ‘Give me back my Yam’!
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References:
Carney, Judith A and Rosomoff, Richard Nicholas. 2006. In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in
the Atlantic World. University of California Press, London. England.
Garth, Hannah (ed), 2013. Food and Identity in the Caribbean. Bloomsbury, London
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