Episode 92

NAFTA is in All of Our Bodies: Corn, Policy, and Health with Alyshia Gálvez

Published on: 22nd August, 2024

In this episode, I sit down with anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez to talk about her book Eating NAFTA. The conversation is from two people who came to economic policy through unlikely means, but as Alyshia explains, economic policy in general, and NAFTA in particular - on its 30 year anniversary, has become a part of all of our bodies whether we’re aware of it or not. Alyshia’s work is incredible at connecting dots that aren’t often seen in economics - its about people, landscapes, and cultures and how they are affected by policy that favors corporations. We explore ideas of efficiency, and how the standard definition is anything but, of consumption, and the paradoxes that arise when looking at people, food, and policy. We look at corn as a material that drives our world through corn products and how landrace corn varietals have been lost to the people that first cultivated them. We also look at the health effects of policy, both here in the US, and in Mexico. Alyshia comes with a big message: if you, like us, feel like you’re a stranger to economic policy or that you can’t change it, perhaps you can and it matters now more than ever. 


Find Alyshia Gálvez:

Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico

Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers

X: @alyshiagalvez

Website 


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Transcript
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Howdy. I'm Kate Kavanaugh, and you're listening to the mind, body, and soil podcast, where we're laying the groundwork for

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our land, ourselves, and for generations to come.

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By looking at the way every thread of life is connected to one another, communities above ground mirror the communities below

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the soil, which mirror the vast community of the cosmos.

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As the saying goes, as above, so below.

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Join me as we take a curious journey into agriculture, biology, history, spirituality, health, and so much more.

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I can't wait to unearth all of these incredible topics alongside you.

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Groundwork podcast, which I think is still grounded at this the mind, body, and soil podcast,

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because I am just taking my sweet time over here.

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I am your host, Kate Kavanaugh, and we are exploring the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth.

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And I have a great example of that.

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In today's episode, I first want to say, sitting at my desk, it is the middle of August, and I put on a sweater for the first

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time, and it has just been a rush here.

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And I was telling myself this morning as I looked at my to do list and wanting to really put the amount of effort that this

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intro deserved into it and feeling like I was late, you know, you're late, you're late, you're late.

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And I just want to say this as a reminder that I tried to change that story that I was telling myself into. It's right on time.

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And as these seasons shift and we get into the absolute rush of end of summer, whether that is harvest for you, or it's back

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to school, or it's a rush to soak up the sun and the warmth and the easy community that seems to unfold during the summer,

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to take a deep breath and to slow down and to realize that things will happen right on time.

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And I really, really struggle when people tell me, oh, things will happen right on time.

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But I think that we just have to give ourselves a little bit more grace.

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This has been a big theme for me.

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For those of you that have been listening to recent episodes, you'll know that I've been writing my intros because I'm really

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trying to weave together some complex topics and bring in a lot of things.

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And I think it's a little bit better than when I do it off the cuff.

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And so today's intro is no different.

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And I'd encourage you to listen to these because they really give a little bit of a framework into how I'm connecting some of these dots. Before we get into that.

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I just want to thank you for subscribing to the podcast and for sharing the podcast.

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If it resonated with you, if it's something you think somebody else might find interesting.

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Most podcasts spread by word of mouth, and so I appreciate that.

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And anytime you can take to leave a rating and review, it might seem small, but it really moves the dial when it comes to podcasts.

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And I want this podcast to find find the ears that are it's meant to find. Let's dive into this intro.

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So I've been thinking a lot about how to introduce this podcast, which I am just so excited to bring you.

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My hope is that it's building on some of the ideas we've been exploring, while also opening some doors to some new ideas that I want to continue to explore.

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It is firmly couched in a couple of the themes that we've been exploring.

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The first, which I think is really about to get underway and gain steam, is an exploration of the materials, mostly organic,

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though we'll touch on some inorganic, that have changed the fabric of our landscapes, our bodies, and our psyches.

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We'll be exploring cotton, wood, wool, metals associated with ev's like lithium, silica.

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In addition to the explorations we've done on sand and the extensive exploration we've done on some agricultural products like meat.

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This is also a continuation of our theme of looking at manufacturing and the effects of offshoring and policies that really

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started with NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

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I've done two big episodes around this.

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The first was with Rachel Slade and the second with Stephen Curriculum, their books making it in America and american flannel respectively.

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We explored through the lens of these books how NAFTA, and later CAFTA and the World Trade Organization and other economic

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policies change, literally and figuratively, the fabric of America, from its middle class to its rural vibrancy to its economics and beyond.

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In the episode with Rachel Slade, we also do a big exploration of some of the historical precedents that lead into the creation

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of NAFTA here in the United States.

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We've also explored some pieces of offshoring and globalization, like the shipping industry, with guests like Rose George.

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I said something in the intro with Stephen Curriculum that it was vital to me that we explore the externalities of NAFTA and

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the realities and the stories really of NAFTA outside of just an american lens, and my guest today does just that.

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Alicia Galvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist, and she is an incredible writer and the author of several books in

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this episode, we dig deep into her book, Eating Trade, Food policies and the destruction of Mexico.

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Alicia, like so many of the guests featured here, expertly and beautifully, really beautifully, weaves together a vast number

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of complexities in this book, from Corn's beginnings in Central America and Mexico, to the historical factors in Mexico that

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led to NAFTA, to the vibrant communities of pharma, of farmers and milpa based cuisine in Mexico, to the rise of corn and

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tortillas and elite global cuisine, and the many devastating health effects of NAFTA on the bodies of humans, land and water, and so much more.

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In Mexico, 2024 marks 30 years of NAfta.

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It was signed into existence by Bill Clinton in 1994, and a turning point where we might really ask ourselves, as Alicia and

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I do in this podcast, did this policy achieve what it set out to do? And how could we reimagine it? Maybe even completely?

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Alicia presents a must read for exploring those questions, and I think this podcast is also a must listen, and using it as

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a lens to perhaps look at other policy initiatives as well, and how we think about our deeply interconnected global community.

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I asked a question in my intro with Steven, what happens when the motivation for development in other countries is mining the cheapest source of labor?

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And I said also all over the world, the quest for ever cheaper labor has wreaked havoc. It's irreparably broken lifeways.

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It's made the worst of american culture our biggest export, along with diseases like diabetes.

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It's disrupted the very fabric of other places so that the fabric we put on our backs can be ever cheaper.

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And it's through this, you know, through the idea of perhaps bringing some of these jobs back home, back to America, where

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I think we can begin to focus on the costs and have a chance to reimagine how we actually want these industries to look when

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we can see those environmental, social, psychological impacts in our own backyards.

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And I know that's kind of a hard sell at times.

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There was an article in the New York Times recently about bringing mining home, and it's wild to experience how much reactivity

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we have to some of these ideas, and how much reactivity I hear when I listen to people talk about economic policy on other podcasts.

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Speaking of which, we are going to be tugging some at economic policy on the podcast, and indeed, we already have been.

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This fall, I actually begin an eight month fellowship in economics, which nobody is more surprised than I am.

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Alicia and I discussed this, but we both came to an interest in economics from very unlikely places.

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And it's actually my sort of confusion over how economics are viewed and talk about that led me to Alicia's book in the first

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place, which actually Anna Borgman, who was a former guest, is to recommending this book to me, and I'm just so grateful to her.

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She's incredibly more well read than I am and just a powerhouse.

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And if you haven't listened to that podcast, please do.

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And I felt like Alicia's book illuminated economic policy in a way that I actually understood it, and I felt like she saw

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these pieces that I felt were missing in the bigger conversation.

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That economic policy is something that is incredibly complex with far reaching effects that we might note measure in our ideas

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of efficiency or productivity or some of these words that get tossed around.

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Alicia and I dive deep into some of those words, and her idea of efficiency has stayed with me in a big way since reading

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the book and since recording this podcast, where we really tug at that.

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I want to mention that I feel like it was only in hindsight that I saw how much of this was an episode that was also, in many ways about corn.

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And and as we begin to shape this series on materials, I do want to briefly touch on corn. The material.

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As Alicia reminds us in this episode, NAfta is in all of our bodies.

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She means that in more ways than one.

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But I couldn't help but think about all the ways in which corn makes up our bodies.

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In what is now, I think, the eponymous Omnivore's dilemma, Michael Pollan has several paragraphs about all the places corn

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enters our bodies from, whether that's the foods we eat, whether they're thickened or sweetened or bulked up by corn, the

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food our food eats, the gas we fill up with the myriad of paper and plastic products corn makes its way into, even our building

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materials, where joint compound and fiberglass has corn inside of it. Corn is everywhere.

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Domesticated around 9000 years ago, Teosinte, which we now call corn, is a vital crop.

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And what we're talking about when we talk about this corn is so far from that vision or even from 5100 years ago, what that crop looked like in Mexico.

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But it has been turned into a commodity and a material, and it's no wonder, as Alicia reminds us, quote, it is the most heavily

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subsidized crop in the United States, receiving between 1995 and 2014, a staggering $84,427,999,356.

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That's $84.5 billion in a variety of subsidies, deficiency payments, direct payments, crop insurance premium subsidies, price

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support payments, countercyclical programs, market loss assistance and other programs.

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We consume over 280 million tons of it each year in the US alone. These are staggering statistics.

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And where this was once a vital and nutrient dense crop, we increasingly export a good deal of this modern, hybridized, nutrient poor crop.

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And I think it's worth noting because we don't take note of it in the podcast.

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That, and this is from Alicia, again, quote within 15 years after the implementation of natural, 40% of corn in Mexico would be imported from the United States. That is just wild.

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And so where farmers grew corn to feed their family and their neighbors from heritage varietals that have been grown in these

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ecosystems in Mexico for a very, very long time.

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I mean, for 9000 years that these varietals had been tended to.

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Now that export, that import from Mexico, is this nutrient poor product that I think we call corn.

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And the effects of that on the health of the mexican people for this and for other reasons that we'll explore is profound.

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And we really dive deep into that in this episode.

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I also, and I'm ad libbing a little bit here, which probably shouldn't do, we explore a lot around narrative capital and who

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gets to tell stories in this content saturated landscape.

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And we've also been tugging this idea of story on the podcast.

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And so I do just want to highlight that.

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And then I want to say that on a personal note, I'm surprised to be here having these explorations.

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If you had told me two and a half years ago when I started the podcast that would be trending towards looking at economics,

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supply chains and these various materials, I would have been very, very surprised, especially as we kind of squeak into almost 100 episodes here. And, you know, I wonder. New wonder is a strong word.

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I know that for some of you it might feel like this is breaking with our beginnings in agriculture and human health.

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And for those of you that are experiencing that, I just want to beg you to stick around for just how interconnected and fascinating this world is.

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Because it's those topics of food, of human health, of agriculture, that led me directly into these explorations.

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As always, it's my goal to try to illuminate some modicum of the deep complexity of this world and just how intertwined and

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interconnected and enmeshed we all are, how each material and supply chain is to one another.

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And Alicia's work is a masterclass in complexity.

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And I am so grateful that she took this time to explore NAFTA with me.

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And I just, I really hope that you enjoy this episode.

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I want to thank this week's sponsor, Sundries Farm Garlic.

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Thank you for hanging in there for what was a little bit of a long intro.

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And now, without further ado, please, please, here is Alisha.

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There's just kind of space to ease into this love that actually, you know, one of the hardest things about this podcast is figuring out where to start.

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And I think that one thing that really came up to me as I sat and I thought about how you and I might start is that you have

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taken a topic like NAFTA and the work that you did in patient citizens and immigrant mothers, and you have really illustrated

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complexity as you've kind of brought us to the table to explore the micro and the macro and how they're informing one another

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and all of these interconnected systems and externalities that maybe aren't considered in some of these broader narratives that are being talked about.

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And so I wondered, as we sort of set the table for listeners, if you might talk a little bit about how you came to sit at

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this table first, especially, and I know I mentioned this, my background isn't in economics, and I know that yours isn't either.

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But I also, as I've started to scratch the surface of this topic, you illustrated this in a way with complexity and nuance

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that I had been deeply searching for.

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And I mean, this book, I've read it a couple of times now, and it has just opened something for me in the way that I'm beginning

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to be able to tease out more when I'm looking at economic policy.

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So a little bit about how you came to be here.

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Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

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It's really a pleasure and an honor, and I'm touched that you've read my book twice.

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I love a good food or eating metaphor.

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So the idea of setting the table or being at the table really resonates for me.

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And I think, really, the story of how I came to this topic has to do with sitting at people's tables and talking to them, eating their food.

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I'd love any excuse to sit at someone's kitchen table while they're cooking, preferably not cooking.

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For me, just an average Tuesday, getting food into the kids is my favorite way of eating, actually, and of talking.

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And for me, that's really the true backstory. I didn't even quite

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recognize it in the book because I had this sort of intellectual reasoning for how I came to the topic, which is true.

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It's intellectually true that I have been studying migration for 20 years, and I came to the realization that a lot of what

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migrant families were going through and a lot of the dynamics around migration in the United States and Mexico have to do with trade.

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And in order to understand what's happening with the mobility of people, you have to understand NAFTA specifically. That's all true.

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But there's a more personal story that I don't even completely kind of talk about in the book, which is that over the course

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of 25 years, I've developed very close friendships with people who I met here in New York City, who I've stayed in touch with,

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whose weddings and baptisms and birthdays and trips to the doctor and hospital and funerals I've been part of.

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And their lives have been really not just touched, but really in many ways transformed by these trade dynamics, these economic

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policies that we're sort of made to think don't affect us personally.

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And yet it's a life or death issue not only for them, but the more I get into the research, the more I realize it's in all

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of our bodies, it's on all of our plates.

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It's something that affects all of us very personally.

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So my relationship to very specific families is what brought me to this table, and they have asked me to make this a story

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that's intelligible to people who make policies audible to people outside of their communities because they didn't feel.

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They haven't felt historically that their perspectives were given much weight in terms of the making of policy.

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Yeah. This is something that you begin to broach in interviews as well as in eating NAFTA, is to look some at narrative capital,

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and the stories of that get told and the stories that don't get told and how we connect to those stories.

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And so before we dive in deep, I wonder if you might touch on that, because I think that this is an incredibly important component of this work.

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Yeah, I've been grappling with this concept of what is the value of stories.

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As a cultural anthropologist, our data is stories.

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You know, we sometimes jokingly say that our research methodology is hanging out.

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So when I say sitting at people's tables like that literally is, you know, how I collect my data and, you know, it may seem

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like it's anecdotal, but when you do it properly, when you do disciplined hanging out, you end up having actually more data

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than you know what to do with.

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And it's really kind of a grassroots perspective.

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You learn not only what's happening, and it often correlates with what political scientists and economists are saying based

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on data sets of thousands or millions of people.

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Some of the larger flows of migration, for example, Orlando economic well being can be seen at the micro level as well.

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And it helps reinforce that, you know, what we understand at the macro level is also true at the micro.

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However, there's just something humanizing about hearing someone's story straight from their lips, seeing it in action, seeing

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what happens when families are separated by borders, seeing what happens to when a family member is plagued by diabetes across

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multiple generations, seeing the way something as basic as what are we making for dinner? Is affected by trade policy. So I believe in stories. I deeply love storytelling.

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I was told by one of my mentors who gave me Anne Lamott's book Bird by Bird when I was in grad school.

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Just because you're writing anthropology doesn't mean you need to, like, ignore the writing. You need to, you know, have.

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The way he phrased it was, you need to have empathy for your reader no matter what you're writing.

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And so I've always tried to think about, how is my reader going to find meaning?

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How is my reader going to be touched by what I'm.

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The story I'm telling, even if I'm telling a very technical story. So I'm deeply invested in storytelling.

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At the same time, I find storytelling really problematic in terms of a way of thinking about rights.

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We're at this stage in our society where, on the one hand, anyone can tell a story.

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And we love the unmediated, direct kind of channels like TikTok and Instagram, where you can hear from someone in someone's

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own words, from their own mouth, you know, kind of what they're experiencing.

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But in many ways, this has just reinforced what we already know about social capital, that some people's stories are given

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more value, given more weight, are more audible, are sponsored, literally by corporations.

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And so we end up reproducing the same inequalities.

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And some people's stories just are nothing audible outside of their own networks, their own families, and their own communities.

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And so as far as a way of, you know, doing the business of, you know, equity, for example, I'm very skeptical that storytelling

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can get us there, because sometimes we kind of end up saying, like, oh, your story made me cry.

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Therefore, I want to see a change in policy that's really problematic.

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It's really troubling because there are people who don't have even.

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It requires a certain amount of capital to know how to tell a story, not in a way that resonates with your own truth.

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We can all tell our own truth to our own communities, but to tell it in a way that hits the mark, um, transnationally or discursively,

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um, often is a reflection of other kinds of social capital.

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So I find narrative capital a really interesting thing to think about.

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And I try to disrupt that and think about, you know, what would it be like if we just gave people rights based on the fact that they're human? Yeah.

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Instead of giving people rights or benefits because we're more moved by them.

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So, you know, just trying to think through some of that a little bit in terms of, like, have we gone too far in terms of wanting people to.

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You know, some people describe it as kind of trauma porn, you know, wanting something to make us cry in order to. Dot, dot, dot.

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Yeah, I think, and I might add to this as a question, you know, so much of some of the notes that I have after reading this is about consumption.

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And I think that the way that we consume stories has changed in the era of TikTok and in the era of short little bits and

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what we're looking for in order to inform choices.

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And I just want to hearken back to what you said, that humans have rights just for being human, not because their stories

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were this, that or the other thing.

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Yeah. And some people don't have. Don't have not only maybe the resources, but maybe they don't have the desire to frame themselves

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in a way that's going to be appealing to others.

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Does that mean they don't deserve the respect and dignity that other people deserve? I don't think so, no.

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This performance of deservingness is very related to the idea of consumption.

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You know, where we're consuming brands, we're consuming people's, you know, brand identity, self presentation.

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It's a performance and we reward it.

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And that's powerful and beautiful, and sometimes it is leveling and democratizing, you know, but other times it gives me pause.

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It's late summer, and I know that for many of us, that means that we are in a rush to fill our cupboards, that we're preserving

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I think that was really well said, that there's a lot of nuance to unpack in that.

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And I really appreciated, as I listened to several interviews that you did this, bringing in this idea of narrative capital

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to better understand some of the narratives that you're weaving as well, because you do such a beautiful job of presenting

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some stories of, and I think you use the word on the ground that really illustrate something larger and I think connects us

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back to, connects the reader back to having a better understanding of something like economic policy that doesn't feel like

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it has that direct effect on us.

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And so with that, I wonder if we might tease out just to begin a little bit about NAFTA and its effects in Mexico.

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And for your background, we've done some background about how NAFTA kind of coalesced here in the United States and some of the externalities that it had stateside.

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And this has been a really important piece to me to look at how that happened and coalesced in Mexico and for mexican people.

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Mm hmm. Yeah. I mean, sadly, NAFTA, it could have been very powerful. We could have done what?

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You know, when Bill Clinton kind of talked about NAFTA in an important speech on its signing, you know, he talked about a rising tide lifting all.

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You know, that's a phrase that we hear a lot.

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You know, this potential, this equalizing potential, this modernizing potential, this spread of prosperity, we know that that promise has been broken.

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It's widely acknowledged to have been broken in the United States.

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We wouldn't have Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, you know, kind of with the platforms that they have.

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If that promise hadn't I, you know, been very spectacularly broken in a way that we can all see that we haven't all shared in the prosperity.

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We could have had nice things, to use turn of phrase, and we didn't because we didn't have a capacious or generous enough

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vision from the start to really think about what would it mean to unite North America.

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So just as a thought experiment, if we had really thought about how to link Mexico, Canada, and the United States and for

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most intents and purposes, remove the barrier of the border to the circulation of goods, capital, and people, we could have

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had something very beautiful, very prosperous, because people, animals, butterflies, birds, you name it, migrate to where resources are more plentiful.

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They migrate away from conflict and scarcity.

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This is something that's happened, you know, always it's an organic process that no wall and no policy can truly constrain.

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The only thing we succeed in doing by thinking that we can put up a physical barrier like a wall is making it more violent

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and facilitating the involvement of smugglers, of actors who are taking advantage of it being criminalized to move, that becomes a business opportunity.

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If, on the other hand, we said in the late eighties, early nineties, how about we, for all intents and purposes, make it free

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and legal to circulate throughout the region, to have businesses, to circulate goods, capital, and to go where jobs are?

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We could have had a level of prosperity, freedom, and flourishing that we can't actually visualize or imagine right now. The European Union is not perfect. It's not ideal.

-:

A lot of people in Europe have a lot of criticisms of the way that it works and the inequalities that nevertheless are perpetuated.

-:

But you can see that there is an organic flow. People go where the jobs are.

-:

They leave if those economic opportunities are not there. There are labor protections.

-:

There are health and safety and environmental protections that guarantee a certain baseline in which people operate.

-:

In contrast, in North America, we have semi slavery like conditions on the Sinaloa tomato farms that provide virtually all

-:

the tomatoes we eat in the United States.

-:

Whether you're shopping at whole foods, Walmart, target, or a small mom and pop grocery store, you're probably eating tomatoes

-:

that were grown in those semi slavery conditions. People are blocked from moving.

-:

So I have friends who left Mexico in 1997 and have never been back, even when they're not, even to bury their mother when

-:

she died and are completely deprived of access to legal rights, to access even the most basic human rights and services.

-:

We chose to allow, supposedly the flow of goods and capital and not people.

-:

I say supposedly the flow of goods and capital, because even within the way NAFTA kind of permits the flow of goods and capital, it favors big corporations.

-:

So mom and pop businesses also can't trade their small scale produce or products across the border the way, you know, big corporations can.

-:

So we created this very constrained thing, and we called it, ironically, free trade.

-:

And it's just characterized by complete lack of freedom.

-:

And so I think that that's really, you know, I spend a lot of time kind of thinking about what. What could it have been like? What could we have had?

-:

And is there a way to get that now?

-:

Is there a way to, you know, we can't go back in time, but can we, you know, think about what would it be like to get the things that we couldn't get?

-:

What would it be like to have a NAFTA that favors small and medium businesses instead of big business that allows people to come and go?

-:

Most people don't want to migrate, by the way.

-:

That's a myth that we have in the United States, that people want to come here because we're great.

-:

Actually, people want to stay where their family is, and if they have the means to do so, they usually will.

-:

They might leave for a little while, they might do various things, and then often will come back to the place that they're from. We've basically made it.

-:

We've created counter incentives to that organic ebb and flow of people to opportunity and entrapped people on this side of

-:

the border because it's so expensive and dangerous to get here.

-:

Yeah, I really appreciate, especially this year marks 30 years of NAFTA, that you are thinking about what it could have looked

-:

like and what it might look like.

-:

Still, something that I've been coming back to on the podcast is actually a David Graeber quote.

-:

And he says, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it's something that we make and could just as easily make differently.

-:

And so what does it mean to reimagine some of these structures, some of these systems, when they have really even boxed in

-:

our ability to imagine anything outside of those boundaries, of those walls?

-:

And I was struck in what you were saying, that we migrate from scarcity towards abundance and that this is true of, of people,

-:

of butterflies, of pretty much anything that you can think of. We migrate towards that.

-:

And how NAFTA really constrained this paradox of abundance.

-:

I think that this is really well illustrated in the book through the idea of efficiency that we hold this sort of, this big,

-:

large corporate idea of efficiency, this sort of economic idea of efficiency that is missing this really big piece.

-:

And I'm going to pull, because I think that this has a lot to do with how we view that sort of abundance, scarcity space.

-:

And you say, and I love this, and I think that it's a definition we need to look at.

-:

You say efficiency is essentially a ratio of investment and effort to yield.

-:

Unfortunately, it seems that in macroeconomic policy discussions, yield is too often used as an indicator of efficiency, but

-:

this is only half of the equation.

-:

And so in thinking about abundance and consumption and efficiency, we're missing this piece that it's also about investment. It's also about effort.

-:

And I think that this is, and I know that we emailed a little bit about this, so well illustrated in the, the story of, and

-:

I have his name here about the Chivas criollos, these goats that Bertoto is raising, and a little bit about this idea of abundance

-:

and efficiency that's given to us by the government.

-:

And so I'm not sure, and I can make that into a question, or if you have something that you want to tease out in there.

-:

Yeah, you're already getting me thinking. Yeah, I love that example.

-:

And this was, for me, an example.

-:

The struggle I had with efficiency was an example of both where I felt somewhat a lack of confidence as a cultural anthropologist

-:

getting into a study that has to do with, with trade.

-:

I had a certain amount of worry that, well, you know, the things I'm noticing, maybe it's because I don't get it.

-:

You know, maybe I'm just not capable of understanding this the way the economists understand it.

-:

And there might be something I'm missing, and efficiency was something that I just kept coming back to and struggling with.

-:

And ultimately, I believe that my discomfort is. Is correct.

-:

It's a grounded, sustainable, evidence based discomfort because.

-:

And it's something that, by the way, no one has critiqued in terms of reviews of the book, by people who are more in the discipline

-:

of economics or economic anthropology than me.

-:

I haven't had anyone say, oh, you got that wrong.

-:

And basically, as you said in the quote, I just struggled with this idea that there's this assumption built into NAFTA, and

-:

it's led to a lot of insidious policies that the United States is best at growing corn specifically, as well as a lot of other

-:

things, and that if you can't grow corn in the quantities that, that we grow it on our fields of Iowa and the entire midwest, then don't bother.

-:

And so there was this sort of assumption and plan implicit in NAFTA, that Mexico, which is the place where corn was originally

-:

domesticated from a wild weed into a domesticated plant, um, by human farmers in the valley of Tehuacan, thousands of years

-:

ago, there was a sort of assumption that Mexico should not do that so much anymore, because the yields are relatively low

-:

compared to the midwestern United States, and instead should, you know, manufacture airplanes and cars and blue jeans and

-:

television sets, and leave the corn growing and the food production to the United States, because we have such high yields in the United States.

-:

But if you look at how exactly we're growing corn and other foods and non food items, because corn itself is really a non

-:

food item these days, the way we grow it, it's commodity corn that's not actually edible as it is, it must be processed, and

-:

it's as often processed into ethanol as it is into corn syrup, corn starches, corn fillers, animal feed.

-:

More than perhaps anything else, we have completely engineered our entire economy to support, actually a very inefficient growing model.

-:

We flood our fields with chemicals, with herbicides that kill everything but the corn.

-:

The corn itself is genetically modified to not be killed by these very potent herbicides. We are depleting the aquifers.

-:

Ancient, ancient aquifers under our plains states are approaching bottom because we just over pump 24 hours a day to irrigate these fields.

-:

We invest a million dollar tractors that are subsidized by the us taxpayer in the form of farm subsidies, loans, credits we've

-:

allowed for the consolidation of the small scale us farmer.

-:

So most farms are now owned by corporate conglomerates and can't afford, you know, to.

-:

Those small scale farmers can't afford to keep their land or to continue farming in the way they used to.

-:

They can't afford to grow anything but commodity crops like corn and soy.

-:

And then we see the runoff into the Gulf of Mexico killing, you know, coral and producing these algae blooms, contributing to global warming.

-:

I mean, we just have a thousand different knock on effects.

-:

If we actually took into our economic analysis all of those, quote, unquote, externalities in terms of how much we're spending

-:

to have these high yields of corn, it's not efficient at all.

-:

It's absurdly inefficient and destructive and actually kind of nihilistic.

-:

Yes. Yes, absolutely. It is the opposite of abundance.

-:

It's the opposite, and we can't even eat it right.

-:

And we saw how quickly with the pandemic, you know, even basic things like keeping our supermarket shelves stocked became

-:

a challenge for our corporate food system.

-:

So, in contrast, in Mexico, you know, most corn is still grown on very small scale plots with people who, you know, have uneven land. So they.

-:

They might use a donkey, they might use a small tractor or no, you know, mechanized equipment.

-:

And, yeah, their yield is small, but they're doing it.

-:

You know, a lot of corn growers call themselves poquiteros, poquito de todo. They grow corn. They have chickens. They sell the corn husks. They have animals. They sell eggs.

-:

You know, they provide for their own consumption.

-:

They have a very holistic system that is not only not damaging the environment, but is actually concerned with soil maintenance and regeneration.

-:

It's a very beautiful, adaptive system that has shown over millennia a capacity to adapt to drought conditions, wetter years, drier years, et cetera. It's a very.

-:

It is miraculously abundant and beautiful and plentiful.

-:

And so to call one thing, this kind of midwestern us corn growing efficient.

-:

And that inefficient, to me, just struck me as wrong. Wrong.

-:

And then there's the goat farmer whose story I tell in the book, who.

-:

He has his old traditional goats that everybody likes.

-:

When there's a party, when there's a wedding, you barbecue a goat, and everyone loves the flavor.

-:

And there's government agronomists who keep coming to town saying, why don't you start producing these other goats?

-:

And there's all these tax credits and loans to kind of switch his goat farming to a different kind of goat.

-:

But these other fancy goats, chivos finos, he calls them, require irrigation. They require different kinds of care.

-:

They are not as sturdy going up and down the rocky, cactus filled hillside behind his farm.

-:

He has to invest in fencing to keep them penned in, because otherwise they stumble and break their legs and are useless. The meat isn't as good.

-:

There's nothing going for these other goats except that there's a subsidy, you know, something coming from the government to help.

-:

And so he's like, well, sooner or later, I guess I'll have to grow those goats, because I'm not getting any support for my

-:

other kind of farming that I've been doing for generations.

-:

So we can kind of see this push under the guise of modernity efficiency, into really poor outcomes, and we just have to push

-:

back, and we have to turn to indigenous knowledge to see how people for thousands of years have sought and found abundance

-:

in varying situations and really kind of disregard some of the profit scheming that drives us in a different direction.

-:

Yeah. And I think that this is a really important point, that this is that what underlies a lot of the sort of neoliberal

-:

push to globalization is profit scheming under this guise of efficiency that is actually really anything but versus this.

-:

You know, and I think there are a lot of different things to call it.

-:

This holistic system, this indigenous wisdom that has at its heart things that are adaptive, both ecologically, socially, that they.

-:

They make sense in a layer of context and make sense for place.

-:

Also that these goats require less water.

-:

So does the land race corn that is grown. It grows well in this environment.

-:

It serves these communities in a way where it's tasty and it's been celebrated and enjoyed for many generations.

-:

And it has that contextualization that we have discarded in favor of profits.

-:

And I think I was really, you know, I was really struck.

-:

There are so many statistics in the book that are just sort of staggering, truly staggering, that after NAFTA, Mexico ends

-:

up importing over 40% of its corn from the United States because of that idea of comparative advantage, quote unquote, efficiency. That is anything but. And it does.

-:

And I want to hearken back, because when I started looking at some of this economic, without having any background in it,

-:

I had that same experience of, like, this can't be right.

-:

Am I missing something, that this is the definition of efficiency?

-:

Mm hmm. Yeah, it's shocking. And to get there, to understand it, required me to, in some ways, this is an ethnography of.

-:

It's an ethnography of economic policy more than it's an ethnography of the countryside.

-:

In some ways, I was trying to learn and understand the logics, the culture of certain policymakers who subscribe to.

-:

You know, they have a discourse, they have language, they have meanings that are internal to their field, but also incredibly influential.

-:

And I affecting all of us much more broadly than their field.

-:

And so I really had to start to unpack, how is food sovereignty and food security?

-:

How are those not the same thing? Right.

-:

To a layperson, you think food security is your ability to feed yourself.

-:

Yeah.

-:

So on a national scale, food security is the ability of a nation to feed itself. Right. Which sounds the same. Food sovereignty.

-:

Food sovereignty is we have enough food to feed ourselves.

-:

So when I got into this, you know, my own ignorance was actually helpful because I went in thinking food security and food

-:

sovereignty are the same thing, basically with slightly different valences.

-:

And I came to understand that these are actually defined radically differently from a policy perspective, from a national economic perspective.

-:

And so food security actually can be 100% divorced from food sovereignty.

-:

So a country can be 100% food secure even if it grows not one calorie of its food in its own territory.

-:

So there are countries that don't have, you know, some of the Emirates, for example, don't have a lot of agriculture, but

-:

have a lot of other kinds of wealth, which allows them to basically import virtually all of their food needs from elsewhere. Yeah, that's considered maximal food security.

-:

If you can purchase your food, you don't need to produce your food, you need to be able to purchase your food.

-:

And so that kind of definition being applied to Mexico, which is one of the breadbaskets of the world, one of the places to

-:

which we owe some of the most abundant, not to overuse the word abundant.

-:

Diverse, plentiful food traditions in human history,

-:

the idea that Mexico doesn't need to grow food anymore and can just purchase food with all of the wealth it's going to generate

-:

by manufacturing automobiles and airplanes, took me a while to.

-:

To get to understand that's okay from an economic perspective.

-:

And if you think about it from any other perspective, it's ridiculous, right? So food sovereignty is actually. It matters who's growing the food.

-:

It matters, are we growing the food here?

-:

If, you know, global shipping, global trade shuts down tomorrow, do we have enough to eat?

-:

Food sovereignty is a really different metric, I like to think, even just in terms of regional food sovereignty, by growing

-:

my tomatoes on my roof and my herbs in a little dark corner behind this window here, I'm not growing abundantly, but I'm thinking

-:

about just in terms of myself, am I producing a little bit of the food that I consume?

-:

How can I produce more of the food that I can consume?

-:

Can I consume food that's grown locally? If global? You know, I live in Manhattan.

-:

If the bridges and tunnels are no longer functional, where is our food coming from?

-:

Food sovereignty is a very different metric.

-:

And so I think getting to that point of understanding, it was helpful, again, for me to come completely from the outside and

-:

did not understand, and to really question and ask, how are we defining these things?

-:

And then come to see how weird and how disturbing some of these definitions are.

-:

Yes, and I mean, you used a word towards the beginning, how divorced they feel.

-:

I think to me, from any sort of reality.

-:

I just have troubles even fathoming it.

-:

And how divorced they feel from a sense of place, what grows in one place, or what it means to import food that is often processed from other places.

-:

And I think you did a really good job.

-:

I've worked in food for a long time, and you define a food system is all of these different components converging together,

-:

that it is cultural, that it is ecological in a regional way, that it is about distribution, that it is all of these different pieces coming together into a system.

-:

And I think when you're talking about that absolute wild, and I didn't know this until I read the book, difference between food security and food sovereignty.

-:

It feels divorced, and I feel like it's divorced of that sense of place.

-:

And I think it also creates this inroad where one of the things I've thought a lot about in exploring some of the effects

-:

of NAFTA in the United States is one of the things that the United States manufactures and exports very well is demand and

-:

desire that it manufactures, a sense of

-:

wanting to consume in a very different way.

-:

And I think that one of the things that NAFTA opened up in this absolutely wild gap between food security and food sovereignty

-:

was for corporations to then become the security.

-:

And I'm putting this in quotes for people eating across Mexico, and you focus more on these rural areas where you have these

-:

bodegas, these sort of bodega esque shops pop up that are furnished by and supplied by Coca Cola, and it divorces people from

-:

that sense of place and food production. That is food sovereignty.

-:

Absolutely, absolutely. Desire is a really important, it's another important puzzle that we have to think about, because there's

-:

been an inversion that's happened over the last several decades. If we go back

-:

further back in the United States, more recently in Mexico, it was pretty normal for people to grow or produce a certain amount of their food locally.

-:

And then there was this sort of marketing achievement to kind of communicate to us that we could consume modernity.

::

We could, you know, eat in ways that reflect our social station, that we could, you know, eat things that are quicker, more convenient, faster, cheaper, whatever, right?

::

So everything from, you know, drive through or drive in, you know, diners to Campbell's soup, right?

::

I, you know, I was proudly, you know, a Campbell's girl.

::

I grew up on. Yeah, I grew up on Campbell's suit.

::

Yeah, my DNA is pretty much 50% Campbell's and, like, 25% kraft Mac and cheese.

::

You know, and these were things that enabled my single mom to get out into the workplace and know that her kids weren't at home starving to death.

::

So, you know, there's a sense of modernity, freedom, you know, convenience that has been both a marketing achievement, but

::

also a response to sped up lifestyles.

::

People not having extended families, not having the time or resources to prepare or produce food in the ways that we did historically.

::

Now, if you go to the most elite restaurants in New York City or any city, you will see this celebration of this radish was grown on this farm.

::

This chicken was raised by this rancher.

::

This celebration of the locality, the place you keep coming back. And I love it.

::

To the idea of place and specificity of place.

::

There's meaning in terms of place, proximity,

::

the networks and social networks. Do you know, the person?

::

How many degrees separation are there between you and that chicken or you and that cow and that farmer?

::

How much care was put into this food?

::

And so, ironically, you know, it's the most elite eating experiences that are reconnecting those bonds to place and production and the simplicity of production.

::

And the rest of us are expected to eat, you know, things that have zero connection to place that are sort of consumer commodity

::

products, highly processed, shelf stable products that are equivalent whether you're eating them in Mexico or in Tokyo or in New York.

::

And so there's this sort of inversion where.

::

Do you remember when Obama was insulted? Like, oh, he likes kale.

::

Right?

::

That was sort of an insult, right?

::

This idea of, you know, eating from a farm being, you know, sorry, there's something on my phone. This idea.

::

I'll just have to stop and start over because now the dog's barking.

::

We like a dog.

::

Okay, I had my phone on do not disturb, but apparently the doorbell makes my phone vibrate. Anyway.

::

No, you're absolutely fine. Don't be. Don't be. And don't let it throw you. This is all editable.

::

Great.

::

Obama and kale.

::

Yeah. So we don't have to go back too far in time to think about when Obama was made fun of for liking kale or Michelle Obama

::

was made fun of for growing vegetables at the White House and thinking about food sovereignty, even in the space of the food that the White House is preparing.

::

But it's kind of become a marker of elitism now to have locally produced or farmers market or fresh this kind of connection

::

to fresh farm vegetables and farm produce.

::

And so it's a sort of topsy turvy world, but a lot of it is an achievement of marketing and this kind of strange system where,

::

for example, eating a fresh hand ground corn tortilla has become kind of an elite experience.

::

You can have a very expensive taco made with nixtamalized corn in New York City and Denmark, you know, in London. And people who.

::

For whom that's their ancestral way of eating, have a harder time doing that now in Mexico.

::

It's not that people don't love corn.

::

It's not that people aren't still growing corn.

::

But there's been, you know, the way I like to describe it is some things have come closer within reach, and some things have gotten further out of reach.

::

So do rural people living in the countryside of Mexico still like to eat a tortilla made with corn that they grew and ground themselves? Yes.

::

Are they able to do that every day or even regularly anymore?

::

No, not the way that they once could.

::

And so, you know, it's really tragic, actually.

::

Yeah. You know, one of the things that I think that is really prominent in your work is constantly, and I have a list of them

::

over here, all of these paradoxes that come up.

::

And I don't know what it is about paradox that it speaks to attention of complexity.

::

That's kind of how I began to think about it as I was reading through this.

::

And one of those paradoxes is that as people in Mexico have less ability to enjoy, you know, these handmade ground, you know,

::

nishtmalized and ground corn tortillas, they've become incredibly popular in elite fine dining establishments.

::

And you sort of follow Rene Red Zeppi of Noma fame and his storytelling.

::

And I'm using that word very specifically and carefully, of the tortilla that he and I was very struck by this says, quote, no one has appreciated. Right.

::

And what we see is this interesting paradox of this pendulation of first convenience foods being really something that happened

::

for people that had more means and as a way of liberation, too, right?

::

That it took women, mostly women, 40 hours a week to create these tortillas in Mexico, which I was also struck by and sort

::

of did an accounting of my own time spent preparing food and that contrast, but. And that it then flipped flops. Right.

::

Now we see this sort of elite space being dominated by the idea of food sovereignty and of these cuisines that are of place

::

and celebrated even in that sort of Dan Barber esque way of having a couple of radishes and carrots on a very expensive plate.

::

How did you know it was Dan Barber's radishes that I was talking about?

::

Because it had to be.

::

He is that guy that brought back that sort of single radish on a plate.

::

They're delicious radishes, I have to say, however.

::

Yeah. Just really struck by that pendulation and by this paradox, right?

::

It's about corn and corn products and.

::

And the difference between them and convenience and desire. Right?

::

The desire driving food trends and that sort of pendulation and some of these mini gaps. I don't know.

::

I'm not quite sure what it is about these paradoxes, like what is illustrated by their existence.

::

Yeah, I mean, I remember in grad school for cultural anthropology, one of my professors said, you know, humans, if nothing else, we're status deciphering machines.

::

And there's something that, you know, we kind of turn anything into an opportunity for social distinction and hierarchies.

::

And so, you know, the pendulum swingshe are one way that we do that.

::

We need to occasionally flip when something has either become equitably available or exclusively available.

::

We need to kind of flip the script on it so that it becomes more or less appealing, desirable, high status, classy, not classy, tacky, whatever.

::

And so we can see that with, you know, corn, we can see the ways that historically, it was Mexico City elites who were aspiring to french cuisine.

::

You know, there was the, you know, in the United States, too, right?

::

You know, Thomas Jefferson sent James Hemings, who was in enslaved, and cooked for him to Paris to learn how to make a bechamel sauce.

::

That's actually where our Mac and cheese came from, was that particular encounter.

::

So what we think of as a very american food, Mac and cheese, actually came from that french exposure and that french kind

::

of francophile class aspiration that anything fancy and high class comes from France.

::

And so the same was true in Mexico. Mexico.

::

So grinding corn eating corn was not something that elite people would admit to doing even if they were on a Tuesday night.

::

Eating ground corn tortillas like everyone else, because that was, you know, the domestic labor arrangement and food preparation

::

in their household was probably happening at the hands of indigenous people from rural areas who knew how to make that food.

::

But elite cuisine had to do with french food.

::

And so now we sort of see with this ubiquitous celebration kind of globally among foodie elites, this sort of celebration of food.

::

We can see it with Rene Redzepi, right, celebrating tortillas and corn and beans, saying, you know, they're the perfect foods

::

and frijoladas are the perfect food, tortilla bathed and beans.

::

And we can sort of see this flip, this inversion now, you know, Ferne Redzepi says it, then that must be, you know, having

::

the perfect tortilla, you know, with no chemicals, with no additives, is now an elite food experience that you can have if

::

you can afford to travel to Mexico for your taco gastronomy tour.

::

So we always are looking for ways to make it classy.

::

And if people in rural areas now have Walmart and McDonald's, well, that's not classy anymore. That's de classe, right.

::

Yeah. I mean, it's just really striking and wild to see.

::

I wonder if we might go back briefly to the idea of this sort of consumption that happens in globalization.

::

And something that I was kind of struck by was how this exporting of desire and this globalization, where you have corporate

::

interests and profit driven motives, the way it in itself, that consumption actually consumes bodies, that it changes.

::

It changes bodies, it changes health outcomes.

::

And I think also, just the, this morning picked up, you had a great piece that I was going to wrap up with, but it's called, is human centered trade still possible?

::

And you talk about Coca Cola even buying the aquifers in Mexico, that bodies of water, that bodies of land and that bodies

::

of people are really changed by these trade policies.

::

And so if you could just speak a little bit to how much this has changed bodies.

::

Yeah, I love that phrasing. I think that was your phrasing.

::

The bodies of land, water and people, that's really beautiful.

::

I'm glad that that piece led you there, but, yeah, that's. I love that.

::

I think that, yeah, I mean, that was one of the stunning realizations I had doing this research, was that NAFTA is in all

::

of our bodies and on all of our plates. It wasn't something I anticipated.

::

I know many of my friends who are living in New York who grew up in rural Pueblo state, primarily in Mexico.

::

Their families have been ravaged by diabetes and so I initiated this project sort of trying to figure that out. You know, why?

::

When you look at chronic disease, for example, it's still the case, a little bit less so today.

::

But when you look at it 1015 years ago, there was a lot of talk about, in my prior work, I talk a lot about kind of the immigrant

::

paradox, that people have generally very good health when they migrate to the United States.

::

And unfortunately, living in the United States rates, some people argue you should get a stamp in your passport that says,

::

the US may be dangerous to your health because we can see a decline over time.

::

The longer people are here, the worse they do.

::

Rising rates of all kinds of conditions, including cardiac, metabolical cancers, all kinds of conditions are more plentiful

::

among people who were born and raised in the United States.

::

And the longer people are here, the worse they do.

::

And so that immigrant paradox was something that I was very familiar with.

::

And then when my friends from Mexico started talking about how their family members back in their home communities were experiencing

::

very high rates of diabetes, and this wasn't something people were approaching from a statistical level. They were, you know, it was. It was.

::

They were ticking off in their own family.

::

My mother has this, my uncle has this. My grandmother died of this. My brother has this.

::

You know, everyone seemed to be either pre diabetic, you know, experiencing either kidney or diabetes related issues, or both.

::

And it just seemed so strange to me because these were people who had not migrated.

::

And so what I came to understand was that you no longer need to migrate to adopt a us dietary pattern that's heavily based on processed foods. We have.

::

Our corporations and our policy have kind of arrived to every rural community in the Americas and around the world.

::

And so people's ability to eat their ancestral foods has really diminished.

::

And that was really alarming to me.

::

And to see this sort of transformation in health and see the ways that our policy tends to frame people as requiring education or requiring behavioral change.

::

And we wag our fingers and tell people like, oh, you need to do better.

::

You need to learn how to make your recipes more healthfully. Actually, no.

::

People in these rural communities have been deprived of access to their ancestral ways of eating.

::

That's a structural policy outcome, not a choice that people are making.

::

It's not because people prefer to eat food, ramen noodles from a package that they pour boiling water over.

::

It's because they don't have access to their ancestral ways of eating.

::

And Coca Cola has gotten into our bodies again, not just if we're drinking Coca Cola, which is the obvious way.

::

But also, as you say, they have acquired the rights to aquifers throughout Mexico, throughout the Americas.

::

And so they are privatizing the water itself.

::

And in a lot of communities and Mexico, bottled water is more expensive.

::

Water from the tap is not potable.

::

And Coca Cola is cheaper, and it's marketed to be even cheaper in poorer communities.

::

The price at which Coca Cola is sold by the ounce is cheaper in poor, low income, rural and indigenous communities.

::

And so we can see this effort to produce an epidemic that's profit driven and that's in all of our bodies.

::

So even if we choose not to consume those products, what we are consuming is still a result of these policy choices, and we are complicit in it.

::

And that's not even getting into all of the forever chemicals and preservatives.

::

And, you know, the fact that if you pull out a hair on your head or my head, you're likely to find glyphosate in our hair

::

because it's being sprayed on all of the fields that are producing virtually all of our food, if not wafting over the fence

::

from somewhere else in the air and in the rain.

::

So these are concerns that do affect us bodily, all of us, no matter what our quote, unquote, choices or behaviors.

::

Yes, absolutely. And I really appreciate you saying that, that whether or not we are directly ingesting a Coca Cola, that

::

this is something that is in our bodies.

::

And I was struck in reading, right, that when we talk about globalization in this way, when people in the United States lessen

::

their consumption of Coca Cola products because of perhaps a better understanding of their deleterious health effects, Coca Cola needs to expand their market. And that happens.

::

We're using Coca Cola, but it could be any number of corporations.

::

And so expand that market demand and their consumer base, which then happens in other countries, and we export these western

::

diseases alongside them, the type two diabetes and the, I think what you call the idiopathic, the kidney disease, that we

::

don't know where it's coming from, and that all of this really begins to shift with. With this idea.

::

And that then, you know, our food that we're eating, that's going into our bodies is grown like these tomato farms, right, using virtual slave labor.

::

And that in another way in which trade policy becomes a part of us.

::

And something that we touch on a lot on the podcast is that we are literally made of what we eat, right? Like that.

::

Those elements, those vitamins, those minerals make up our bodies.

::

And one of the things I think about a lot is that that is one really tangible way in which a globalized society really connects

::

us, that we are eating food that has been touched and grown and distributed by hands in very different situations the world over and facilitated.

::

And so that this is, because this does, it affects us every day.

::

It affects us with every bite of food that we take.

::

Exactly.

::

Yeah. It's just something that I don't want people to miss and to toss to you, too, because I think that this is such an important illustration of that interconnectedness.

::

Exactly. And thinking about the accountability. Right.

::

You know, we might expect that, you know, ideally one would expect ethically that, you know, with rising awareness of the

::

connection between non communicable chronic diseases and processed foods, that the corporations would, you know, have a little

::

bit of a, you know, my bad moment where they would stop marketing to the young children or, you know, think about the hyper

::

palatability of their products, and they pretend to do that in the United States.

::

You can see the Pepsi CEO at one point saying, I give my children vitamin water.

::

And she kind of pointing to the scope Pepsi famously had the good for you and fun for you lines of products, the good for

::

you waters and energy drinks, and then the quote unquote good for you, and then the quote unquote fun for you were the sugar sweetened sodas. And we're all about hydration now.

::

You have choices, as an informed consumer to choose among all of these different options.

::

While they were doing that in the United States, really investing in waters and less heavily sugar sweetened beverages, they

::

were doubling down in Mexico and around the world, trying to shore up their luck on younger consumers. And this is terrifying.

::

And they learned, rather than taking a page from the tobacco settlement, the multibillion dollar settlement against the tobacco

::

industry for hiding how dangerous cigarettes were, rather than saying, oh, we better be careful that we're going to be held accountable.

::

They use the tobacco settlement as a template for designing lawsuit proof, liability proof policies.

::

So they became very savvy and keen on avoiding accountability, avoiding liability, assuming that the tobacco playbook would

::

be used against them, and basically engineering their way out of it, not because they're not liable, not because they're not

::

accountable, but because they've added little bits of wording here and there in their marketing to imply that if you choose

::

to consume these things, it's kind of at your own risk. It's really disturbing. It's really unethical, and it's scary.

::

Yeah. And it's that broken of them putting the onus back on the consumer that it's that your health is your resource.

::

Responsibility is you don't have access to anything, you know, anything resembling even fresh food and only have access to

::

sort of coca Cola products and processed food and really flip flopping that onus.

::

And I think that that is incredibly insidious

::

from that standpoint in any.

::

Mm hmm.

::

I want to come back to, you know, as we begin to kind of wrap up, I want to come back to that idea of interconnectedness,

::

because one of the things, as I've kind of teased at globalization from a very naive and without the sort of economic background

::

that I think a lot of people come at it, too, I'm.

::

I'm struck by our interdependency on one another while having this sort of divorce from that idea of that interdependency,

::

that we don't see people and we don't see the interdependency that's happening as this policy has literally become a part of all of our bodies.

::

And at the beginning, we kind of started this, what it would mean to reimagine.

::

And I know that I heard you on a podcast, you know, that one of the questions that drives you is, what is it that drives us

::

to be concerned for the welfare of others?

::

And, you know, to pull in this other little piece from you, you know, kind of asking a question, you say eating in a way that

::

does not erase or erode, but builds our connections to each other and to land and to culture and a continuum between the present,

::

the past, and the future that can be restorative and therapeutic.

::

And so I wonder, we're 30 years from NAFTA, and we're six years out from when this book was published and just kind of where

::

you're sitting with what it would mean to reimagine and where we find ourselves right now.

::

Yeah, great question. I've been really inspired out of the fear and uncertainty and violence of the pandemic.

::

I was also deeply inspired by the mutual aid work that a lot of people I know were engaged in and continued to be engaged in.

::

In particular, my friends who own the restaurant La Morada in the Bronx, basically stopped being a restaurant and converted

::

into a mutual aid effort, a soup kitchen, not only throughout 2020, but really for two or three years, they continued primarily

::

doing that, and they still are doing that.

::

And they had this logic that was so stunning to me.

::

The chef, Natalia Mendez, every day, you know, would basically give away or cook up everything that she had been given.

::

So truckloads of vegetables would be dropped off, literally, and she would hand it out on the sidewalk or, you know, cook

::

it into soups and give everything away.

::

And I asked her, you know, do you ever worry that tomorrow you won't have anything to. To cook?

::

How are you going to have your soup kitchen prepare food tomorrow?

::

Do you ever budget the food that you have on hand in order to keep cooking into the future?

::

And she said, when someone gives birth, their breasts produce enough milk for the baby.

::

If they give birth to twins, they produce enough milk for twins.

::

If they have a small baby, they produce enough milk for a small baby.

::

If they have a big baby who needs a lot of milk, they produce enough milk for a big baby.

::

There's a way that abundance can be achieved sort of magically, seemingly from nothing, but it's not from nothing.

::

It's from these investments in communities, and it stretches and expands to include and to serve all of us if we allow it,

::

if we cultivate and invest in that.

::

And so I was stunned by that, just to see this almost biblical

::

multiplication of the resources that they had on hand every day to feed seemingly more and more people.

::

And I think mutual aid is the way to go. And that inspires me.

::

I think we've had a very dark post pandemic, if we can even call it that period, in which a lot of the worst impulses have become more audible.

::

The nativism, xenophobia, racism, anti misogyny, anti trans, anti lgbt movements have become more audible.

::

And we can see, even just this week in England, where whole towns were being torn up by white nationalist residents, there

::

are movements afoot that are very scary and can seem overwhelming and seem like they're winning. But I try to.

::

I try to console myself with examples like La Morada and realize that we all want to be part of communities.

::

And when we are part of a community, when we are connected to people, we support each other.

::

It's not a decision, it's not a political stance. It's just what one does.

::

And I think that's what we need moving forward.

::

And if we are able, in the United States, to consider the United States, Canada, and Mexico as one neighborhood and truly

::

as neighbors, then we will want Mexico to be prosperous and to thrive.

::

We will love mexican people the way we love ourselves. We will love each other.

::

And within the diversity within our country, the way we love our own micro communities, I think it's possible. I think we can foster it,

::

we can facilitate it with policy, but ultimately, it's something we have to build ourselves and invest in. But it's always there.

::

It can be activated at any moment.

::

Yeah. Thank you. I think that was such a beautiful summation of, I think, what's possible, and I think, the importance of community.

::

I know that one question I've been asking myself, looking at all the goings on of the world, and there are a lot right now, is, what can I do?

::

What change can I affect and feeling a sense of hopelessness or a complete lack of agency?

::

And I think one of the things that keeps me going is that I can affect right here in this community that I have, and those

::

sort of intricate feedback loops that you beautifully illustrated with the metaphor of breastfeeding. Right.

::

And so much happens between that mother baby dyad that informs this feedback loop that changes milk production, both the quantity and the contents of that milk.

::

And that is about that connection between community and mutual aid, that when we plug in that some feedback loops that I don't

::

think I could ever begin to describe, many different ones have the possibility to engage, to activate, and to really take off.

::

And so that's a really hopeful space, I hope, in a time that feels dark and hard, to find some of that hope.

::

Yes, absolutely.

::

I want to make sure that we captured what you want to say.

::

I want to encourage people to pick up the book, both eating NAFTA and patient citizens, immigrant mothers alike, but I want

::

to make sure that I didn't miss anything big.

::

You know, there's so much in there. Like, there.

::

There is so much to learn and to see so much through the lens of story.

::

And also, and I want to come back to this little piece that you mentioned, not just an ethnography of sort of people and of

::

NAFTA, but of the economic policymakers and that frame of mind that that comes from something that I think we're really missing

::

when we're looking at policy today and really understanding that mindset.

::

And so, yeah, thank you so much. Yeah.

::

It's been such a joy to talk to you, and your questions are excellent and have really gotten me thinking in a way that has been really enjoyable.

::

And I think, you know, for me, one of the hard things about writing the book and putting it out into the world was precisely

::

this feeling that I was sort of connecting dots that had no business being connected, much less by me.

::

Like, who am I to connect these dots, you know?

::

And in some ways, it felt kind of crazy making to write the book, because I felt like I was drawing on trade policy, migration,

::

anti obesity campaigns in Mexico, anti poverty campaigns in Mexico, in the United States, corn growing, you know, elite foodie

::

chefs, and their tv shows and, you know, New York Times interviews and videos.

::

And it just felt kind of all over the place.

::

And in a way, like, maybe I'm the only one who can, you know, who kind of sees these connections. And maybe that's not good.

::

Like, maybe this is not a good sign of my sanity that I think all of these things are related to each other and to my gratification,

::

I've found that that's precisely what people find compelling about the work, is the dot connecting and bringing things into

::

conversation with each other that we're not accustomed to bring into conversation.

::

A lot of us abdicate our role even as voters.

::

We don't really engage in economic policy.

::

We leave it to, quote, unquote, experts and don't really think that we are capable of understanding it or having an opinion on it. And I disagree.

::

I think we all have not only access or a right to have an opinion, we have a responsibility to learn and understand how these

::

policies impact ourselves, our bodies, our friends, our neighbors, within and across borders.

::

And so if there's anything that people can take away, I hope it's a willingness to kind of entertain these flights of curiosity

::

that allow us to kind of dots and roll up our sleeves and learn and develop opinions and vote on the basis of those opinions

::

for policies that may not get us all the way where we want to be, but move us, however incrementally, towards the world that we would like to see.

::

Oh, thank you. Thank you for that.

::

Because I think that this is, as somebody who has no idea what they're talking about with economic policy, and yet stop trying

::

to kind of tease it apart and found in your book, what I was looking for was all of those interconnected bits and bobs that I didn't see anywhere else.

::

I just, I appreciate that, and I hope everybody hears that.

::

And I'm going to do a giveaway for the book, and I just want people to find your work.

::

And so I'll have links in the show notes to your books and that fantastic article and some of the other interviews that I

::

listened to you on NPR, and there were a couple of other ones.

::

Is there anywhere else that you want people to seek you out?

::

Oops. I think.

::

Did we hit a gap?

::

Was there a little gap for a second? Could you repeat the question?

::

That might be my. There we go. Are we back?

::

Yes. We had such good, stable Internet. I don't know.

::

Can you hear me now? I think it's on my side. I think it's on my side. But we're good now?

::

Yeah.

::

Great. Are there any other places that you want people to find you? I'll have links to your books.

::

I'll have links to some interviews that you've done in the show notes.

::

But is there anywhere else that I might miss?

::

No, I think that's good. I need to update my webpage, but don't we all?

::

It works. It always falls to the bottom of the list.

::

I want to thank you just genuinely for speaking with me.

::

I'm so excited to share this with everyone. Thank you.

::

It's been such a pleasure to talk to you and thanks for doing what you do. I really appreciate it.

::

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the mind, body and soil podcast.

::

If what you found resonated with you, may I ask that you share it with your friends or leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts.

::

This act of reciprocity helps others find mind, body and soil.

::

If you're looking for more, you can find us@groundworkcollective.com and at Kate Kavanaugh that's k a t e k a v a n a u g

::

h on Instagram, I would like to give a very special thank you to China and Seth Kent of the band alright, alright.

::

For the clips from their beautiful song over the edge from their album the Crucible.

::

You can find them at alright, alright.

::

On Instagram and wherever you listen to music.

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About the Podcast

Mind, Body, and Soil
Where the health of land and the health of bodies and communities meet.
Welcome to Mind, Body, and Soil. Join me, Kate Kavanaugh, a farmer, entrepreneur, and holistic nutritionist, as I get curious about human nature, health, and consciousness as viewed through the lens of nature. At its heart, this podcast is about finding the threads of what it means to be humans woven into this earth. I'm digging into deep and raw conversations with truly impactful guests that are laying the ground work for themselves and many generations to come. We dive into topics around farming, grief, biohacking, regenerative agriculture, spirituality, nutrition, and beyond. Get curious and get ready with new episodes every Tuesday!

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Kate Kavanaugh