Now, where do I get my food ! - Day #6 (30 March 2020) - 21 day #Covid19 Lock down

Day #6 (30 March 2020)

Now, where do I get my food !

The Covid19 has hit us with the lock down. Now, where do I get my food ? Or, I had rather ask, have I secured my food ?

That’s a good question to ask especially when most of the shops in town are shut, and it’s only those shops that sell the most essential of food – vegetables, fruits, grocery, milk, egg, meat and fish is allowed to open, that too, for a restricted time. It’s a national lock down. Most states have closed borders, trains have completely stopped, airlines have all been grounded. This is not about people moving, this is also about things – food, moving. Even the shops that are allowed to open, have shortage of essentials like vegetables, fruits and fish. And there is serious uncertainty looming large, atleast in Kerala, where we are dependent on the neighbouring states for most of our essentials. Today we did hear the good news that vegetables from the neighbouring state were allowed to cross border and so it’s available in town. But milk supply is badly hit, with milk production affected by both the summer and now the lock down.

This is not a doomsday thought, but will there ever be a situation when we could face a food scarcity. One can surely not be certain with an answer, but some parts of the country, even in major cities, and many parts of the world are facing food scarcity, especially when production gets hit, the workers are sent off, and transportation gets restricted. Food scarcity is an imminent reality. Whatever is available will then get rationed, meaning, the most ‘needy’, the rich, could get it first and the rest of us later, and the poor below, never ! Now, this is not doomsday thinking, it’s there in history. It’s just a reminder of not just about food as an insecure commodity, but also the society itself as an unequal entity.

I was discussing the Covid19 lock down with a colleague of mine. Almost always, the only things that we discuss apart from organisational matters is climate matters, and environmental matters. What’s wrong with us ? That I promise is a full blog answer, later.

She said “I actually don’t fear the virus, nor other disasters as much as I would fear the possibility of food unavailability, or rather the scary thought that one day I would face hunger !”. With an atypical unease, she added, rather decisively, “I have to buy that small paddy land near my home village, soon as this pandemic gets over.” Her paternal family is already into vegetable cultivation and have quite a number of fruit trees in their undivided land, which she shares with her brother and cousins. Their land is literally a food forest, with many fruiting trees. Food insecurity would surely be a non-issue to such families. I tend to see Kerala as a land of homesteads and wells ! The traditional homes in Kerala is surrounded by a homestead that grew vegetables, trees, medicinal plants and trees, some cattle and poultry, and was a food forest in its real sense. And every house had a well, which was its nearest and most secure source of water. Even in the cities, this used to be the culture, till modernity engulfed it and created cement structures out of it.

A classmate’s mother in Trivandrum has a pragmatic way of looking at food security. Her family is into intensive kitchen garden, produces lots of vegetables and fruits through out the year, consumes them and what remains, they store in a small family-size deep freezer that she has at home. This ensures that those seasonal food, like the drumsticks or even fruits like mango and jackfruit, are stored and is used off-season as well. She even supplies them to her relatives and is a highly resourceful person. Traditionally, many of the seasonal fruits were dried or pickled for use through out the year in most households in Kerala. The mother that I am talking about is not living in a village with lots of knowledge and opportunity for doing this. She lives right in the heart of the city. That’s probably why she got a little modern and pragmatic about it. She is surely a way-to-go.

But then there are others. Soon, as the pandemic is announced and they get to understand that the lock down could come, they drive out their vehicles, with shopping bags, and sometimes sacks, rush to the grocery, and buy out as much as would be needed for a long haul. This is just normal behaviour, one can argue. This is securing food, as far as they are concerned. It begins when they know that the scarcity is coming, and then ends when the Government tells them that it’s all over. I have no commentary on them; such ones always exist. It’s only that we don’t call this securing one’s food, we call this hoarding.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN is right when they say that “globally there is enough food for everyone”. Experts, like Devinder Sharma also reiterate this for the World and India. . But the FAO also says that “Border closures, quarantines, and market, supply chain and trade disruptions could restrict people’s access to sufficient/diverse and nutritious sources of food, especially in countries hit hard by the virus or already affected by high levels of food insecurity.”

What should we be doing ? Simple, start dreaming of your own food forest, however small. Start building a community of them. And keep building them till we have a food village or even a food city. A resilient community is not a hoarding community, it’s a conserving cultivating one!