A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

  Our family’s diet consisted mainly of low-grade ground beef and cheap pasta. Spaghetti and meatballs, Hamburger Helper, hamburgers, goulash—which, along with stuffed cabbage, was the only reminder we had of my mother’s Hungarian heritage. We’d often have pancakes for supper, or, if Mom either wasn’t feeling up to cooking or was in the hospital, bowls of corn flakes from the food bank, piled so high with sugar that by the time we reached the bottom of the bowl the milk and sugar had formed a thick slurry.

  My siblings and I self-medicated with sugar and junk food the way some self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. We might not have been able to help our mother deal with her bipolar disorder; we might not have been able to help our father shoulder the financial burden of caring for five children; we might not have had running water or a house that we’d be comfortable bringing friends to, but we did have sugar, the one luxury we could afford to indulge, the only path to normal that we could see open, inviting us in. Other kids—richer kids, off-rez kids, happy kids—had Snickers bars and Doritos and Oreos, and so, sometimes, did we.

  The documentary Food, Inc. dives into the messy, unethical world of food production in America. A segment titled “The Dollar Menu” profiles the Gonzalez family. They’re hard-working, with both parents putting in long hours at unforgiving jobs to support their two children. Neither parent has enough time to really cook. The segment opens with Mr. Gonzalez ordering food for dinner from Burger King. He buys five Rodeo Cheeseburgers, two chicken sandwiches, two small Sprites and one large Dr Pepper.

  The total for all that food, with tax, is $11.48, or a meagre $2.87 per person. As Mr. Gonzalez passes everything out and the family starts to eat, Mrs. Gonzalez’s voice narrates: “We didn’t even think about healthy eating because we used to think everything was healthy. Now that I know that the food is really unhealthy for us, I feel guilty giving it to my kids.”

  The movie cuts to the Gonzalez family grocery shopping. The younger daughter wants a pear. They’re on sale for 99 cents per pound.

  “First check to see how many are there for a pound,” her mother says before walking off to join her husband.

  The older sister grabs one and puts it on the scale. Her face is impassive, the way your face gets when you’re used to poverty’s heartbreak. The way it gets when you spend your life watching, helpless, as your parents struggle against an unrelenting tide, knowing the day will come when you must navigate that stormy sea yourself.

  “Not worth it, honey,” she says to her younger sister. “You can only get, like, two or three.”

  She places a hand on the back of her sister’s head and leads her away. The little girl may not understand now, but one day she’ll learn, the way all poor kids must. Poor people can’t afford good health. Poor people can’t even afford five-cent plastic bags. My family certainly couldn’t. Dad always sent us searching for empty cardboard boxes we could use instead. We’d scour the shelves for any box we could empty quickly. We’d dig through bins full of cardboard that management kept at the front of the cheapest grocery stores, knowing families like ours wouldn’t waste money on plastic bags. We couldn’t even if we wanted to. Every nickel counts when you’re poor.

  When I was a kid I thought grocery shopping was exciting. There were so many colourful boxes calling out to me, so many empty calories jockeying for their chance to be ground between my increasingly porous, cavity-riddled teeth. By the time I was eight I knew better than to ask my parents to buy me anything, but my little brother Jon was only four, so he still had hope. He would grab the brightest box with the most sugar inside, sheepishly show it to our mother, then when she shook her head and told him to put it back, say, “That’s okay. Maybe next time,” not daring, even at four years old, to let his disappointment weigh on her. Somehow, he’d already learned what poverty meant, how it shaped your needs, your desires, your expectations. All before he’d entered kindergarten.

  The reason junk food is so much cheaper than nutritious food is the U.S. government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. The U.S. government subsidizes what are called “cash crops”: wheat, corn and soybeans. They push farmers to overproduce these crops, which farmers then sell at a deep discount to companies that turn them into high-fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein, refined carbohydrates—all the primary ingredients in food poor families rely upon, both in Canada and in the U.S.

  Since empty calories are both cheap and widely available, it should be no surprise that the biggest indicator of obesity is a person’s income level. And since so many Western countries are built on white supremacy, it should also come as no surprise that the biggest indicator of poverty is race. In Canada, a staggering one in five racialized families live in poverty, as opposed to one in twenty white families. This puts many poor, racialized families in the position where they have no choice but to rely on cheap, unhealthy food and, as a result, support the same companies that have converted their poverty into corporate profit in the first place.

  By encouraging farmers to overproduce cash crops, the U.S. government has ultimately helped corporations create a food economy where poor, racialized communities depend upon unhealthy food to survive. And because poor diet has been linked to health problems such as type 2 diabetes, heart problems, cancer and stroke, this would also mean that the U.S. government has been essentially paying for poor, racialized people to become sick through its crop subsidy program. In some ways this is to be expected. Capitalism always prioritizes profit over people. But it raises the question: if these crop subsidies dispr​oport​ionat​ely affected white people’s health and well-being the way they dispr​oport​ionat​ely impact racialized people’s health and well-being, would they still be in place?

  Consider Sherronda J. Brown’s “narrative of pain.” In her essay “Decolonizing Empathy: Why Our Pain Will Never Be Enough to Disarm White Supremacy,” Brown describes a nursing book that was recalled for its descriptions of how racialized people—including “Arabs/Muslims,” “Asians,” “Blacks,” “Jews,” “Hispanics” and “Native Americans”—supposedly responded to pain. According to this book, as a Native American I can endure a very high level of pain before requesting pain meds. My husband, who has seen me pop Tylenol at even the slightest sign of a headache, would be very surprised to hear this.

  The glaring omission from this list is the white race. One can assume why. For white people, other white people are considered “normal,” and therefore unremarkable, meaning their pain is also “normal” and therefore unremarkable. This is how you can tell white supremacy is functioning the way it’s supposed to: because white people are the standard by which all others are measured. If white people are the ones who are “normal,” that means racialized people are by default “abnormal.” Further, Brown argues that if white people believe Black, Indigenous and people of colour “don’t feel pain in the same way that they do,” then white people also “don’t see us as being human in the same way that they are.”

  This bias is very convenient for countries like Canada and the U.S., which still have mostly white populations. If racialized people aren’t considered human, it’s okay for them to have unhealthy bodies. It’s okay if they have unhealthy minds. It’s okay if the state submits them to violence and trauma again and again and again, withholding justice and relief. All the pain white governments have historically caused racialized people can be justified; all the pain they’re causing racialized people today can be justified; all the pain they will ever cause racialized people can forever be justified. After all, racialized people can’t really feel pain the same way white folks can anyway.

  Though American health studies have often neglected to obtain statistical facts on Indigenous people, the Canadian government has not. In fact, they’ve gathered information specifically about Indigenous peoples and health. In 1973, the Department of National Health and Welfare released Nutrition Canada, which was the result of nearly ten years of surveys on the food and nutrition of Canadians. As Krista Walters
points out in her paper, “ ‘A National Priority’: Nutrition Canada’s Survey and the Disciplining of Aboriginal Bodies, 1964–1975,” the nutrition analysts in this survey decided to group both white settlers and immigrants into a giant group they called the “national population.” Two groups were excluded from this category: “Indians” and “Eskimos.”

  “The construction of these groupings underscores the special otherness of Aboriginal bodies,” Walters writes, “and the form of data collection and conclusions drawn well illustrate that this government funded project aimed not simply to raise the standard of health in Canada but was part of the state’s ongoing agenda to assimilate Aboriginal peoples.”

  How is gathering information specifically about Aboriginal peoples’ health related to assimilation? It seems like a harmless enough venture, perhaps even beneficial considering how often statistics on Indigenous populations are conveniently ignored. However, as Walters points out, the study doesn’t distinguish any other cultural, religious, class or ethnic groups. Everyone other than “Indians” and “Eskimos” is lumped together as “nondescript Canadian citizenry, distinguished in the published reports only by region, age, and gender.”

  If the government wanted stats on Indigenous peoples’ health so they could measure the effects of colonialism, intending to develop methods to counter and correct those effects, the decision to segregate Indigenous peoples from the “national population” would be completely justified. But the survey itself did not consider the effects reserves, the Indian Act and residential schools have had on traditional diets and food knowledge. Nor did it consider the limited access to fresh food on reserves, or the higher costs of food on reserves compared with in urban centres.

  Instead, accessible Indigenous foods like wild game, tubers, berries, wild rice and fish were considered “country food” and treated as “limited and supplementary.” Certain methods of preparing food were called “primitive,” a word that has been very effectively used throughout history to delegitimize Indigenous peoples’ knowledge and culture. Essentially, Walters writes, if any person practised food preparation or relied on nutrition that deviated from the norms of settler Canadians, they were “pathologized as practising poor nutrition.”

  We must consider this in context. By the 1960s, people within the Canadian government were well aware of their policies of starvation used to clear the plains. They were aware of the way residential schools starved and malnourished Indigenous children in their care. They were aware of policies they had written and enforced that prohibited Indigenous people from participating in traditional hunting and fishing on their own territory. They also knew that they had forced many Indigenous communities to relocate to completely different lands, making it sometimes impossible to rely on food sources that may have been abundant before, but were scarce in their new homes.

  These are only a handful of government policies that have targeted Indigenous bodies, all of which have had devastating effects on our health. By ignoring these policies but emphasizing their effects, the Canadian government’s survey makes Indigenous people seem inherently unhealthy. And if we as Indigenous people are inherently unhealthy, well then, we’re going to need Canada’s help to become healthy again, aren’t we? We might have to come live in cities, where there’s more access to fresh fruits and vegetables. We might have to give up our lands and treaty rights. We might have to watch as inherently healthy Canadians move onto our homelands and build houses and grocery stores and set up farmers’ markets and community gardens. We might have to pretend the very colonialism that has cursed us will suddenly, inexplicably, save us.

  It’s all in our best interest, really.

  Whenever I looked at the food pyramid in school I was both confused and amazed. How could anyone eat three to five servings of vegetables in a day? Each member of my family only ever had one heaping spoonful of canned vegetables per day. Soft and salty string beans or mushy boiled carrots or peas like deflating balloons.

  There’s a certain shame in learning about the food pyramid when you’re poor. Just like Canada’s nutrition survey in the 1960s, teachers who preach the gospel of the food pyramid assume that if you’re eating unhealthily, you have a choice. That if you’re eating unhealthily, it’s entirely your fault. I felt this shame acutely when I was in high school. We had to track our food for a few days in health class to measure our diet against what we were supposed to be eating according to the food pyramid. My diet, like the diets of so many poor and racialized families, consisted mostly of carbs, dairy and fat. There was very little protein, fibre, fruits or vegetables. As I filled out the worksheets, I knew that I was failing, that my family was failing. I lied to make myself seem healthier, adding tallies of fresh fruit and protein where really there was none. None of the worksheets mentioned that healthy food was more expensive, or that food banks mostly relied on giving out non-perishables to families like mine, families that visited at least one food bank every month, our hands outstretched, hoping for boxes of cereal and day-old doughnuts. In the photocopied utopia of these worksheets, there was no poverty. There were only these facts:

  Fats, Oils and Sweets: use sparingly

  Milk, Yogurt and Cheese: 2–3 servings

  Meat, Poultry, Fish, Dry Beans, Eggs and Nuts: 2–3 servings

  Vegetables: 3–5 servings

  Fruits: 2–4 servings

  Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta: 6–11 servings

  I’d stare at the list and try to imagine what it would be like to be that well fed. For the first year and a half of high school I didn’t eat anything for lunch. My dad had inquired about enrolling me in a government-subsidized lunch program, which I’d relied on for hot lunches when we lived in the States. They didn’t have anything like that in Canada, though. My dad never told me this with words. I only figured it out when I saw him focus on my younger brothers, whom he now had to pack lunches for every day—something he’d never had to do, or budget for, before. He knew the teachers’ attention would be on my brothers’ lunchboxes, not mine; that if they weren’t properly filled, social services could bang down our door and take my brothers away. I knew this was my father’s biggest fear: his children disappearing into the foster care system. I could see it in his eyes when he ran to the convenience store first thing in the morning to buy peanut butter for their lunches, or, when he realized peanut butter was no longer allowed in schools, small microwavable cans of ravioli.

  I was thirteen, though. Practically an adult. I had to fend for myself. A few times a week my friend Amber took pity on me and would buy me some twelve-cent Timbits to hold me over, or a thirty-five-cent pizza bun from Zehrs. My real daily food pyramid—the one I would have filled out if I hadn’t been too ashamed—remained mostly empty and always unhealthy. No one seemed to notice or care. It was probably safer that way, considering what happened to the poor Native kids who were noticed. After all, according to teachers and social workers, journalists and politicians, neighbours and total strangers, the parents who could check off the proper boxes on the food pyramid were the only ones who really deserved children anyway.

  The first time I went to my future husband Mike’s house, in grade eleven, I took one look at their stocked cupboards, the fruits on their kitchen table, their two full freezers, and I thought he and his single mother were rich. Patty was on disability due to her epilepsy and worked part-time caring for disabled children. The government deducted her income from her monthly disability cheque, so it didn’t help all that much. In other words, Patty was definitely not rich. She was just smart enough to stock up on food when it was on sale.

  Patty had picked up this stockpiling technique from her mother, Betty. Betty often went hungry as a child because her parents thought the men in the family needed food more than she did. They lived on a farm, and though her brothers were supposed to be doing chores and manual labour, proving their masculine worth, Betty was often the one left doing everything, her stomach concave, empty.

  When I found out
about this, I couldn’t help but think of my family. While I know my parents’ focus on my brothers’ lunches wasn’t a deliberate attempt to starve me, I also know that both Betty’s parents and my own had a choice to make, and we were the ones who lost. How many families must make that choice? How many children must lose?

  Sometimes I wonder whether Betty binged on food once she started making her own money, the way I did once I had a job. Whether she, too, tried to fill her stomach to bursting to make up for all the times it wasn’t full in her youth.

  Maybe it was just me.

  It is only recently that Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples has been referred to as genocide, and even then, it’s usually been “cultural genocide,” as if that somehow softens its edges and makes it more permissible. More Canadian.

  Brent Bezo, in The Impact of Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma from the Holodomor Genocide of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, describes how the Holodomor, a forced starvation that killed millions of Ukrainians, undermined its victims’ lives:

  [Holodomor survivors] reported that the confiscation of food, personal property and homes rendered them “bare” and resulted in the complete loss of traditional means to independently support, look after, and maintain themselves and their families. This loss was reported as a “destruction” of independent self-sufficiency that was a “deliberate act to break the will of the Ukrainian people” and “to show people” “that they would not become independent Ukrainian people.”