Lack/Nothingness
The terms “lack” and “nothingness” permeate academic works concerned with food access, and refer to the understanding of locales experiencing forms of food apartheid as places that are “void” or “empty”. Terms like “food desert” further this kind of assumption, as do conversations around food security that focus solely on what’s missing in these communities rather than asking how people living through food apartheid are understanding and responding to their experiences.
What this project entails is an interrogation of lack and nothingness: how they permeate in our food systems and what the narrativization of spaces categorized as “lacking” entails. The presence of the void is an indication of a naturalized material reality that has resulted from the very human processes of food apartheid, land theft, and capitalist exploitation. As such, rather than taking the nothingness at face value, we must see these spaces as openings with which to uncover the narrative that obscures the aforementioned processes.
Even as these spaces, places, and maps are written off as sites of “nothingness,” the people left in this void are actively “demonstrat[ing] the opposite of lack: strategizing, informed decision making, and nuanced understandings of not only the systemic failures of the food system but also what they desired in a shopping experience” (Reese 51). Additionally, even as these spaces lack the choices that other, “something” spaces might hold, residents are intent on creating new choices through refusal, seeking self-reliant community to counteract the absence of choice that lives in food systems of forced dependence. Residents transform these environments deemed “voids,” “deserts,” “wastelands,” and both critique the imposition of this narrative upon their home and find opportunity for nourishment within the desert.
Lack and nothingness are ideological narratives structured to naturalize a deliberate material reality. Yes, there are less supermarkets, less fresh produce, less immediately visible options for sustenance in these “voids,” but there are also long-seeded desires, organizations, movements, and futures of material abundance that provide material and spiritual nourishment. We are taught to see only the absence that has been imposed on these spaces, but the residents force us to look beyond the void and witness the great potential for flourishing that rests on the horizon.
