This week’s papers have been bursting to the brim with Egypt’s crumbling government, Wikileaks, Kabul’s bombings, polio vaccines, Mandela’s illness, Kim Jong-Il’s successor, and the deportation of Uganda’s lesbians. But the most pressing issue cartwheeling through my brain? Grocery shopping.
My neighbourhood in New York City is a neighbourhood of barbershops converted into bookstores where the one man is shaved while ten more talk politics over blaring reggae. It is a neighbourhood of collard greens and bellowing church choirs and brownstone architecture and graffiti in sultry oranges and greens, of fire escapes and stoops and creased women pushing wire hampers down the cracking sidewalks. The grocery store on the corner jostles its customers up against bins of seeping papayas and bloody buckets of pigs’ tails; the Baptist church down the block was built by freed slaves two centuries ago. When I first moved to Bed-Stuy, I was one of the only white people for blocks. Other than mine, blue eyes were rare, and the only blondes I ever saw on the street often turned out to be my roommate. Within the past year, however, gentrification has hit full force, lining coffee shops, vegan co-ops, art galleries, and hipsters clad in their grandma’s skirts and faux-fox.
Neighbourhoods, cities, countries—they are all living organisms. They eat, breathe, grow, shrink, evolve, and migrate. They can contract diseases. Bed-Stuy’s hipster population could be compared to a pregnancy, one indicating the birth of a new culture. However, pregnancies are parasitic by nature, and this new parasite may be more than the neighbourhood can handle.
The white population is comprised mainly of liberal arts graduates from middle class backgrounds. These are the type of newcomers that replace former residents, drive up real estate value, and effectively raise the rent of the entire neighbourhood. The arrival of the white demographic also marks the departure of many of the neighbourhood’s businesses as the demand for hair-braiding salons and R&B record stores dwindles. I see most of the young white residents getting off the subway by the Fulton Street Grocery laden with recyclable Trader Joe’s bags full of fair-trade and organic products like brie, rosehip jam, and soy bacon. The local grocery store has felt the loss of its business enough to start carrying merchandise like almond milk and havarti cheese, but the commodities cost twice as much as they would even in a ritzy Manhattan health shop. If the new demographic can be compared to a fetus, it is evident that the population represented by the pregnant mother is weakening and wasting away.
Here I must pause and make a confession: in my opinion, havarti is heavenly. I own several of my grandmother’s skirts. I am a young white student who has attended a liberal arts school and lives in an artists’ collective; my need for housing played a role in the raising of my building’s rent. I am the parasite.
I am the parasite. But the rosehip jam in my refrigerator was sent from my mother in France. The bakery in which I am currently sitting is named for its original owner, Miss Dahlia, a freed slave, and I shop at the grocery stores I can see from my window. Buying food can be an ethically-complex process. Were peasants were coerced into selling their fertile land to multinational corporations? Does buying imported food from the neighbourhood grocery store undermine American farms? Am I paying outrageous prices for peaches in support of Bed-Stuy’s merchants and maids living in relative poverty only to leave the third-world fruit harvesters to pay the true price: absolute poverty at the hands of greedy corporations eager to extort surplus value from the workers? Myopic charity is just as damning as Dickens’ telescopic philanthropy, but I often feel helpless in a world where every meal I eat is somehow morally reprehensible.
So I choose Bed-Stuy. We have to pick our battles, find the pocket of injustice to which we find ourselves called. If each of us attends to our portion, acting as body parts in one united healing body, the entire corrupt system will begin to crumble. I have chosen Bedford-Stuyvesant, with its tropical turbans and hip-hop. This inevitable gentrification doesn’t have to be a feeble mother’s parasitic pregnancy. It can be a healthy pregnancy resulting in the birth of a joyful new baby to a robust, diverse, and harmonious family, and in pursuit of that goal, I will continue to smile at my neighbours over piles of chicken feet, mangos, and grits.
