Food: A Deadly Weapon

Three Australian women were responsible for the world's first conference on "Women and Food — Feminist Perspectives" held at the University ofN. S.W. in Sydney from 25—27 February, 1982. The following is an interview with Charlotte Bunch who attended the conference. It was first published in Girls' Own No. 7 1982 (P.O. Box
188, Wentworth Building, Sydney University 2006, AUSTRALIA).

In your panel- address on the first morning of the Women and Food Conference you spoke about the fact that male society uses "Food as a Deadly Weapon". You said that we urgently need to develop strategies to counter this attack on our lives, and to reclaim control over yet another part of our bodies. You expressed our need to reassess, redistribute and decentralise food-resources and food-management. In short, that we need to bring feminism to bear on local and global food policies. Do you feel that this conference has brought us any closer to this aim

I think that — by and large — the feminist movement has not yet addressed the questions of food and food policies in any significant way. Therefore, I feel, the role of this conference was really that of consciousness-raising as to the importance of this political area for us. ... In that sense, this conference has taken us one baby-step towards
what is a much more difficult longterm process. ...

How do you reconcile the lack of focus in this conference with the fact that global awareness of food issues has been readily available for a few years in such work as Susan George's How the Other Half Dies or Frances Moore-Lappe's Food First — Beyond the Myth of Scarcity or Diet for a Small Planet to name just a couple of examples?

For me, this is connected to the lack of politics in the whole conference — an academic avoidance of politics, which is frequent in such events. Actually, someone said to me later that they wished I had talked more about Susan George's work. One of the outstanding things to realise in a conference discussing food, was how few
people knew the substantial work — in this case even done by women — on this topic. I find it astonishing that we couldn't deal from that base. To me this says something about the degree to which the existing women's movement has become isolated from the information and knowledge of political issues that are not necessarily viewed
as feminist per se. I suspect from what.

I have seen of the women's movement, both in Sydney and in the US, that the majority of women do not have any idea who Susan George or Frances Moore-Lappe are, and feel that they can afford to be ignorant about such issues. Although neither of these two authors are defined as feminists, they have written important political work
that we need to learn from. Part of the strength of our movement comes out in our ability to do just that. ...

There are many examples of activist campaigns around food issues, where women so far have not involved themselves enough. As an example, I have been working for a couple of years in the Infant Formula Action Coalition, an activist group raising public awareness on one of the most horrendous multinational crimes — open profiteering
from children's and women's lives, which should concern not the Third World alone. This is primarily a women's issue seeing that it revolves around the first food we as women can give to children. It, therefore, lends itself ideally to combine the fight against multinationals with demands for women's rights in the workplace. Unfortunately,
around the globe, the campaign has remained primarily in male hands and this is thus misusing the issue of breastfeeding to force women back into the home. At this conference, an appeal for help was typically answered primarily by many Third World women, while none of the Australians stepped forward, except for the few already
involved in other active food campaigns. Do you feel that women need to become active in such areas of global importance.

Sure. This is primarily a woman's issue. The boycott of Nestle has brought phenomenal public awareness. I mean, when a campaign has managed to force
a high official in the US to resign from public office, you know that you have reached a high level of pubUc awareness. So, I agree that this issue is a good model, because it has involved all the necessary processes: the academic work essential to investigate the case, the propaganda campaigns to let people know about it, and the activist
work to show that people really care. That was how it became an issue which can no longer be ignored. ...

You are asking for actions which dramatise the fact that the First World is using up 85 percent of all the world's food-resources, not to even mention other resources, and thus literally living off the Third World?

Yes, just take cash crops like coffee or tea. We need to expose the ways in which the industrialised nations exploit the food grown in the Third World by manipulating the market and the prices until the growers do not get enough for their produce to survive.

How do you feel about the trend of some of the conference speakers to see women's traditional role as controllers of food preparation as an important power, which needs to be recognised and secured?

I did hear this assertion and was amazed that it was made. Obviously, for women to control the kitchens and the stoves is hardly to control the power situation we live in. ... There clearly were some problems in this conference, since some of the speakers openly did not identify as feminists, and since there was not much effort made to say
what it meant to call it a feminist conference. For me, the term feminism is an absolutely crucial political definition for my life, and how I approach things. I am quite happy with there being a lot of diversity and debate over what each of us means by 'feminist', but that variety exists within a framework of trying to understand feminism
as a basic approach to all issues which question sexual politics and power or domination.

However, in my contact with Third World women - and in a sUghtly different way, with our own women new to the term feminism - I have experienced that we cannot discuss the term without also recognising and dealing with the ways in which the male-controlled mass media have intentionally distorted feminism. Feminism is either seen as a very small number of very privileged women trying to become the heads of General Motors or the president of the US. While I don't necessarily object to this, it is hardly the
core of a feminist approach.

Are you saying that Third World women have fears that feminism will see women rise into white men's imperialist positions?

Yes — white women as becoming interchangeable with white men as the oppressors of the Third World. That is one way they see us and that is obviously
neither attractive nor relevant to their struggle for change.

The second stereotype, which we have to deal with, is the way in which feminism has been trivialised by way of the extreme image of the bra-burning, frustrated,  crazy lesbian. As a lesbian I have to cope with the fact that many of the Third World women I would Uke to work with have received only this negative image, which again presents us as essentially privileged, though not power hungry, but just as irrelevant to their political concerns. ...

I had to become sensitive in two ways. First, is not to deny, in any way repudiate repudiate or quit using feminism as a definition for myself, but that I also need to provide women with an explanation of what it means to me.... The second part is to then let go of our need for them to use the term feminism. People respect you for being and staying with what you are, but at the same time, we have to stop expecting that this is how they would want to identify. They need the space for that to evolve in
their own way. In turn, we can then learn from their process, and this will give us dimensions of feminism that we were missing before.

Are you saying that in many ways — even as feminists — we share some of white men's imperialist views of the world and therefore need to challenge our own prejudices before we start this kind of work?

Right — that has shaped our perceptions of issues. No matter how well intentioned we are, our cultural limitations sometimes prevent us from seeing beyond a certain point. What we have to show is how we are not identifying with that in what we are trying to achieve....

In this regard, I think, any women's conference or meeting that attempts to be international or to incorporate more than one particular cultural group, needs to devote a major portion of its time initially simply to the process of defining and putting forward who we are and what our assumptions are to each other — in such a way so
we can then begin to work together.