<
https://www.eater.com/23959807/food-sharing-disability-justice-movement-mutual-aid>
"“Oh, you want to know how you can support disability justice? MAKE SOMEONE A
POT OF SOUP!” my friend William Maria Rain, a true disability justice OG,
yelled at the audience at a disability justice panel at the D Center at the
University of Washington, circa 2014 or so. Someone had probably been wringing
their hands during the Q&A and timidly asking, “Um, what’s a good way to help
the disabled community?” William made the answer very plain: You help disabled
people by making sure we’re not dying of starvation in our apartments.
Disabled culture is full of food sharing and abundance. It’s one of the many
best-kept disabled secrets about how we love and show up for each other. I can
think of a million ways sick and disabled folks I know have shown me and each
other sweetness and survival through food, like the time my friend Syrus
Postmated me a dozen doughnuts from Toronto when I was having a three-day
mental breakdown, or the time my friend texted me to say they had extra apples
from the fruit-truck guy who sold outside their building, and would I like
some? All the way to the times during the 2020–2021 lockdown period of the
COVID-19 pandemic, when I regularly left a contract-free cooler full of extra
collards and tulsi I’d grown on my porch for anyone who needed it.
Crip food sharing is the truth, and it was never truer than when COVID-19 hit.
There’s a thing I call the art of disabled pessimism, where you are truly never
surprised at any kind of giant disaster or system-failure shitshow because the
system not working is not new to you. So when the news was still saying that
COVID-19 was just a mild cold and would definitely stay in Wuhan and not spread
throughout the world, I drove to DK Market, my local immigrant food warehouse
palace in Renton, Washington, and loaded up my cart with the immigrant survival
basics: a 50-pound sack of rice, multiple 5-pound bags of red lentils, the
really big can of olive oil, coconut milks galore, and enough tea to last for
the next three years. I figured my Sri Lankan grandmother, who fled the
Japanese invasion of Singapore on the last boat to Colombo, Sri Lanka, during
World War II, would have been proud of me for flexing my ancestral skills at
surviving disaster.
As COVID-19 did indeed spread all over the world, disabled folks were at
increased risk of dying due to care rationing or “ICUgenics,” a term coined by
disability justice organizers (including members of the NoBodyIsDisposable
Coalition) to describe proposed and ad-hoc ableist medical policies that deny
lifesaving care to the disabled, fat, and elderly, and/or Black, Indigenous,
and people of color (BIPOC) because of ableist beliefs that we have a supposed
low quality of life and are less deserving of vaccines, equipment, and care.
But at the same time, mutual aid and collective care networks were springing up
like wildfire."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: November 23, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-93389863
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
