Written by: Liesl Stewart

In 2015, the governments of the USA and South Africa fought about chickens–chicken meat, to be precise. The US congress had given South Africa special trading status to export goods to the US without import taxes, amounting to many jobs for South Africans. But, under the Obama administration, the US government threatened to withdraw this favorable trading position when South Africa began putting high taxes on imports of US chicken “waste meat” (for example, the leftover cuts from the white meat portions that US and European consumers prefer).¹ This meant less money for US chicken farming corporations. South African chicken farming businesses wanted these taxes because, without them, the US chicken would be cheaper to buy in South African supermarkets than the locally-farmed chicken meat. The South African government finally gave in, allowing for 65,000 tons of US chicken imports into the country annually.²These were high economic stakes for both US and South African farms, and millions of farmed chickens, plus the livelihoods of working people, were caught in the crossfire.

The globalizing, corporate food systems are driven by money and power, not by health and nutrition, nor by creaturekindness. The colonization of foods and diets has been multilayered over the past centuries, and colonization continues in the ways that corporations dominate food systems. These systems are colonial and racist to their core, and they wield violence against peoples, animals, and the earth.³ Governments posture and flex their muscles as they collude with powerful food corporations that lobby for more power over economically vulnerable countries. More and more, these corporations determine not only what we eat but who eats and who doesn’t, who eats too much, who eats well, how much nutrition they get, and whether or not it’s enough to fill people’s stomachs. The escalating globalization of food systems affects whole culinary cultures, as well as individual households’ diets throughout the world.

South Africa, where I’m based, is a good example of this. In a recent blog, I shared parts of an interview I did with the Reverend Tsakani Sibanda, a Church of the Nazarene pastor in Khayelitsha, one of the largest townships in Cape Town. I asked Rev. Sibanda about how she sees global food systems impacting her parishioners’ diets in their underserved community, where there are financial and geographical limitations to accessing healthy, nutritious food. Below, I have described parts of our conversation, which I’ve interspersed with direct quotes from her.

Rev. Sibanda: “When we’re saying we want to address the food systems, for me … that’s the wrong place to start, because this is not about food, it’s about money. It’s about the economic system. It’s about greed. It’s about understanding what drives this thing. Is it people-driven? No. It’s money-driven … [Because the system is money-driven] we can exploit all of God’s Creation… we can have such huge food waste, and have people starving … So, we know this is not about food, right? There’s plenty of food. This is about money.

What happened with the trade agreement with Obama? … They Insisted we have to take the chicken from America or else we lose the whole trade deal! … That was forced on us because this is not about the food; this is about money; this is about power.”

When I asked Rev. Sibanda about the lack of affordable healthy food in Khayelitsha, she offered important insights about the abusive, predatory nature of food corporations and their aggressive marketing. She likens the situation to an abuse survivor who has been groomed by the perpetrator.

Rev. Sibanda: “I was talking recently about how much research goes into food, to play with it in the lab, and play with our palates, so our palates have been trained to eat, our eyes have been trained to see things in a different way, and think, “Oh this is so appealing!” So we constantly feel like we made a choice, we constantly feel like this is what we wanted. We’ve been made to eat the foods that we eat. We’ve been exploited here for the benefit of the corporates, for the benefit of whoever is making the most out of this.

We are groomed psychologically to think this is the food we want …You feel like it’s your decision, that as a victim you agreed to this. We’ve been trained, we’ve been mentored, we’ve been groomed into liking those things that are not good for us. When talking about access [of nutritious food] … if you made those foods available here, who would eat them? Yes, it’s about access but it’s also that we’ve been trained. The system has been manipulated so that we do not have food access [to healthy food].”

Indeed, these foods are advertised to the public with massive corporate budgets, shaping access and creating markets for their products. Sophisticated advertising works to spin a web of promise – promise that consumers will be living the “good life” by consuming certain products. Whether looking at a box of breakfast cereal in Mexico, a can of Coke in Korea, or a pack of chicken drumsticks in South Africa (with happy, free-roaming chickens on their labels), consumers are asked to believe in the story that’s being sold with the product. And big money has been poured into research and marketing to make people want to buy those branded products that have traveled across continents. Aggressive and targeted food marketing hammers away at us almost unnoticed, shaping our tastes and diets.⁴

Food is money, and this reality has huge health implications. Health experts widely agree that many countries are in a “nutrition transition.”⁵ Food corporations continue the legacy of colonizing food systems, while driving more and more people away from their traditional foods. For the Global South, this often means adopting a Westernized diet of foods that are high in salt, refined sugars, refined grains, and animal fats. These foods aren’t nutritious enough to sustain good health for the long term and can lead to chronic health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease, which are already among the top causes of death for US citizens.

Ironically, because of this colonization and aggressive marketing, the Westernized diet has been pushed as aspirational, suggesting proximity to wealth and whiteness. It is falsely promoted as the healthier choice, while local, traditional diets are being rejected because they are negatively associated with primitivity, Blackness, and bad health. One tragedy of this is that the Westernized diet ends up replacing local, traditional diets, which are healthier and often more plant-based. In the last few centuries, missionaries, governments, and colonial business powers saw that local, traditional crops were replaced with foreign cereals and other mono-crops. Rev. Sibanda spoke about the loss of traditional foods that people knew how to grow and prepare, and that were healthier to eat.

Rev. Sibanda: “We were told that using natural herbs was demonic … So then we had the psychology that what was good for us, and what we lived on [traditionally] was deemed to not be good, until it was repackaged differently and now it’s ‘good’ for us. We couldn’t eat this, because … we had been made to believe it was ‘poor people’s’ food. And now all these foods can be resold to us [as healthier].”

Indeed, often South Africans are averse to eating foods they associate with times of poverty and historical hardship. Mpho Tshukudu and Anna Trapido, authors of the book Eat Ting, explain that many traditional South African foods “bear witness to the culinary creativity of a community under stress.” In this case, they’re referring to the oppressive Apartheid years. As a result, “Many of us have a love-hate relationship with so called ‘poverty foods.’ In the rush to shed the indignity of apartheid and poverty, we have abandoned many of the nutritious tastes of those times in favour of foreign junk food. Very few people have attempted to reintroduce pre-colonial, pre-apartheid dietary diversity into their daily lives.”⁶

Rev. Sibanda: “My mom used to grow sorghum. We grew up on that. Then we understood it to be ‘poor people’s’ food [and we didn’t want it].”

The most recent Barefoot Guide publication⁷, which focuses on traditional foods in the different countries of the African continent, explains: “The beauty of traditional dishes and diets is that they treat food as food where we care about how it is grown as well as its social, psychological and cultural role in contributing to our quality of life in body, mind, soul and community.”⁸ Some of the traditional greens and grains are now being reclaimed more widely, but often businesses are also repackaging them as super-foods with higher price tags, making them less affordable.

This isn’t unique to South Africa or other southern African countries (like CreatureKind Fellow Linda Ncube’s country of Zimbabwe, which she wrote about in a CreatureKind blog). Many peoples and communities globally have similar stories to tell. It’s also interesting to note that many traditional diets have a bigger focus on plant-based foods than the Westernized diet that’s constantly pedaled by corporations. There is much to learn from people who know about growing, processing, and preparing local, regionally-adapted, indigenous foods.

You might be thinking: This is all quite interesting, but what on earth does this have to do with farmed animals? CreatureKind is focused on the liberation of farmed animals, after all!

Farmed animals are caught up in the destructive ways of our corporate, globalizing food systems. Take the millions of chickens caught in the middle of the trade negotiations mentioned above: neither government was concerned with the welfare of the millions of chicken creatures. Store-bought chicken meat in both countries almost always comes from factory-farmed chickens.

Whether we’re looking at a pack of chicken meat in a South African or US supermarket (or elsewhere), big money has usually been poured into marketing that chicken to make us think it was raised roaming free on a lovely small family farm instead of living and dying in misery in a factory farming system. Meat labels are loaded with deceptive, often unregulated terms like free-range, humanely raised, natural, or cage-free, which are attempts by the meat companies to make us think the meat came from animals who lived and died on high welfare farms (known as humane washing).

We are sold outright lies about the treatment of farmed animals. We are lied to every day by food corporations who aren’t concerned with our health and nutrition, who aren’t concerned about the working conditions of farming and slaughterhouse employees, who aren’t concerned about destruction to local and shared environments, and who aren’t concerned with the welfare of the farmed animals. For them, this is about big profits.

Now is the time to pay attention to what is happening and to be aware of how marketing shapes our palates and our food choices. We shouldn’t underestimate how much we’ve been influenced by the relentless messaging of advertising, which doesn’t tell the truth about what we’re eating.

To end, I express my gratitude to Rev. Sibanda for sharing her thoughts so that we might all better understand what’s at stake in determining what we eat.

^{1. https://providencemag.com/2015/12/the-south-african-american-chicken-war/
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^{2. https://agoa.info/news/article/5715-south-african-poultry-shares-fall-on-us-chicken-deal.html↩}
^{3. Christopher Carter, on the Board of CreatureKind, explains this in great detail in his book The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice (University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 2021).↩}
^{4. Raj Patel offers helpful information on the relationship between food advertising and health impacts in Chapter 9: “Chosen by Bunnies” of his book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System (Harper Perennial, Toronto, 2007). ↩}
^{5. Barry M. Popkin, Linda S. Adair, and Shu Wen Ng, “The Global Nutrition Transition: The Pandemic of Obesity in Developing Countries,” Nutrition Review 70, Issue 1 (2012): 3-21, https://academic.oup.com/nutritionreviews/article/70/1/3/1829225?login=false
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^{6. Mpho Tshukudu & Anna Trapido, Eat Ting: Lose Weight, Gain Health, Find Yourself, 2016 Quivertree Publications, Rondebosch, South Africa, 12. While ending fat shaming is an important conversation gaining traction globally, this book has merit for a specific sociocultural context in South Africa.
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^{7. The Barefood Guide publications are free offerings of “Creative ideas, stories, practices and resources of social change leaders and practitioners from around the world.” https://www.barefootguide.org/.
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^{8. Barefoot Guide Agroecology Series: My Food is Africa: Healthy soil, safe foods and diverse diets, (2022), 3. https://www.barefootguide.org/barefoot-guide-10---my-food-is-african.html. ↩}