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9 Environmental and Food Justice Toward Local, Slow, and Deep Food Systems Teresa M. Mares and Devon G. Peña Recently, the second author had a fascinating conversation with an acquaintance who identifies as a vegan activist. Living in the Pacific Northwest, she is highly committed to the Slow Food Movement and explained her philosophy of the connections between slow and local food: If you go slow that means you also go local. Slow leads to local. I only eat local grains, veggies, fruits, and nuts. Every meal is slow-cooked from organic ingredients grown slowly by farmers that I know personally. Many are close friends and I often work on their farms for the food I need. I have become self-reliant and I have helped the local farmers become self-reliant. This unites slow and local food ethics. Together with my vegan diet, I am reducing my own carbon footprint. . . . The vegan philosophy means I am not guilty of inflicting pain on others including animals or the people who go hungry because so many of us still eat dead animal protein. The second author then asked this vegan friend to explain more about the communities where her farmer friends live and work. All are white farmers who live in the Skagit watershed north of Seattle or the Chehalis watershed south. When asked if the vegan activist knew the names of the Native American first nations inhabiting these watersheds, her response was a disappointing surprise: Well, in the Skagit, you know, there are a lot of multigenerational farmers who are not Native American. They have been here a long time and have as much stake in this watershed as any one else. But I don’t remember the names of, you know, any tribes. I haven’t met any Indians myself, so I really can’t tell you much about the cultural history of the area. . . . It is also a problem with, or because of the conflicts over salmon recovery. The Indians and the farmers are fighting it out but I am not that well read on the matter. This response came as a surprise because we naively expected that anyone with the values and ethics to become an advocate for local and slow food would also be concerned with the foodways of Native 198 Chapter 9 communities in a given locality. Surely, one must be aware of the deep history of places to practice a politics of consuming local and slow food. Is it not essential in supporting local food systems to consider the severely crippled state of local Native food systems and the forced disappearance of heritage cuisines, resulting from the impact that even the most organic, vegan-friendly settler-farmers might be exerting on indigenous resource rights? Our vegan friend lacked knowledge of Native ethnobotany, the rich traditions related to the collection and use of wild plants recognized and valued for their nutritional, medicinal, and spiritual properties. She did not know any of the wild mushrooms in the Skagit or Chehalis watersheds that are still harvested by Native people. Camus bulbs and huckleberries ? Not aware. Further, she did not seem to fully realize the impacts of modern forestry, agribusiness (including organics), and urban sprawl on the habitat of native species in the area. By only considering the direct impacts of her food consumption practices, she drastically overestimated and simplified the degree of reducing her personal ecological footprint. Lacking depth about the environmental history of the lands of the Skagit and Chehalis, she assumed that organic farmers were necessarily sustainable and equitable. Lacking deep local knowledge, she could not estimate a more accurate rendition of the “ecological footprint” she partakes in by being a beneficiary of generations of structural violence and intergenerational historical trauma experienced by Native peoples and their floral and faunal kin in the Puget Sound bioregion. While we both respect the commitment and self-reliant ethics that often accompany attempts to eat locally and slowly, and embrace the critique of corporate globalization that originally spurred the slow food movement abroad;1 this exchange leaves us with many questions. First, is it deep enough merely to consider our carbon footprints, or must we consider the broader societal and cultural footprints that we leave behind? Second, should we not also consider how a call to eat locally invokes spaces that have been settled, colonized, ruptured, and remade through complex processes of human movement and environmental history making? And finally, is...

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