Technologies of Mystification

More thoughts on food security.

The poor are those who don’t have enough money. – Leslie Dunbar, The Common Interest

In an essay in the newsletter Culture Study, finance writer Dana Miranda explores the myths about financial-help culture; budget advice, she argues, like diet advice, “does not work”. Miranda admits that her own financial well-being came about not because she learned to be more “responsible” with money, but because she made more of it, going from $12,000 a year as a freelancer to a salaried position that quadrupled her income. Miranda asks the reader to reconsider their perspective on money: “See how the world is or isn’t made for you based on your financial situation.”

The broader point of Miranda’s essay: In our current society as-is (i.e. neoliberal capitalism), cash is king and queen. Having more money not only reduces or eliminates the omnidirectional, debilitating stress of just being poor, but also allows people to improve their material circumstances, e.g. secure safe and stable housing, access transportation, provide for their children and other dependents, care better for their health, set aside savings – and, obviously, eat. 

Numerous studies on universal basic income, not to mention the ad-hoc, real-world experiments of pandemic relief payments, further demonstrate how money functions as a panacea to poverty, improving agency, savings, diet diversity, mental health, and so on. 

If we share legitimate concern for the poor, then, our goal should be to eliminate poverty. A war on poverty, one way or another, aims to redistribute wealth and opportunity; the fight against “food insecurity” creates … well-meaning nonprofits and NGOs (on which the state can offload responsibility), food banks, educational programs, conferences, infographics on social media, and so on. That is, as I described in my first essay on food security, “neoliberal moves to innocence”; however sincere our intentions might be, we treat the symptoms, not the problem.

But I think there’s another way of looking at this. In the essay “What Matters”, Walter Benn Michaels describes how neoliberal anti-racism can function as a “technology of mystification” in the American context, one that aims to create a “crucial and entirely specious” bond between “poor black people and rich white ones” in the name of diversity. The non-white poor, he describes, can at least be confident that wealthy white people, as long as they employ the correct manners of speech, aren’t racist or sexist – despite the fact that they, the poor, have been economically disenfranchised by the same system that creates that wealth. In a culture of left-versus-right neoliberalism, Michaels argues, we no longer have to concern ourselves with the distribution of wealth and power: “[We] can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect.”

I think the idea of “technology of mystification” proves useful in examining neoliberal food-security discourse, as well, which tends to render the rather simple and relatable idea of inequality into something obtuse and technocratic – like securitization, mill rates, etc. Without the requisite, almost rote-sounding explanations (food security is ….), neoliberal concepts of social justice feel beyond the immediate comprehension of the average person. And that’s where the mystification comes in: The afflicted aren’t poor, or hungry, or sleeping rough, for example; they’re “food insecure”, or “unhoused”. Nothing changes, of course (at least not for the better), and every generation or so, we refresh the lexicon and launch new initiatives – rather than restructure the ways in which our systems apportion wealth, power and privilege.

Ultimately, there’s a very simple way to approach the question of food security, and that is not to ask who is “food insecure”, but who isn’t. The answer should prove obvious: people with adequate means.

If anything, this tells us that the problem isn’t food insecurity, at all.