Chills of love and respect kept going down my spine reading this account of the kitchens at Standing Rock, from activist-anthropologist-writer Liz Hoover, on an ever interesting and insightful blog.
Meal line up outside the mess hall of the Main Kitchen. Photo by Elizabeth Hoover
Since April, thousands of Indigenous people and their allies have converged on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and treaty lands, to support the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in their opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), slated to cross under the Missouri River directly upstream from the reservation. People have come from around the world to pray; to stand in opposition to Energy Transfer Partners and the Morton County Sheriff’s Department as well as 71 other law enforcement agencies; and to form community. Some people come for the weekend, others have quit their jobs and made resisting this pipeline their full time work. They spend their days building infrastructure at the camp, chopping wood, sorting donations, praying and singing at the main fire, and putting their bodies on the line between the land and an…
I love the slightly sour tang of creme fraiche, and the best brand to buy around here (with not too many retail choices) is Rachel’s Organic, a local, responsible, family-owned Welsh company in nearby Aberystwth. NOT. As their Facebook public relations person cheerily responds to any who mention the 2010 buyout by Nestle — there are many and you can be one too:
Hi XXXXX, thanks for getting in touch. Rachel’s is owned by Group Lactalis. LNCD is a joint venture between Lactalis and Nestle and here in the UK, Rachel’s is distributed by LNCD. We hope this helps, Best wishes, Rachel’s
If you want to stay on top of why Breastfeeding and Child Health advocates decry Nestle policies, Baby Milk Action has long been a place to to go. Breast Milk is the first best local, organic, easy, perfect, slow, wonderful, delicious, perfect food.
But after watching this video, I dislike Nestle even more, for it’s efforts, backed by all powers conferred by markets, governments and unwitting consumers, to seize and privatise water resources which are so fundamentally collectively owned, and to which, by any progressive vision of a social humanity, people, all people, have a right. It’s hardly complicated. There’s no argument, until people like this man begin to pretend they are disinterested stewards in the public interest. Bullshit.
This time round the Banality of Evil seems to hide its greed under an ideology of public good, and we see clearly the moment we’re in at which the Corporation seeks to justify it’s trumping of the role of State. State– which once could have been imagined in the interests and values and common resources of people (and planet), and now cedes to Humungous, ungovernable Money. And I would never actually call myself anti-capitalist. But I profoundly believe in common resources and genuine democracy.
If you watch Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a brilliant exploration of authoritarianism and social violence, you will be hard-pressed not to be reminded of this Peter Brabeck clip — so simultaneously extolling and critical of the Nestle project.
Meanwhile, on the home front:
I don’t pretend to myself that the Nestle boycott is supremely effective, and occasionally I still do buy Rachel’s Organic Creme Fraiche, though I seek to do so as seldom as possible. It’s so easy to “culture” your own with other cream you may have. In this case I bought some reduced from the Co-op (love those orange stickers), mixed the two together and thinned a little with some milk. By tomorrow, it will all be creme fraiche, and wonderful with … hmmmm, what shall I make… an easy Apple Crumble! As long as I can keep it fresh, spoonfuls of the stuff then can duly “culture” the next bit of cream there happens to be.
Not bringing revolution, but a small act of kitchen counter culture.
Meal line up outside the mess hall of the Main Kitchen. Photo by Elizabeth Hoover 
Kitchen Counter Culture 