Mabi David wears many hats: poet, published author, fermentation teacher, food activist. I came across her Instagram page through a friend when I was just a few months into (mostly) plant-based eating. And though it’s her fermentation projects, which she generously shares on social media, that initially drew me in, her food activism and work with Good Food Community were what really opened my eyes to the issues that plague our food system, our urban poor, and especially our farmers, and made me confront my own shortsightedness when it came to food justice.
For Mabi, the phrase ‘food is political,’ is not just some empty platitude posted on Instagram for likes. It informs everything she does. I got in touch with her a couple of weeks ago to interview her (via email) about how she became vegan, how ordinary people can help reshape the food system, and what Filipino food looks like decolonized.
(The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Photos courtesy of Mabi David except when stated.)
Hi, Mabi. How has the pandemic affected your day-to-day and what’s been keeping you busy?
I’ve mostly worked from home for much of my adult life, a good percentage of my work life was freelance, so the sheltering-in-place, I was able to adjust to. This year, I joined Good Food Community to work on advocacy, partnerships, and communications, all of which I am quite lucky to be able to do within the safe confines of my home.
This means I sort of have a daily and a weekly structure in place, shaped by work demands, which help me a lot given that a lack of form is a major stressor for me, and to have days blur into each other in the middle of a pandemic while seeing the infections rise, and the government’s response, can take its toll on anyone’s emotional and mental well-being, which we need work hard daily to protect given so much is at stake.
Admittedly it’s challenging to work within such a context, witnessing its dire impacts on the more vulnerable, which our work also exposes us to. It’s like trying to be “productive” in the middle of a war. There are good days, and there are bad days. It’s an emotional rollercoaster and I find I need to carve out time for physical activity, and that means working in the kitchen, which takes me out of my head and my tendency to doomscroll, and instead grounds me and nourishes me for further action.
When did you start eating vegan and how were you introduced to it?
Having given up meat since my early 20s, veganism was the logical next step that I had put off taking for the longest time. Mainly because my vegetarianism was about health and little to do with animals.
I loved dairy products despite my lactose intolerance and thought of it as a health food. I became vegan in 2016 after reading The China Study, which showed the undeniable link between animal products and chronic diseases. Specifically, the experiments where the clinical researchers turned the cancer cells on and off in rats with the addition and removal of casein (the milk protein) in their diet, which was mind-blowing for me and decimated any belief [I had] that milk was healthy.
Around the same time, I found moldy forgotten cheese at the back of my fridge and realized that I could actually live without cheese and that a large part of what was holding me back from committing fully to veganism was simply the attachment to the idea that I could have cheese, not cheese per se. I became vegan practically overnight.
So health was the gateway to veganism for me, followed by both environmental issues and animal rights, as I tried to study more about veganism.
Can you tell me about your work with Good Food Community and Lingap Maralita?
Good Food started the CSA (community supported agriculture) model here in the country, and its work is about connecting farmers and consumers in a way that goes beyond retail transactions but is built on the mutual commitment of each in ensuring that people have access to ecologically and ethically grown food, meaning using organic methods, and a commitment to share the rewards, risks, and responsibilities of food production with farmers. CSA says that consumers are not relegated to the end of the food supply chain, where we just wait for what is available. As eaters, we have the power to shape the food system so that we have equitable access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food—we are co-producers of this better food system.
My work involves advocacy, partnerships, and communications and is essentially about helping people imagine that this kind of food system is possible and then engaging them in its co-production. Of course, the entire team is involved in this work—our ability to dream and create what is possible also rests on the practical work that the operations side of Good Food undertakes.
Lingap Maralita was a project that happened in the early days of the Luzon lockdown. We needed to find a way to get the produce from smallholders to be able to feed our community of CSA subscribers and direct some of them to the urban poor who were experiencing severe hunger and for people looking for ways to help to be involved. It was a chance to emphasize our connection and interdependence with the rural poor (our peasant farmers) and the urban poor, who make up a large part of the essential services sector that makes society run. We also took it as an opportunity to educate people about the ethics and politics behind food, which we tend to forget.
(photo from Good Food Community)
What propelled you into food activism? And how can the everyday Filipino exact change in our food systems?
I was a longtime subscriber of Good Food before I joined the team, so to a greater extent, they opened my eyes to the fact that the food we eat is shaped by different material conditions beginning with how it’s grown to how it ends up on my plate. My work prior to Good Food was in sustainability, which acknowledged and sought to mitigate the numerous environmental and social impacts tied to economic activities. After training in plant-based cooking in 2017, I couldn’t help but bring this sensibility, shaped by my experience, to food along with the desire to make healthier and responsible food choices desirable, a little easier. You cannot oppose and not propose.
With the ongoing pandemic, where people are going hungry and becoming vulnerable to illness and disease due to unhealthy consumption, it’s hard not to see one’s work in food as a moral responsibility—to make sure everyone has equitable access to fresh nutritious food, and to protect this access as a basic human right.
The industrial food system, Big Agriculture, with its ties to Big Pharma, and the chemical industries are implicated in a lot of the issues that are ushering this existential crisis we face, from the climate emergency, severe global hunger, and gaping inequalities. It is the peasant farmers who feed 70 percent of the global population using only 30 percent of the world’s resources, but they are also the ones going hungry, routinely taken advantage of, and caught in a vicious cycle of poverty.
We need to remember that food is very powerful—what we eat defines the world we live in. The current food system will have us believe that we have a diversity of choices when it comes to food. Supermarket shelves are designed to attest to that—never mind that the wide array of products are actually variations of the four biggest commodities: wheat, soy, rice, and corn, and behind these thousands of brands are the same big food companies with ties to agrochemical companies and pharmaceutical companies. Consumer choice is about choosing from what these giant food corporations want us to choose from and staying in that lane.
The work we do at Good Food, through community-shared agriculture, challenges this. How food is grown, distributed, and eaten are choices we can actively make every day, and we can make those choices that transform the food system into one that supports the labor that grows and produces the food we eat, rebalances access to the planet’s resources, protects society’s most vulnerable members, and makes sure that everyone is fed well with safe, healthy, and affordable food bursting with complex flavors. CSA says that we are not passive constituent parts at the end of the food chain; rather we can be co-producers of a just, nourishing, and sustainable food system. But claiming our seat at the table requires our participation and the recognition of the vital interdependence of farmers and consumers, and the responsibilities we owe each other.
At the same time, we need to realize that making the “right food choices”, i.e., responsible/sustainable consumption is not enough. This is coming from someone who published a book (Makisawsaw) where the boycott of NutriAsia products was its impetus. Because sometimes, sustainable consumption is about companies trying to outsource the responsibility to consumers while they continue their business practices as if resources are endless, offering the zero-waste option alongside numerous plastic options. Individual action is a great start, especially with growing our own food. It shows us how essential our agency and participation are to our wellbeing. It develops self-sufficiency outside the industrial food system that actually makes us and the planet sick but which rakes in profits. We need to reduce our dependence on it. From individual actions, we need to come together and gather our strength and make our voices heard to affect systemic change. People need to organize and participate. We are citizens first before we are consumers.
What are your thoughts on local food media and how do you think food publications can advocate for change within our food systems? It seems that it's mostly been focused on lifestyle.
I can understand why lifestyle is the focus of most food publications. I think it’s an effective mirror that reflects back to us what society is largely interested in—and therefore helps sell the publication, generates the much-needed traffic, hits, and engagement in this current attention economy.
Lifestyle pieces can be effective when it comes to showing how change can be concrete, relatable or desirable, and actionable. Change begins at the individual level, and that includes social change—but we have to make sure it doesn’t get stuck at mere self-optimization.
But food media is still a business, so I am curious as to the nature or extent of alternatives that it can offer while making sure advertisers do not pull out. Admittedly this leads to a certain homogeneity in content and perspectives offered, sometimes toothlessness, which doesn’t work when it comes to challenging the status quo or pushing for systemic change. Sometimes it can also be tone-deaf when it proposes lifestyles stripped of our socio-political context or historical knowledge.
And I think this is why we can’t overemphasize the need to support small independent publications, which contribute greatly to diversity in voices and experience, to offering alternative narratives that big media tends to muffle or ignore for reasons both economic and ideological.
Independent publications can also take bigger risks by being able to push boundaries, whether in terms of themes, art, genre, etc. and is often better at introducing the idea of the new and challenging old crusty ways of doing. The work that Gantala Press, a small feminist press with titles on food issues is worth looking at when it comes to models that are available. (Full disclosure: Gantala Press is the publisher of Makisawsaw.)
In your IG bio for Me and My Veg Mouth, it says that your recipes come from “a vegan kitchen in pork and poultry-lovin’ Philippines”, how do you reconcile your veganism with living in such a meat-obsessed country?
I do my best to act consistently with my beliefs about veganism and I am committed to this worldview and ethic. While the Philippines tends to consume a lot of meat and dairy, I realized that being vegan, I no longer feel disconnected from our food culture and heritage. My diet, and the diet I advocate, is whole food plant-based, which is compatible with the food grown by our smallholder farmers—rice, beans, fruits, and vegetables. At the same time, I really appreciate the work of Astig Vegan, with her delicious efforts at veganizing well-known Filipino dishes.
It was challenging in the beginning and a feeling of disconnection was acute because starting out, I realized that a lot of the models we have for vegan food are from the West. Even the way we advocated for veganism was so reliant on Western models and therefore felt so… white and affluent, stripped of the recognition of the labor and human rights violations that also plague food production in this country, and which are actually cut from the same cloth as the oppressive worldview that permits animal cruelty because it regards one group as superior over another.
I think it’s necessary to bring these topics into the conversation of veganism here and to be fair, there are people who do, such as The Vegan Neighbors who are also involved in fighting for the rights of the urban poor.
So I guess the reconciliation I needed to make was not so much with the Philippines being obsessed with meat as much as aligning and practicing veganism in a way that contributes to the broader social justice movement here. It really helped to find kindreds who show you how it is possible.
Filipino food relies so heavily on meat. Do you think Filipinos will ever truly embrace entirely plant-based cooking or do you think it’s too ingrained in the culture? Thoughts on fake meat?
I think the numerous benefits of a whole-food, plant-based diet has gotten so well known over the last several years, and while we may not be predisposed to eating plant-based, more and more Filipinos are trying it out.
I think it’s also important to realize that a lot of the plant-based protein that is all the rage now is actually ultra-processed food. We tend to think they are automatically healthier but they aren’t. Check their ingredients—they use a lot of salt, additives, gums, “natural flavors”, and genetically modified ingredients—the majority of them are essentially junk food. These companies also make a lot of claims about being more environmentally sustainable versus animal agriculture, so it’s important to examine those claims. It’s the same thing we demand of those marketing their animal protein counterparts.
But essentially it feels like it’s another version of the same problem. Meat is still valorized. Why this need to always have meat?
There's has been a lot of emphasis recently, in countries like Mexico, on decolonizing one’s diet or at least attempting to. It's a topic I've been really interested in and I've been struggling to figure out what Filipino cuisine would look like decolonized. What are your thoughts on this?
When you mention “decolonization,” two things come to mind. To me, the work of decolonizing not just the Filipino diet but the Philippine food system means, first: the eradication of these vast plantations or haciendas, vestiges of an oppressive colonial past that continue to be sites of so much inequality, forced labor, and trafficking, and the violation of rights of farmers and workers, who remain poor, hungry, and exploited.
Plantations are about producing commodities meant for export, extracting a country’s resources to benefit a ruling, wealthier class or nation, but leaving the plantation workers, the subjugated people, the colonized but productive force perpetually poor and hungry, unable to meet their own needs. And this present-day colonialism is greatly enabled by the industrial food system, made up of giant transnational companies.
Decolonization also means the restoration of our people’s control—our agency and sovereignty—over our food production, distribution, and consumption. We can do this, first and foremost, by protecting our country’s genetic diversity by saving our seeds, the foundation of our food system, and releasing it from the grip of corporations. It’s not the colonialism of old, but it’s powered by the same appetite for other people’s natural resources and stripping them of their rights over how to use these resources and make them productive to be able to achieve food sovereignty.
And it’s more insidious now. The patenting of seeds, including their genetic modification and the creation of sterile seeds, says that a people’s ability to feed themselves must be privatized, subjected to proprietary laws and mechanisms, and along with it the eventual reduction of equitable social benefits arising from food producers being able to exchange seeds and grow food freely, to give way to the prioritization of profit that will be concentrated in the hands of the few.
And this is a real threat right now, a clear and present danger: the genetically modified Golden Rice, designed to address Vitamin A deficiency, has been approved for commercial release last December 2019, despite being unable to deliver its purported benefits and not having been tested for biosafety or toxicity. Behind Golden Rice is the agrochemical company ChemChina. On top of this controversial approval, which we continue to actively protest against, is the Rice Liberalization Law which made us dependent on imported rice despite being an agricultural country, with little support for our local rice farmers.
Rice is our staple food. And we are witnessing how it is at the center of this new form of colonialism.
And finally, and this may be too big of an ask, but how do you feel about the future of the Philippines? Are you hopeful that change can happen?
This is a tough question to answer. On one hand, part of me holds onto the figure of the pacifist activist Carmen Trotta who, whether or not there is hope, will choose to live his life serving the poor and fighting injustice. It's worth thinking about: what will we do and believe in even if failure were assured?
This makes me sound hopeless. To be completely honest, I don’t know. A friend told me once, hope is about how we live our lives. The question, therefore, isn’t so much as do we have hope or why hope, but how. How do I hope? How am I being hopeful?
Hope must be enacted. It’s a choice we make daily. I’ve learned that hope is not this fuzzy feeling in our hearts, it’s not a bounce in our step despite everything we face. Rather, it’s a heavy lump in the stomach. It’s messy and scary and difficult because it asks for courage and vulnerability and action.
You can follow Mabi on Instagram. And if you have the means, please make a donation to Lingap Maralita here. Your support will go a long way. And as always, thanks for reading.