For reasons that shall soon become clear, I keep thinking about the bananas article. Bananas in more than one sense. A recent New York Times op-ed, “The Human Cost of Your Breakfast Banana,” recounts the corruption and even horrors of the banana sector:
“Each year hundreds of millions of people worldwide eat bananas, a fruit that’s rich in vitamins and minerals. But here’s what the average consumer should know: Every bite contains a drop of the banana industry’s bloody history.”
Fair enough, you might think. Chiquita sounds, from that article, like bad news. Plus, bananas are sort of meh as a food. Convenient (the built-in wrapper) and affordable but if I never ate one again I wouldn’t mind.
But even if you boycott bananas indefinitely, you’re not in the clear. Every foodstuff has its exposé. “Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?” The “truth” being that “poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it.” It’s important to reflect on this, and then… do what? Avoid quinoa and bananas in favour of…?
Tomatoes are bad, out-of-season produce is bad, anything not organic is bad but organic has its issues as well but also fruits and vegetables are preferable to meat but does it depend which meat and dairy is basically as bad as meat for the animals and the workers in every part of the food industry have it rough so if you eat in restaurants/get food delivered/shop at the supermarket, you should feel terrible.
By all means, journalists should shed light on bad actors and practices in all industries. But the ingredient-by-ingredient framing, the how dare you eat X, wherein X encompasses all that is edible, amounts to a larger and nefarious message: don’t eat. Don’t exist. As though existence itself is the unethical act. A kind of antinatalism that isn’t about urging people to have fewer kids but rather about asking everyone who does exist not merely to make appropriate environment-driven sacrifices but to retract, for the heck of it. To eschew air conditioning in summer not because this is the most urgent or wise cost-benefit-wise sacrifice to make but because what could be more noble. Sweat it out.
Here’s the thing though: People take up space. People emit. We go places where we weren’t born, live in homes with previous occupants who didn’t bequeath them to us, and who might well want to still be living in them had they not had to move or sell for life-happens reasons. Even the everyday act of renting a convenient and affordable apartment can be classified as a kind of invasion if you are someone who could be plausibly cast as a gentrifier, however this is being defined at any given time.
If I’m especially attuned to the defining of humans as consumers in a nefarious sense, as occupiers, it’s because… you guessed it. Jews are always a people in excess of what everyone else demands. The shouts of “go back to Palestine” prior to 1948, the accusations of settler-colonialism that followed. Why should a Montreal Jew be told to “return” to Poland? We are always cast as “settlers.” As an unnatural presence wherever we’re found. Wouldn’t it be simpler if we could just… not? As in, if we could not exist at all, not merely if we could leave a particular spot, or modify our behaviour to suit local preferences. Thus the enduring appeal, as counterpoint, of the expression Am Yisrael Chai. It’s saying, we get that you don’t want us alive, but it’s not your call.
In a moving essay in The Atlantic, Joshua Leifer, author of Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, reflects on the much-publicized (including by us) cancellation of a book event he’d planned to do at a Brooklyn bookstore. The shop—or rather, one person working at it—didn’t want to platform Zionists. And if Zionists include even Jews with strong criticisms of Israel, this rather limits the scope of discussion.
Technically it was the event’s other speaker, a rabbi named Andy Bachman, who wasn’t permitted to speak, but Leifer, too, would qualify as a Zionist in the view of someone who views anyone (or any Jew) who doesn’t want Israel wiped from the map as such. Writes Leifer: “Neither Israelis nor Palestinians are going anywhere, and both peoples have the right to equality, dignity, and self-determination. No movement that ignores this reality has any hope of success.”
For what it’s worth, I consider myself a Zionist and share this view. I want all the Ams to Chai. And to do so, we’ve got to eat something.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
