From the Column Desde los Fuegos del Tiempo (From the Fires of Time)
This text is the prologue to the bookRecursos y producción de alimentos en México: soberanía alimentaria y desafíos (Resources and Food Production in Mexico: Food Sovereignty and Challenges), edited by my dear friends Edith Yesenia Peña Sánchez and Lilia Hernández Albarrán. It is a document recently published in the Interdisciplinary Collection, Enlace Series, by the Ministry of Culture / National Institute of Anthropology and History, 2025, which will soon begin to circulate everywhere.
This prologue, which we present here, is intended to be a celebration of the book and all the work of Yesenia and Lilia. Eating or feeding ourselves in our contemporary societies has so many forms, so many historical aspects, so many reasons and irrationalities. In the present day, even our food preferences and searches are decided and planned by capitalism itself and its machine for making consumption useful to its logic. As a result, consumption defines subsequent production and its methods; the steps in supply chains and the definitions of value chains. These will end up shaping not only what we eat, but also what is produced, who produces it, the timing of this production, the particular modes it takes, how much these foodstuffs will be valued, the places where products will be available, for how long, and how food can be exercised and why. These reasons become so complex and intertwined with the machinery of agreements, standards, criteria, flows, and investment and “free trade” treaties organized to serve as instruments of power diversion that give companies room to maneuver while leaving people defenseless, who are also no longer able to feed themselves with their own agility.
Our eating habits must, in theory, obey this supposedly national framework. And even if we look at it from the most local perspective, it is paradoxically decided in a distant, disjointed, murky, and poorly agreed-upon manner that causes radical changes in our habits, our body weight, the way we see ourselves as people, and the life prospects that we will no longer be able to have. It will have deforested our forests, including through frequent fires, poisoned our fields, our water, and the bodies of our children, and it will define the life expectancy of our communities, our families, and ourselves.
On the contrary, as Verónica Villa (2023) said in her presentation at the Eighth Conference of La Vía Campesina: “From the peasant perspective, producing [and eating] food is not just about keeping the body alive. Food is not a commodity. Large agricultural companies harvest raw materials, not food. Corporations impose monocultures, intensive meat production, and then ultra-processed foods, distributing all of this according to stock market guidelines, pursuing productivity and profit. They want people to consume and remain silent. But for peasants, food is not just fuel to endure oppression.”
That is what this book is about. Feeding ourselves is not just about providing energy for the body.
Resources and food production in Mexico. Food sovereignty and challenges is a bold book because it brings together specific discussions from many corners of the country, with a Latin American perspective, leading us to different stories that narrate the numerous and diverse ways of feeding ourselves that are alternatives to those that capital wants to impose on us. This is perhaps the most visible challenge to that “food sovereignty.” Saying “food sovereignty” already announces a conflict, a struggle, a fight.
There is diversity in the writing in this book, and the authors look at and understand food (and therefore the production and resources necessary to produce it) from the perspectives of different regions, traditions, and the history of the peoples.
From a life “without milpas and without pots,” that is, a cuisine whose ingredients were obtained daily “without altering nature,” to an understanding of corn polycultures, in what we call milpa, through the omnipresence of beans in Latin America; the power of dried chilies and their use in preserving and maintaining food in difficult environments; the magic and mystery of human pollinators that help vanilla continue to exist; the ancient and modern saga of the avocado and its entry into the realm of world-famous crops; the resources of the sea and fishing trades; the different types of meat, animal care, and changes in their production and consumption; and, of course, as Yesenia Peña and Lilia Hernández rightly point out, the analysis of the impact of trade agreements on biodiversity loss, the erosion of food sovereignty, and contamination with agrochemicals, which is difficult to eradicate due to the pursuit of intensive, high-yield agriculture.
A timely overview, this work weaves together the foundations of food sovereignty and its affordability or difficulty in achieving it. We review the sources: cereals, legumes, vegetables, mushrooms, meat, fish, insects, and the details that make diverse meals possible with these raw materials. None of the works presented skimp on details, so that the history of the search for food independence or the paths to recover it can be grasped.
It should be emphasized that a fundamental attack against peoples is the war against subsistence, which deprives people of the possibility of providing for their own food needs. And the first thought that strikes us when reading the book and the dietary trends and practices it shares with us is how far injustice has gone, how our strategies, conditions, and possibilities have been disabled, and how submission and subordination have been normalized, shrinking our universe and making us believe that it is impossible to propose solutions. It is a normalization so pervasive that it confronts us with impositions or opens up options to the will-o’-the-wisps of consumerist imagination as the only way to “feed ourselves.”
But the editors of the book have been clear from the outset that food sovereignty and its project are achievable in practice, not just vague illusions. Food sovereignty is a horizon that implies a second consciousness, the realization of what traditions naturally emphasize to us and how, by becoming aware of them, they illuminate concrete paths, procedures, and care.
In these practices lies what we need to protect, but also what we urgently need to combat, and thus defend life in all the ways that nourish and sustain us.
From the outset, we are faced with an effort to undermine food sovereignty. The very notion of “food sovereignty” is seen as utopian and radical because it insists that in order to exercise it, we must think in terms of “self-government,” “self-determination,” “territorial defense,” “community,” or “self-management,” magnetic words that call for concrete, collective action (because at the individual level, everything would be reduced to “lifestyles,” “fads,” “trends,” or “algorithmic impositions”). At the collective level, people are quick to cede to the government [or the market] the social need for “food security,” but that’s as far as it goes.
There are new keys and shadows. Before, when faced with the idea of food sovereignty, it was common for us to think that it was enough to produce our own food and that, if we achieved this, we would not have to ask anyone’s permission to be a community, a collective, a people.
And the communities that had been doing this for countless centuries, going about their business naturally, may not even have realized that the time would come when the very idea of food sovereignty would have to be defended. Nor, of course, was there any legal need to establish food sovereignty as a proposal of the peoples: it was the direct solution that people, as they went about solving their problems, ultimately arrived at. From the urgencies and their solutions arose a permanent relevance. With great disdain, those in power called this “self-consumption” or “self-sufficiency.”
As we know, all this was disrupted by the upheaval that threw relations off course and turned them into tangled threads of endless mediation. First the bosses and landowners, then the companies and governments, and finally the international bodies that became global commissars, understood that allowing people to produce their own food meant letting them out of the iron grip they sought to impose.
Scarcity as a horizon and norm subjugated people, preventing them from resolving for themselves what matters most to them. Coercion, deception, standardization, and regulation transformed the horizon of communities that were also quickly or slowly expelled. They were torn from their subsistence environments, which also severed their relationship with cooking as a fundamental principle of the most primitive magic. This made it possible to strike a blow against and undermine those who produced food, and when they were left without land (left without the life they had known), people were forced to work for the great lords or corporations, which shattered the belief that it is possible to produce our own food, that it is possible to resolve the issues that matter most to us. If at first this was a direct imposition, later the mediatization of our efforts became normalized by requiring us to depend on intermediaries (promoted as specialists) who would solve for us what we are no longer allowed to solve. Not only in food, but in everything: health, education, mental health, conflict resolution, logistics, daily management, and our relationship with the sacred.
That vast universe (of whole foods) is stolen from us when we are unaware of, prohibited from, or prevented from producing our own food. In other words, preventing us from resolving the issues that matter most to us is one of the central strategies of any power that seeks to subjugate. And that is why people cry out for autonomy and self-determination.
Proposing food sovereignty means demanding that nothing be imposed on us that impedes our own determination (determination in both senses of the term: our own way of organizing and “regulating” ourselves, and our own decision and drive to act in order to achieve something).
Currently, there is an academic trend that, with great arrogance, insists that food sovereignty is not feasible, that it is a utopia only imaginable by those of us who “romanticize the peasantry, indigenous peoples, or Afro-descendants and confer upon them an idyllic relationship with the land or nature.”
The paradox is that there is a proliferation of case studies, stories, and experiences that demonstrate the strength of community-based proposals embodied by women and men who not only leave no doubt about the intense relationship between communities and territory, between human beings and nature, but also work and are responsible for a large part of human food production, as demonstrated by studies by the ETC Group and GRAIN, among many other organizations and movements.
Such is the strength that maintains a long historical arc: a web of knowledge from peoples and communities that, detail by detail, delineates the local geography, the relationships between the mountains, the forest, the slopes and the levels of ravines, hillsides, waterfalls, and springs, in a management of ecological zones and the microverticality of that management.
There is a living fabric that contradicts those who claim that we are romanticizing. Those of us who have witnessed this daily care on many levels have no doubt that these details of care are precisely the body of strategies that have allowed so many communities and so much biodiversity to survive over millennia.
This book is a sampling of some of those processes, related to the production of food, its sources, and the particular ways in which it is transformed. As we know, throughout history, ceasing to produce one’s own food has led to tremendous catastrophes in all those populations that have allowed it to happen.
In real time, corporations and governments have eroded or eradicated much of the knowledge that shapes the ancient intelligence of peasants. It is urgent for them to create an obligation and normalize the idea that people work for others and submit to wage labor. They need to break the brief space of independence or freedom that peasants have always claimed. The transition from peasant to worker is a radical change in their relationship with the world. It is a shift from creative labor to wage labor, from which surplus value is extracted in the case of wage earners, or to work equivalent to that of machines or animals in the case of slaves.
So we need to clarify our perspective and our narrative. The linear idea of agriculture clearing the forest to sow vast expanses of land, ushering in civilization and progress, is increasingly insufficient. Ancient food production did not begin there and continues to be involved in many other issues that go beyond what is generally known as agriculture, because it is much more: it is an intelligence full of strategies that take care of everything with relationships full of imagination and justice. Maintaining the territory means using it, among those who live and coexist there, and nourish themselves from it and with it, and nourish that territory together. Thus, in order to achieve food sovereignty now, we must fight multiple battles simultaneously, rebuild ourselves, and pay attention on many levels. It is no longer enough to produce our own food. Working with agroecology and caring for the soil helps, but it is not enough. We must understand, step by step, level by level, all public policies, regulations, standards, criteria, technical and administrative restrictions, and dependencies with which the executive branch and the legal structure collude with landowners and corporations, ultimately placing in their hands the instruments of subjugation that unleash the violencethat fills the news with deaths and disappearances of people who resist and fight. We must dismantle the apparatus.
A major obstacle, as we said at the beginning and reiterate here, are the free trade and investment agreements that are determined to give companies room for maneuver and close off legal avenues for people. Efforts to impose a series of regulations and agreements on intellectual property and the privatization of seeds and plant material are exacerbating the situation to the point of criminalizing one of humanity’s oldest strategies: saving, exchanging, sowing, and reproducing these seeds. And in this way, curbing independent food production. Biased standards of what constitutes clean, healthy, and safe food are also weighing on the horizon of food sovereignty. But the collective imagination is eager for proposals, and there are examples throughout the country.
Today, food sovereignty and self-determination or autonomy are one and the same struggle. And to Today, food sovereignty and self-determination or autonomy are one and the same struggle. And to achieve it, we must defend our lives, which are our closest territory. That is why reading this book opens up paths in the heart of our struggles.
Original text by Ramón Vera Herrera published in Desinformémonos on August 18th, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.