Free food in the cracks of the city: The Food Autonomy Festival comes to town

Why is it important to talk about food autonomy now and in the context of the city
In the birthplace of capitalism, most of us are constantly defending what we find valuable from privatisation and commercialisation. Living in Amsterdam can feel like living in the belly of the beast. It is a center of global trade and a tax haven for countless multinationals but people continue to hold open cracks in the city for us to live, whether we’re fighting for a social center at municipality meetings, or squatting land to protect it from extraction or gentrification. 

The supply chain is made invisible, as well as the waste we throw away, and we are led to believe that industrial agriculture ‘feeds the world’ rather than the workers or small-scale peasant farmers still producing the majority of food for communities globally.

In a food system which alienates us from land, habitats, and the people handling our food, we become complicit in continuous exploitation and completely dependent on systems of production we don’t understand. The supply chain is made invisible, as well as the waste we throw away, and we are led to believe that industrial agriculture ‘feeds the world’ rather than the workers or small-scale peasant farmers still producing the majority of food for communities globally. We become trapped in unfair food systems, vulnerable to greedy profits, unfair trade agreements, poisonous petro-chemicals, poor nutrition, and climate destruction. Meanwhile, big corporate players profit, and profit most in times of crisis.

Yes, we all live here. But that doesn’t mean we have to relinquish our autonomy to the violations of state-capitalism. (Read in a goblin whisper:) There are ways, cheap and free, for us to eat our way out of this trap. 

What is the Food Autonomy Festival?
We are ASEED: a small organization in Amsterdam exposing corruption in the food system, sharing tactics to subvert it and get much closer to the food we eat. The Food Autonomy Festival (FAF), returning 13-14 June, is for exactly this. It’s a big celebration every year, constructed with love from the ground up by ASEED members and lots of volunteers, to pull people together and seed new grassroots strength. 

The FAF has always been about highlighting why it’s important that people have determination over the food they consume and the health of their communities. We should all have access to food and know about the food we eat. We can empower each other by preserving and sharing the tools to produce nutritious food for ourselves and our kin without damaging or depleting the environment. In the words of the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina: ‘Food Sovereignty is not a simple set of technical solutions or a formula which can be applied – it is instead a ‘process in action’ – an invitation to citizens to exercise our capacity to organize ourselves and improve our conditions and societies together’(European Coordination Via Campesina. (2018). Food Sovereignty NOW!). We chose to speak of ‘autonomy’, rather than ‘sovereignty’, not to reclaim a ‘supreme power’, but to exercise our right and responsibility of self-governance, responsibility and a task shared across a community.

This year the FAF will have been running for ten years; an immense accomplishment from our small and changing team. Across the years, we’ve seen boycott campaigns, solidarity vokus, forest theater, alternative fertilizers, rocket-stoves, fire shows, radical agroecology, trashy punk, farmers and folk bands, seed bombs, seed swaps, and action tactics. The FAF has also been a space which learns from local and international struggles against corporate globalization, militarization, and land grabbing. This year will be a celebration of the food autonomy realities in the city today, and the worlds ASEED has inhabited over the last ten years of its life.

Every single year, the festival was made so powerful by all the cooks, farmers, unionists, researchers, activists, squatters, artists and community leaders who surround us in Amsterdam and beyond. To celebrate this decade of magic and change, we want to organize a FAF which not only invites the initiatives around us promoting tactics for food autonomy, but also sends you all, local citizens of the Netherlands, to their door (or gate). The FAF#10 kicks off by gathering in one field together for the weekend of 13-14 June, then continues with decentralized events on location at the sites of these strongholds, farms, community centers, and free spaces – not only in Amsterdam, but also across Utrecht and Wageningen. 

These cities are full of free spaces defying what the industrial food system calls possible. Many kitchens are sites of resistance feeding the underground, with free markets, people’s canteens, agroecological farms, and donation dinners. In these spaces we are holding open the doors to access nutritious food for nothing, to ancient traditions of preservation or fermentation, and the even older practice of eating together to build strength, share respect, and collectively rest. I would personally like to thank these spaces and the people in them for feeding me. 

Food by the people, for the people.

How to be involved
The FAF is fully donation-based and anyone can be involved! 
Do you want to help make the Food Autonomy Festival happen this summer? Go to our website where you can sign up to participate in the program, bring your imagination or skills to share, open up your own space, or become a vital volunteer.

www.aseed.net/food-autonomy-festival-10

See you soon!