September 8th
Good morning!
This is Issue 71.1 of Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s news, fermented:
After a long and beautiful Twitter hiatus, I re-entered yesterday.
The first thing that caught my eye was this thread, which built on some viral captioning of a photo as ~ultimate capitalism~ with some additional context.
I really recommend taking some time to read through the whole thread, but here’s the gist: Amazon is taking advantage of underpaid workers in Mexico and the US to dodge tariffs, plop down enormous warehouses in the middle of communities, and exploit the same closeness of Northern Mexico and the Southern US that is so often weaponized against immigrants and wildlife.
As Charmaine Chua puts it:
(TJ = Tijuana, USMCA = US/Mexico/Canada Agreement)
Back in 2019, I was able to travel through Mexico by bus, eventually wielding the blinding power of my US passport to waltz across the bridge from Juárez to El Paso. Later that day, I walked up to the top of a big hill in El Paso that offered a sweeping view to the south.
When you look down from there, the border doesn’t exist; it’s just land.
While Amazon is free to exploit the US/Mexico logistics seam, people on either side of this border are obviously not. The militarization of this place, the detention and deportation that continues, cannot be overstated.
But that’s not all—just as Texas instated the most restrictive abortion bans in the US, Mexico decriminalized the procedure.
[Side note: In both of the articles above, abortions are presented as something only women get. It’s worth acknowledging that all kinds of people with all kinds of identities give birth. From what I understand, using the language “birthing people” is the most inclusive way to talk about this.
The gender binary is still a dominant cultural paradigm nearly everywhere, and is useful to invoke when talking about discrimination specifically against women, or struggles borne particularly by women. However, just because trans and non-conforming people aren’t out somewhere doesn’t mean we don’t exist; it just means it isn’t safe. So, lots of things that are true of women’s experiences around the world are true for all people who don’t identify as cis men, but it isn’t always possible to discuss them openly. <rant complete>]
And while the relatively arbitrary/deeply consequential presence of this border manifests in law and capitalism, markers of regional culture are being eroded by both of those powerful actors. According to a new study, the wild relatives of crops crucial to early and traditional foodways (corn, avocados, vanilla) in the Americas are facing extinction, according to a new study.
What does this mean, given the current state of our food, economic, and political systems? Bad things, most likely.
Picture this: eventually, nation-states will fall, border walls will be repurposed to build actually useful things, since we’ll lose the ability to extract resources, yes I did read a lot of science fiction over break, so on, so forth—and rebuilding traditional food systems will be a core part of human survival.
If we’re to zoom out on human time, we’ll see something like this: development of complex societies and agriculture, as practiced by the Aztecs, Mayans, and other original peoples; a brief blip in which we actively destroyed everything alive that could save us; and then a long period of trying to figure out how we’re going to feed ourselves once global supply chains and the US/Mexico/Canada agreement and others of its ilk crumble under the weight of their own dysfunction.
The good news is that animals are shape-shifting to meet new, climate-changed conditions of their environments. If they can do it, can’t we?
(via)
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
Did it hurt? When Digestable took a break for over a month and you were deprived of your thrice-weekly ~*Hot Goss*~ updates?
I'm not going to lie, I had quite the relaxing month off. I hardly looked at any celebrity gossip in these last four weeks except for the news that made it onto my timeline every now and then. So from what I've gathered, the most controversial thing to have happened in Famelandia recently would be the fact that Jake Gyllenhaaldoesn't shower. People were equally repulsed and unsurprised at this revelation but I was still pretty pleased to see The Rock and Jason Momoa set the record straight: hot people shower, and sometimes multiple times daily. As someone who now lives in a tropical country and just happens to be hot, I endorse this message. It is simply how the universe intended it to be, so take it up with someone else if you're feeling excluded please.
I know you were probably expecting something a lot longer, potentially funnier and more scandalous for the first column back after our hiatus but the backlog of goss stretches far enough back that I was not able to comb through everything by the time this column was due. We'll get back to regularly scheduled programming in due time but for now, here's a recent post from Tom Holland wishing Zendaya a happy birthday and most probably, hopefully definitely confirming that they are dating (squeeeeeee!):
