MARGINS AS METAPHOR

Accessible food and wine practices as a form of resistance.

A fruit bursts open when ripe, pleading entry. We seek to offer ripeness, to center abundance, to share willingly. A restaurant holds the potential to be both resource and resourceful; to connect rather than estrange, to abandon the use of disembodied and archaic constructs of service, food, wine and language. What does it mean to be of service? How do we engage with reparative pairing? How can we slit open our own seams and invite entry to all? Let us invent the language of self-expression every day anew. Let us plant varied seeds that lay down roots against oppressive monocultures. Let us sustain understanding via new modes of communication and communion. join us in disarticulating food & wine, for your pleasure and our own. 

“Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counter identification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change, while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance.” Jose Muñoz

• Marginalization [mahr-juh-nl-ahy-zey-shuhn], the act of placing a person or thing in a position of lesser importance, influence, or power; the state of being placed in such a position.
  
  
• Marginalization by choice: to occupy space on the fringes, to be proudly other, to prioritize decentralization; to stand in solidarity with those without access to systems of power.
  
• Witeness, power and control are central; to choose to occupy the margins is to resist these forces and to create space for alternate realities.
• If marginalization is enforced by invisible and normative systems of power, we seek to make these systems visible by naming them and disrupting their stasis: open, trespass, transform.
  
• Many people and practices exist on the outskirts because they have no other choice; we choose the margins in spite of our access to assimilation. 
  
  
• One cannot examine marginalized identities without thinking intersectionally: context is crucial in the face of inequality and not all contexts are equal. 
  
  
• We choose mutable and unfixed identities. Queerness centers & celebrates the margins. 
  
  
• The offer of assimilation is seductive to the marginalized who are taught that fitting themselves into the main text and joining the ruling paradigm equals success.
  
  
• At what point do the margins become the main text? And who makes it so? 
  
  
• White queerness can overstep its queerness in favor of its whiteness by choosing the main text over the margins by exploiting those more marginalized. i.e. gentrification and other forms of “upward” mobility.
  
  
• Would you rather have a closed structure or an open work? Would you rather assimilate (love wins) or remain hard to read? 
  
  
• Identities and thoughts considered by the norm to be “less important” are relegated to the margins; a space considered to be less desirable real estate. 
  
  
• If you have the privilege to “choose” the margins, how do you not give into the seduction of assimilation and commodify them?
  
  
• If the main text fails to include, we must take to the margins to correct what is already there, and include what is missing. 
  
  
• How do you center something whose fundamental existence is based on being decentralized? How do you do that sustainably?
• Choosing the margins means choosing to pay attention. The format of a text makes the main part easier to navigate, while following a thread in the sidelines takes skill
• Main text does not invite participation. The margins welcome addenda, which welcome life. 
• If the margins come into the front and center how do they remain alive? (read: not closed, not colonized) Evolution happens in the margins.
  
  
• The sidelines of the paradigm are always moving, always alive.
  
  
• ALCHEMY! We think magic happens when food, wine, and people resist assimilation and remain in the margins.
  
  
• INCANTATIONS! We recognize the oral tradition of recipe sharing as a practice in shapeshifting, accessibility, and transfer of knowledge.
  
  
• FRACTALS! We celebrate worlds with endless possibilities; the queer alphabet (LGBTQIA+) contains infinite expressions of each letter.
  
  
• DYNAMICS! We believe food is also infinite - every culture contains iterations of variations specific to region and person; no dish is fixed (though attempts are made to fix them).
  
  
• BIODIVERSITY! A dish may be “defined” by specific ingredients but it’s in the application of those ingredients and in the hand of the cook to determine the final form and therefore, the specific iteration of that dish. 
  
  
• WHOLENESS! The universe is composed of infinite universes, of infinite you’s and infinite me’s. 
  
  
• CHAOS! Wine making, too, is marked by constant variables (soil, weather, grape type, growing method, fermentation style, fermentation vessel, the person making it) 
  
  
• MOVEMENT! The individual character of wine is called an “expression”, of a grape, or a place, or a time of year, rather than a fixed definition. 
  
  
• DIFFERENCE! The variance of conditions in natural wine making leads to constant rarity; you never really drink the same wine twice. 
  
• EVOLUTION! Natural wine does not exist in a fixed state; due to a lack of preservatives, it is alive in the bottle and alive after opening.
• ANTI-CONFORMITY! Conventional wines of the mainstream are doctored with additives during the fermentation process and preservatives during bottling.
• ALIVENESS! A wine with no additives takes the risk of being alive and unreliable. A reliable product is easier to sell again and again. 
• FLUX! Natural wine is the unpredictable margins; conventional wine is the main text. 
• RESIST! The food + wine industries demand standardization. They demand fixity, replication and consistency.
  
  
• MUTABILITY! Late-capitalism rejects fluidity as functional. It centers stasis because stasis is “safe” and “sellable”. 
• BE WATER! One is taught that to be “successful” one must be “buyable” and buyability relies on consistent conformity, the main text - set in stone. 
• FLUIDITY! We make our home in the river that you can’t step in twice; the difference is life.
• METAMORPHOSIS! Avoid “static” “stagnant” “sellable” by focusing instead on “sustainable” -- you can sustain fluidity without forcing it into a fixed state.
  
  
• RESILIENCE! You can do this by operating on principles that embrace openness, variation, change, mutation, accessibility and magic. 

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Read this piece in print in the issue 16 "Food Eats the Soul", out now!