Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ had emerged from months of working in the forest and learned his father had died. It always felt like whatever scene Theo was describing from decades ago was just out of sight of the window. Theo pointed out where the banana workers that United Fruit brought from Jamaica used to live along the highway and recalled how, as a Garifuna man working nearby, he was often mistaken for one of them.

      By the time I had accompanied mobile care teams through those orange and banana plantations of Stann Creek, most of the workers were from Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador, with a handful born in Belize. This made it strange to be part of a group that arrived with an English-language diabetes education video depicting white North Americans in sweaters, who did not look like anyone (except me) on the plantations where we showed it. “Your pancreas is the size and shape of an average banana,” one memorable line went, an anatomical cartoon of organs secreting keys and dots that flashed on the screen. A visiting Garifuna nurse prepared her glucometer for testing while the educational video—if anyone was able to understand it—was instructing the banana workers to avoid eating the exact types of food that were sold from the attached company store.

      Only a few of the workers had high sugar that day (and were told to follow up at the hospital). I was put in charge of carrying the red plastic sharps box containing several hundred dollars’ worth of used blood glucose testing supplies. The mobile team was attentive and kind, and their gestures seemed appreciated by the workers. But the machines already had theories built in, which made it feel like we were at once too early and too late: years too late to prevent exposures to pesticides or to the carbohydrate-heavy diets that seemed visible all around, but years too early to measure their effects. We all got sent home with bunches of green bananas. I handled mine carefully after seeing the metal claws used to dunk them in caustic chemicals, thousands of bananas floating in shallow baths under signs reading NO FOOD.

      Belize’s beautiful landscape, spotted with mango trees and covered in flowering vines, often gives visitors the impression of a paradisiacal garden. This lush appearance makes it particularly paradoxical that much of the country would easily qualify as a food desert today, according to U.S. definitions (which are based on factors like miles of distance and transportation difficulties to purchase healthy food; limited, high-priced selection of vegetables at those locations; and overall poverty levels). Potentially arable land that could (but does not) support vegetable agriculture in Belize only accentuates the manmade ironies underpinning food deserts most anywhere.

      The territory now bounded as Belize once produced food for an Indigenous population of two million. Yet today, this same land is unable to grow enough vegetables for Belize’s current population of 380,000. Pesticides are often hailed as necessary for scale, but Maya techniques of soil engineering allowed for larger-scale agricultural productivity than the monocropping on that same land now.⁴⁵ Even a few decades ago, when individual Kriol families in southern Belize used to grow more kitchen gardens along the coast, some would travel to nearby ancient Maya ruins to obtain the rich soil from the areas where pre-Conquest inhabitants buried waste using methods to optimize the soil’s later chemistry (including burning in particular sequences, and strategically distributing materials like nitrogen-rich seashells).

      Today, the majority of vegetables sold in Belize are imported and pricey in contrast to surrounding countries. “You know,” a man from the Yucatán told me, “in Mexico, poor people go into town to sell vegetables. Belize is the only country I know where most villagers go into town markets empty-handed to buy them.” As the history book British Honduras: Colonial Dead End reprised of Belize: “Its land laws [are] far behind the Republics of Spanish America [that] have laws for the encouragement of agriculture, which in spite of revolution and misrule, have attracted immigrants when this Colony has repelled them.”⁴⁶ Reflecting on this archival source, the authoring historian acknowledged that “the ‘progressive’ land tenure system in Spanish Honduras was almost a replica of the ejido system or Indian village commons.”⁴⁷

      Anthropologist Richard Wilk’s work helps to further unfold the complex history of foodways in Belize.⁴⁸ He calls the colonial food economy in then British Honduras “the first global diet, a kind of nineteenth century equivalent of McDonalds hamburgers,” since agriculture was forbidden in the colony’s early history because of fierce land disputes between Spain and England, and British settlers were made to rely on barrels of white flour and salted meats shipped from London. The economies supporting Belize’s “rogue colonialism”⁴⁹—run by men who called themselves not pirates, but privateers—actually have much in common with the privatization of late liberal economics.⁵⁰ A global industrial food economy—in ways similar to the forced imported foodways and trade constraints that existed in Belize for centuries—is becoming increasingly common in many countries and getting further amplified by harmful trade policies, as Alyshia Gálvez observes of Mexico in Eating NAFTA.⁵¹

      Even though I read those things in books, seeing them through the eyes of someone like Theo who had observed change over time brought a more human scale to what I could gather about changing foods and farms. From his car window, the “sclerotic landscapes”⁵² and constricted food systems that scholars write about made more sense. Sclerotic arteries kept showing up in diabetes clinics, but from the road I could also see sclerosis even in the lush land that nonetheless choked free movement through it—like the United Fruit bridges and the roads that followed, still constricting the motion of food and people long after the corporation and its train tracks were gone. Some historians of science used to search for what they called the “machine in the garden,” moments when industrial technologies entered nature.⁵³ But I realized that the banana train, missing now, wasn’t the machine in this garden any more than the crumbling mills and their rusting wheels. When it came to wild sugar and its landscapes, what looked like the garden was the machine—altered infrastructures and biologies, living sugar “absorbed” into bodies and absorbing them in turn, overgrown excesses of fixed and moving parts.⁵⁴

      But whenever I thought I had found some connecting plotline to think with across scales, the events I wanted to wrap a story around seemed to shape-shift again. Some months after our last trip, I was shocked to learn that Theo had been murdered in the same car we had driven in the past summer. Memories of those trips and the stories suddenly changed gravity. The last time I saw him, he was listening to country music and said his sugar felt low. He was going to buy a piece of fruit.

      No matter how many times I read headlines in Belize like “Sugar and Bullets,” I can’t really grasp the scale of the numbers.⁵⁵ Yet according to national statistics, what happened to Theo is not strange at all in the sense of numerical probability. Murder was the most likely way for a man to die in Belize, followed by diabetes (for women, diabetes was still number one). What makes this reality especially hard for both Belizeans and scholars to understand is that the country’s homicide rate was very close to zero only a few decades ago.

      The rise of militarized forms of policing within the United States has deeply affected Central America, as has the growing demand for opioids headed for U.S. markets. Current homicide rates are well over the so-called civil war benchmark countrywide. At last count by the U.N., Belize City’s homicide rates ranked third highest on the planet.⁵⁶ Some 90 percent of Belizean children have seen a dead body, compared to 20 percent in Mexico.⁵⁷ Yet unlike many nearby countries where violence is also a major issue, there is no legacy of civil war in Belize. Once I asked a prominent journalist who regularly publishes on what he calls the “violent triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador why he leaves Belize out of Central America, even though its violence rates are comparable to or higher than those in the surrounding countries he focuses on. “Nobody understands Belize,” he said.

      Since many of my memories of Belize’s landscape were learned through the windows of Theo’s car, now the whole landscape felt learned anew through the memory of what happened to him there. Being afraid to move around at certain times or places was part of sclerotic landscapes too, and one of fear’s many unpredictable effects. СКАЧАТЬ