FOODBACK

It started in the grocery stores. One minute it was self-scan, loyalty id number, and tongue swab to pay, just as usual. The next minute, the frozen turkeys were rolling across the floor, the prime ribs and drumsticks strutting out the door, the lamb chops slipping into the stream of muscle and bone to join the flow. 

More patient with the humans, the produce held out the longest. The corn, beans, and squash yawned from the stands as the flour, salt, and sugar danced past, laying a powdery road for the pig feet to stampede their prints in on the way out the door. Oh, the Three Sisters always intended to leave, but entertained as they were, they weren’t interested in joining the drama of the parade. Besides, they didn’t have as far to go. When the stores became tomblike, dark and empty, the Three Sisters made their quiet exit as well. 

Quiet suburban dinners erupted. Meals leapt from their tables as unceremoniously as they’d been claimed and placed there. Steaks and potatoes wriggled off of forks to begin their journey home. Refrigerators flung open as cheese drawers and vegetable bins loosed their inhabitants. Even some sheepskin rugs and leather couches joined the procession. 

Theories were thrown in every direction: Could it be artificial intelligence? Did an event in the earth’s tilt, the ozone, or the tides somehow animate post-life organic matter? Had food undergone bioengineering to the point of gaining sentience? The conversations never started with the assumption that food had possessed sentience to begin with. 

Not every single food and resource returned to the land. The highest rate of intact foodways appeared in Indigenous communities where food had been grown, hunted, and gathered by hand. It took Elders in these communities no time at all to figure out what had happened. If colonial governments, or even just their neighbors, had listened to them from the beginning, no one would have gone hungry at all. Instead, institutional leaders attempted to use what energy they had left to put out official statements about the famine that affected the most affluent people in disproportionate amounts. Campaigns were started to raid Indigenous communities for food and resources in the name of the greater good. Eventually this tactic was deserted when it proved useless to invaders. The second these Things were taken, they leapt from the seizing hands and returned to the community from which they were stolen. 

Water refused to leave the rivers, lakes, and springs. Water cupped in hands splashed itself so thoroughly out of them that the takers’ hands remained dry. The sensation of truly going without was a first for many. 

The whole event lasted for four days. Four days for anger, violence, and self-absorption to get acquainted with weakness, hunger, and thirst. Four days for entitlement to give way to empathy. Four days for fatalism to concede to abundance. 

The concession began with the Youth, though they remained unheard until weakness encouraged stillness of the body, and stillness cleared space for attention. When that quiet time came, they gathered their families and led them to the Elders. 

The Elders had been waiting, prepared, for days, as had the Warriors that would demonstrate the return. They had chosen to weaken themselves, and the whole time were flooded with gratitude that they had been shown how to do this in their youth. 

Medicine was passed into unsteady palms before it was offered to shorelines, for once an offering expecting nothing but pity in return. Finally, a tiny bit of the water cupped in these palms stayed cupped in them, and with each palmful that was offered away to community first, the water stayed in larger and larger amounts. This revelation washed across communities, ripples of relief followed by waves of gratitude. The Elders had prepared feasts to celebrate this growth, and once their food had been turned away over and over by people who finally knew true hunger, once they finally heard thanks offered in reciprocity, an ear of corn rolled right into the heel of an Elder, offering their Self as the first bite.