Subsistence was my favourite word in my undergrad, it implies anything to do with survival, of the individual and the wider society. It is the maintenance of self, without ostentatious surplus but with a consciousness of the impact we create within our environment. It also generally leads to a discussion of food, which is where my love truly lies. Subsistence is not about struggle, or minimalism, it is about flow and consciousness, creating a closed circuit of survival that benefits the individual, the group and the broader environmental context. I am not suggesting that we return to our family groupings, boycott clothing, and race for the most fertile land, but entirely outsourcing our subsistence seems a little much. 

Brief history lesson: As social complexity developed the concept of subsistence agriculture continued in settled early agricultural societies. Production was a community project with shared spoils. Nothing was wasted because every member of the group understood the work that went into producing what nourished the group and the need for the nourishment for the society to survive. Once social hierarchy was established to the extent that centralized power was possible, subsistence was put in the hands of the elite classes. The common man would produce the food, deliver it to the central authority, and receive a small ration of it in exchange. This was the very beginning of the occupation specialization that has separated people from their personal subsistence. 

​Personal subsistence can refer to the acquisition of food (whether through foraging, hunting, or agriculture), the processing, social and cultural consumption, and nutritional satisfaction. This is one of the most significant aspects in an understanding of past life ways and modern human action. Food is about so much more than the physical eating of it. We need to look at our food consumption from all angles and appreciate the cultural and social code embedded in what we eat and how we do it, and consider our diet in terms of the global food network that exists today.
We are offered so many diet plans, foods to avoid and ‘top 10 tricks to lose weight’, but we are not uniform – neither personally nor contextually. ‘You won’t find Inuit’s eating corn’. Julian Steward, the father of cultural ecology, used that image to explain the link between environment and culture and the reality that we are part of the natural ecosystem, not a law unto ourselves. Diet should not be designed around an idealized 10 step plan from a wellness expert living half a world away. While they may have brilliant and knowledgeable advice, the journey through diet is not static, dogmatic or generic. Our diet is something so personal, built by our culture, memories, traditions, idiosyncrasies, personal tastes, social interaction, and position in our world.  You won’t find Inuit’s eating corn, or Japanese elders eating chia seeds, or ayurvedic practioners eating seaweed, or Italian mamas eating kumara.
It is important to look at our life ways and the context we are living in now to gain an understanding of the networks we are participating in. The practices of history and prehistory are important yet we need to learn to live where we are and do the best with what we have. Our society is so accustomed to the fast paced, industrialized capitalist system that a reversion to historic subsistence practices, instead of reconnecting us to the social and cultural networks surrounding food, produces a barrier of alienation.  Modern subsistence is about moving the philosophies of subsistence into the contemporary environment, allowing space for our bodies, relationships, and actions to take the spotlight, while maintaining participation in the aspects of modern society and culture that serve us best. Although we may not realize it there is a complex network of links, language and implications around food that we are fluent in. When we learn a new language we are painfully away of the complicated anomalies of grammar, something we take for granted in our native language, not really having to think about it. It is not until we study the grammar and literature of our first language that we realize home complex it is, this language that comes so naturally to us. The language of food is the same, we participate without knowing and we perpetuate it without understanding. (Calling cheese in a spray can food is the equivalent of putting YOLO in the Oxford dictionary.) Food is endowed with meaning, emotions, connotations of relationships and bonding. Marketing has built complex cultural traditions around excessive meat and dairy consumption, snacking, and fast foods, none of which serve our health, relationships with each other or our relationship with our environment. We nee to define a social grammar of conscious subsistence, learn a little more about ourselves, and consider the environment that supports us. 

​Tess Xx

​In our postmodern society, nutritional value of food has very little to do with how we choose what we eat. We are bombarded with advertising and global trends in culture that try to tell us where, when and what to eat. People were camping out in front of the first Krispy Kreme store to open in Perth, just to ensure they could get donuts on the first day. There is nothing biologically good about a Krispy Kreme donut, but the fact that they were not available in Perth, making them associated with travel and the bigger cultural hubs like Sydney and Melbourne, gave them exotic connotations. Anthropologist Margaret Mead took this symbolic interactionist approach to food meaning, arguing that the significance given to food items stems from our social interactions in food related activities. So we do not consume foods and drinks based on our biological need but on our experiences, nostalgic desires, and emotional needs.
 
I have been a coffee drinker since high school. My family is one of those families that always eat together at the table for every meal, and breakfast was a particular event. Porridge or cereal came first, followed by toast and coffee. This ceremony of sitting around the table, each person making personal modifications to the familial template, was the symbolic interaction that began my love affair with coffee. It’s easy to overestimate our personal autonomy in food choices. Traditional foods, linked to our culture and family, and our individual food memories of our childhood have a massive impact on what we choose to eat in adult life. Though I don’t always think about the big table we all ate breakfast around or the sound of the coffee boiling through the pot, these memories come into the back of my mind in the gap between breakfast and the beginning of a productive day and put the notion of coffee into my mind. 

​Morning coffee has always been a ritual that I adapted with the changing phases of my life. From inheriting a coffee pot from my parents and making coffee for my self in my first flats at university, to making a connection with particular cafes and baristas as I moved cities and countries; using coffee as a way to motivate myself while studying in the library to combining a take-away coffee with a morning walk in a form of meditation. In all cases a cup of coffee was used to form and maintain my identity, providing comfort and social connections, and to structure my body and my mind, either focusing it or allowing it to wander. In the midst of my anthropology study I started to wonder why this simple cup could have such hold over me, both in its presence and absence.
 
Our coffee culture is shaped by ‘ritualised inebriation’.  There is a connection between caffination and productivity that has been cemented in our consciousness by our coffee marketing and the idealised fast paced, capitalist lifestyle. This dogma around coffee has taught us that if we have a busy day ahead, we need coffee; if exams are coming up the only course of action is a book under your nose and coffee in your hand; if we are tired at any point before 2pm the prescription is coffee; if there is a mandatory task that we are dreading, coffee will get us through it. This enculturation has created the highly caffeinated population we have today. We have been taught to rely on the promise of warm, dark brown liquid sanctuary and fear desertion by this saviour. I never had intense physical coffee withdrawals, maybe a small headache, but I could definitely feel its absence within myself when I decided to cut down my coffee consumption. It’s sort of like leaving the house without brushing your teeth. You are consistently aware of it throughout the day despite the fact that it’s not visibly obvious to others. My body was also having some issues with the caffeine, so after a bad encounter I decided to give up coffee for six weeks to see if I could break the cycle.
 
Those who don’t drink coffee are now outside of the norm. For many people coffee signifies the beginning of their day; coffee at home with breakfast, grabbing a takeaway coffee on the way to work, or having coffee in hand as we sit down to work, to signify that, yes, it is business time. But this perceived increase in productivity and cheeriness seems to have lead to an increased emphasis on the drudgery of life. We have access to this substance that we are told makes us a better member of society (more productive, cheery, vibrant, and sociable), and this has introduced a fear of an uncaffinated life. The nonchalant overuse of coffee puts pressure on ordinary life to be perfect. Concepts like #mondayitis and the 3pm slump run rife in our world that tells us we have to always be up. 

I realised after giving up my daily coffee for six weeks, that it really is a drug. When I first reintroduced coffee I was full of a nervous, aching energy, jumping around like a whirling dervish. My pupils dilate, and so does my conversational contribution. I go from someone who lives analytically in her head to an unfamiliar chatterbox. My appetite disappears and my productivity (or at least my own perception of my productivity) peaks, until I fall into a trough of lethargy mixed with an anxious inability to rest. I go from light headed to heavy headed in the multiple hours that this drug impacts on my system, and I am left feeling that I have struggled through a long day. This perceived productivity based on the fast paced energy of my mind and body while in the throws of caffination, coupled with the physical and mental exhaustion of the crash, reflects exactly what is expected of us over the coarse of a workday. This brings us back to the concept of ritualised inebriation. Coffee makes us feel like we are contributing, both in a social and professional capacity, fulfilling the spirit of capitalism without too much effort. Max Weber argued that the religious dogma around labour as divine action to attain the grace of God was manipulated and secularised during the reformation resulting in a capitalist spirit of labour and hard work as the path to both spiritual and worldly success. For today’s competitive work force, coffee consumption is the technological short cut to such success.
 
A study done on the effects of habitual consumption of coffee and its side effects of anxiety and alertness found that while high coffee consumers became tolerant of the anxiety producing properties they also lost the benefits of alertness. In people who frequently consume coffee there is the same change in alertness, but instead of rising from the human baseline to increased alertness they have to rise from a depth of depleted alertness caused by the absence of coffee and will only reach the standard baseline after their hot beverage, no higher. 

Coffee is playing the ultimate mind game with us. We need it to be productive and effervescent, but the more we drink it the less productive we become. Our consumption of our daily coffee helps us to form our identity and our social status, yet the more frequently we reinforce this status the deeper the moments where we lose ourselves completely in a caffeine deficient chasm. This is not to say that coffee is all bad, I cherish a good cup of coffee. But let’s we honest and see it for what it really is. Maybe be rebellious and drink a cup of herbal tea once in awhile. 

​Tess Xx