When Aleks and Vitalii Koval got an email that listed the handful of bomb shelters near their daughters’ kindergarten in central Kyiv, they were anything but reassured.

But taking bits of information like this and figuring out what they might say about the possibility of war between Ukraine and Russia has become part of the daily routine for the Ukrainian public – even if it is like reading tea leaves.

With 100,000 Russian troops massed along the Ukrainian border in what Washington characterizes as the greatest movement of troops since the Cold War, and with conflicting messages from the United States and Ukraine over the imminence of the threat that they pose, Ukrainians have been left to themselves to puzzle out who knows best. And their responses have varied, from denying that a war with their Russian kin is even possible, to planning for the worst – like scouting out routes to bomb shelters.

“We are very anxious,” said Ms. Koval, as she dropped her daughters off for a three-hour visit at the school. “I haven’t gone to check what these shelters actually look like, but I suppose they are not very cozy.”

Titanic concerns?

Washington fears that an incursion by Russia could be imminent, with President Joe Biden warning that one could come as soon as February. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has tried to dial down the anxiety, saying it has cost the Ukrainian economy $446 million since the start of the year. “We don’t have a Titanic here,” he said on Jan. 28.

The disconnect between the risk assessments made by top U.S. officials and the Ukrainian leader, a former comedian, is the subject of both confusion and humor in Kyiv.

The front page of the Monday issue of Vesti, a once Russian-language newspaper now published in Ukrainian, read “No Panic on Titanic” with a picture of Mr. Biden and Mr. Zelenskyy standing on the hull of the famous ship against a purple and pink sunset. “For the first time in the past eight years, the Ukrainian government has stood up to the United States and destroyed all the rumors of possible Russian invasion,” read the caption below.

Page 2 was devoted to the death of a famous Russian actor, while page 3 pointed to an outbreak of the coronavirus in the Ukrainian parliament and the arrival of more weapons from Western allies.

Galina Lyshenko, who works as an administrator at a shop, says she is worried because her parents live in Sumy, the northeastern region of Ukraine. They have already packed their emergency bags in case they need to flee a partial Russian incursion. Ms. Lyshenko says her risk assessment aligns with the one presented in Washington.

Dominique Soguel

Vlada Shestak (left) and Galina Lyshenko, shown at Maidan, or Independence Square, in Kyiv on Jan. 31, are worried that there is little to stop Russia from invading Ukraine. “The Russians took Crimea; they took Donbass,” says Ms. Lyshenko, referring to the region annexed by Russia in 2014 and the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, respectively.

“I think Biden is right,” says Ms. Lyshenko, while taking a celebratory birthday coffee at Kyiv’s Independence Square, better known as Maidan. The scene of two post-Soviet-era uprisings is now a de facto shrine filled with portraits of the demonstrators gunned down in 2014. “The Russians took Crimea; they took Donbass,” she says, referring to the region annexed by Russia in 2014 and the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, respectively. “What stops them from taking Ukraine?”

“There is no help from the West,” chimes in her friend Vlada Shestak. “Look at the experiences of Crimea, Donbass, and Belarus. When things get hot, all they do is express deep concern and slap sanctions.”

Vladimir Tsisaruk, a used-car salesman, points out that Ukraine has been under threat of attack for years. He believes the fever-pitch tensions are all part of a Russian scheme to gain concessions from the West – such as a reduction in economic sanctions and no NATO membership for his country. “If they invade, we will react,” he says. “But we can’t live in a state of tension.”

“It won’t happen,” says Vera Danilova, the owner of a hookah bar in Kyiv and a native of the eastern region of Donetsk. “It is absurd. Not even Russia wants it. The West is following their own interest as they have for centuries. They just want to smash Russia into pieces.”

Friends and neighbors

Olga Ruzhanska bought lottery tickets at a kiosk on Monday. “The best kind of luck I have today is that we have peaceful skies and no tanks on the streets,” says the retired engineer from the western Ukrainian city of Husych, who now lives in Kyiv. “I have grown grandchildren and I don’t want them to see that sight.”

Dominique Soguel

Retired engineer Olga Ruzhanska, standing outside the municipal building in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Jan. 31, is optimistic but defiant about a Russian invasion. “There is nothing you can do,” she says. “If Moscow comes we will fight with everything we have, but why be scared before that?”

She does not downplay the risks of the current standoff between the West and Russia over the fate of Ukraine. “I am scared because there are parts of Kyiv that have no place to hide in case of an attack,” she says. “Putin is the same as Hitler. Land is not enough for him. He wants to be a god. But he will never be a god.”

But she has decided to take the president’s advice to carry on with pride rather than panic and hoard porridge like some of her neighbors. “There is nothing you can do,” she says. “If Moscow comes we will fight with everything we have, but why be scared before that?”

At the Besarabsky Market in Kyiv, several stalls sell caviar advertised as “Russian,” even though an embargo on Russian products has been in force for over a year. One vendor says in her case it is a marketing trick because tourists want Russian caviar. Another says she still manages to source Russian caviar, and that loyal customers going back more than 30 years are happy with a “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The two vendors, who declined give their full names, say the pandemic – with the toll that it has taken on household budgets and international travel – has been more destabilizing for their business than the current tensions with Russia. And there is no doubt in their minds that peace with Mr. Putin could only bring greater prosperity to Ukraine.

“We should have remained friends with our Russian neighbor just like Belarus and Moldova did,” says Vera, one of the caviar vendors. “You can’t get rid of your neighbors.”

Back by the kindergarten, Mr. Koval believes a full-scale incursion into Ukraine, while not impossible, is improbable.

“If Russians invade Ukraine, we just don’t understand what they want to achieve, because the [Russian] economy will be destroyed by sanctions and they will get the pain [of trying to occupy a resisting] Ukraine,” says Mr. Koval, who works in finance and monitors English- and Russian-language media. “So risk-return at the moment, it’s not very obvious.”

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the spellings of the Kovals' first names.

Thomas Frey/AP

Defendant Anwar Raslan (center) awaits pronouncement of the verdict against him at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, Jan. 13, 2022. In a landmark trial, the former Syrian secret police officer was convicted of crimes against humanity for overseeing the abuse of detainees at a jail near Damascus a decade ago.

When a German court this month found a former high-ranking Syrian government official guilty of war crimes, it wasn’t just the victims’ families who felt hope.

So too did an international community of human rights lawyers and activists, who saw the verdict as one that might open a path to justice for other victims in war-torn Syria and help deter such crimes in similar conflicts elsewhere.

“The trial could really create the conditions to push the door open to wider accountability for the conflict in Syria,” says Balkees Jarrah, the interim international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “The more judicial activity there is in response to demands from survivors and others, the harder – we hope – it will be to sweep the accountability issue under the rug. This shows the long arm of justice, but it also shows that justice is a long game.”

The former Syrian official, Anwar Raslan, was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity including murder, torture, and rape. Just a week after his conviction, another trial began against Dr. Alaa Mousa who is accused of torturing more than a dozen Syrian dissidents and murdering at least one in military detention facilities. Activists say seeing these figures in the dock has emboldened more witnesses to come forward.

These are the first trials anywhere in the world that address state-sponsored torture in Syria. More are on the horizon in Germany and other parts of Europe, showcasing the potential of European national courts to be a tool for justice in war crimes prosecution, when specialized tribunals such as those used for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda or the International Criminal Court are not an option.

“It’s not just about Syria and Syrians,” says Syrian lawyer and former political prisoner Anwar al-Bunni. “This sends a message to all the criminals and dictators who are comfortable thanks to the political relationships that protect them: Nobody can protect you … if the victims decide to have justice. Maybe with this work we can save millions of lives.”

Finding the tools and will to act

The crimes of Bashar al-Assad’s regime happen in a country thousands of miles away. For alleged perpetrators to then become defendants in, say, a German or Swedish court years later, many things have to fall into place.

The biggest issue is the willingness of the courts and prosecutors to get involved. Most courts will only hear criminal cases where they have jurisdiction over the people involved – usually via the nationality of the accused or the victims – or over the place where the crime took place. That poses a problem with war crimes, because they can rarely be tried in courts that have jurisdiction over the people or places involved.

Thomas Frey/dpa/Reuters

Samar Al Bradan records proceedings in the trial of Syrian Anwar Raslan, later convicted of crimes against humanity, for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights at the Higher Regional Court in Koblenz, Germany, July 18, 2021.

That has spurred the development of the principle of “universal jurisdiction”: any court is considered to have jurisdiction in a case where the crime is so serious that to let it go untried would be a miscarriage of justice.

Unlike many other European nations, Germany has a special war crimes unit, and it opened a structural investigation into torture in Syria in 2015. Yet even with that pathway in place, trials require time and resources, along with a few unique factors: perpetrators who are present in the country, survivors willing to provide witness testimony, and prosecutors who can connect the dots and invoke universal jurisdiction.

All these factors came together in Germany, now home to more Syrian refugees than any other country in Europe. It’s no coincidence police investigators and prosecutors have been most active in this country, says Ms. Jarrah, as this critical mass offers up many potential witnesses. In these two cases, the defendants themselves had left Syria in hopes of building a new life in Europe.

“Germany and German justice have a vested interest in the matter,” agrees Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador and chairman of the advisory board of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, which helped build evidence for the case.

The evidence used in Mr. Raslan’s trial included the “Caesar files” – a body of 28,000 photos documenting the crimes in state-run detention centers – that were smuggled out of Syria. Now with Mr. Raslan’s trial part of the public record in Germany, the information that came out can be used in other prosecutions in Germany or elsewhere in Europe.

Germany has also issued an arrest warrant against a high-level Syrian official who is not present on German soil, as have courts in Spain and France. “There’s power in the issuance of that warrant, because it serves to ostracize that individual, shrink their world, and signal the seriousness of the crime they’ve been accused of,” says Ms. Jarrah.

Inspiration for Syrians

Germany’s trials are particularly poignant for victims and all those who have devoted a decade documenting the war crimes of Mr. Assad’s regime – only to be left with the feeling that nobody cares. Russian and Chinese support for the Assad regime at the United Nations Security Council has blocked efforts to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court. The latter prosecutes crimes against humanity when national systems are unwilling or unable to do so.

“For Syrians in general, to see somebody with the highest rank of head of general intelligence being put on trial sends a very heartening, morale-boosting signal that there’s not impunity writ large for the crimes being being committed in Syria,” says Hanny Megally, member of a United Nations committee investigating atrocities committed in Syria since March 2011, when the Syrian regime cracked down violently on Arab Spring protests.

But crimes such as the torture and killing of detainees, he points out, started decades earlier under Mr. Assad’s father, Hafez.

After finding shelter in Germany, Mr. Bunni launched a legal research center in Berlin that helps identify witnesses and victims willing to testify in a court. Survivors face many risks, he says, even in the relative safety of Germany: potential consequences for relatives who remain back home, reputational risks as they rebuild their lives, and psychological scarring from reliving and recounting such violent experiences that some barely survived.

“The victims are heroes for taking all these risks and giving testimony,” says Mr. Bunni.

The fact that European national courts are trying Syrian war criminals by invoking universal jurisdiction has destabilized the sense of safety felt by regime officials with blood in their hands, regardless of whether they are still in Syria or mixed in with the refugee population in Europe, he says. Mr. Bunni estimates that there are at least a thousand still at large in Europe.

“There is no safe haven,” says Mr. Bunni. Word filtering in from the streets of Damascus, he notes, is that some Syrian officials have sought to procure passports under different names or modified their photos to prepare for a possible flight abroad.

“And perhaps there’s a new momentum around these issues,” says Mona Rishmawi, the United Nations chief of rule of law, equality, and nondiscrimination. “There’s a feeling that justice has to be pursued, and Germany led the way to show that this can be done. Fortunately this trial happened and can open the way for more trials. We are documenting conflict after conflict and seeing atrocities taking place. You know, we cannot just be in the business of counting bodies.”

“There is no time limit”

What makes Germany’s verdict against Mr. Raslan so remarkable is that it was the first conviction of a high-ranking official of a regime still in power. This is the fruit of international cooperation mechanisms long in the making, as well as greater experience in collecting and sharing evidence, say former international war crimes prosecutors.

Mr. Rapp points out the European experience dealing with the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Transatlantic efforts to share intelligence and identify perpetrators culminated in the creation of the Hague-based Genocide Network. Today, programs like Eyewitness tap individuals armed with smartphones to track war crimes around the world.

Experts agree chances are slim that Mr. Assad might face justice in a courtroom, mostly for geopolitical reasons. But there’s hope. “The last thing [Slobodan Milošević] expected was that he would appear before the ICC,” notes Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, as well as that for Rwanda.

Nobody in the Arab world thought that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would be tried. Germany is still prosecuting even elderly Nazi war criminals. All these things add up, Mr. Goldstone says, to “an important message to war criminals that there is no time limit and no matter how long they live they can be brought to justice.”

Ryan Carrillo doesn’t particularly care for the term “toxic masculinity.”

A world-class powerlifter and self-described “big man” with an imposing size and fierce-looking features, he says he has “scared countless children with my presence and garnered stares almost everywhere I go.”

He’s made peace with that, Mr. Carrillo says. He knows he naturally stands out. But his physical presence has always made others look past the kind of person he is – and just assume the worst kinds of masculine stereotypes.

Terms such as “mansplain,” too, are used as political weapons on both sides of the spectrum, he believes, feeding a negative and disempowering cultural narrative from different directions. On the one hand, masculinity is equated with misogyny and oppression. On the other hand, masculinity is reduced to a celebration of strength and power.

Throughout his career in marketing, people sometimes express surprise when he gives sharp, insightful presentations – and then offer condescending compliments. “Teachers always thought I was big and dumb, and that stereotype has stuck with me my entire life, even into my professional career.”

Naturally expressive and creative, Mr. Carrillo says he’s still recovering from the emotional trauma of growing up in the “good old boy” culture of Texas high school football. 

“Masculinity, you know, meant not being vulnerable, letting your frustrations manifest as aggression, and not having a healthy way to, you know, cry, and to share feelings and communicate honestly – but I’ve always been that kind of person,” says Mr. Carrillo, who recently published “The Big Man Bible,” a self-help memoir he wrote “for the big men of the world who are silently struggling to transform their lives.” 

Over the past few years, there have been wide-ranging discussions about a purported “crisis in masculinity,” another front in the nation’s ongoing political battles over the meaning of sex, gender, and the social roles of men and women. Many conservatives, especially, see the “crisis” arising from the left’s decadeslong efforts to deconstruct the idea of masculinity, which have caused American men to, as a whole, lose their “toughness.” 

But Mr. Carrillo sees this crisis as more of a “silent pandemic” of men who are caught in the middle, boxed in by pressures from the right to be strong and stoic, or pressures from the left to be deferential and silent. He says he sees many men “living in fear and believing that they are not worthy – not worthy of love, not worthy to stand up for what they believe in, not worthy to exist as they are.”

Courtesy of USA Powerlifting

Ryan Carrillo completes a 750-pound squat at the USA Powerlifting American Open in Anaheim, California, in 2017. “The most ultimate form of masculinity is being vulnerable and letting yourself love and be loved,” he says.

Men, and white men in particular, still dominate most of America’s halls of power, of course. But within the lower rungs of the country’s socioeconomic ladders, certain trends have troubled researchers on both the left and right. 

The data is startling: Middle-aged white men now have the highest rates of suicide in the nation, and while men and women generally have similar rates of depression, men seek help far less often. Over the past decade, the nation’s opioid epidemic has engulfed single and divorced men far more than any other group, and the number of men who died of alcohol- and drug-related causes spiked 35% from 2019 to 2020.

At the same time, a generation of young men is beginning to give up on college. Today women make up 60% of all college enrollments, an all-time high. And while U.S. colleges and universities lost 1.5 million students over the past 5 years, 71% of these students were men.

“Many men feel lost in this current climate of shifting gender roles and messaging,” says Mac Scotty McGregor, the founder and director of Positive Masculinity, a Seattle-area center for men seeking an authentic and healthy way to express their manhood.

A former member of the U.S. Karate Team and three-time U.S. Open champion, he doesn’t necessarily care for the term “toxic masculinity” either, a term that, if misunderstood, “can seem wildly insulting, even bigoted,” says Mr. McGregor, the first transgender person to run for office in the state of Washington.

“The purpose of discussing traditional masculinity is to help masculine-identifying people lead happy, healthy lives, by expanding their emotional repertoire and not diminishing their strengths,” he says.

He’s always identified more on the masculine side of the spectrum, a spectrum that could include both the late Fred Rogers and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, he says. 

“I’m a jock, and I still love to work out and hit the bag and lift weights and all that,” says Mr. McGregor, a member of the World Martial Arts Hall of Fame. “But I have become much more, I think, in touch with my Fred Rogers side.” 

But when he was younger, he, too, felt a bit lost. “It’s so interesting that, when I was presenting as a female, I used to never be able to cry – I would never cry in public,” says Mr. McGregor. “It was feeling like I had to uphold that idea, being that guy that never shows emotion, the stoic that’s always got it all together.” 

Chrissy Wylie/Courtesy of Mac Scotty McGregor

Mac Scotty McGregor, a member of the World Martial Arts Hall of Fame, works out near his home in Seattle. Mr. McGregor, the first transgender person to run for office in Washington state, says that, if misunderstood, the phrase “toxic masculinity“ can seem “wildly insulting.”

“I’m not afraid to do that now, and it’s because I’m more at home with who I am,” he says.

Indeed, over the past decade especially, female athletes have come to embrace the “warrior” ethos of traditional masculinity. The emergence of the U.S. women’s national soccer team, popular fighters in mixed martial arts, and athletes such as Serena Williams have helped to, in effect, divorce ideals of toughness, dominance, and swagger from gender. 

“I very much see and understand sports culture as a landscape primarily conceived for masculinity,” says Brandon Manning, professor of Black literature and culture at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. But it’s also a landscape that has been conceived according to certain white ideals, which tend to be enforced in different ways for athletes neither white nor male. 

“The larger question is, who does and does not have access to these masculine performance rituals, which are generally centered and situated around the white masculine,” which emphasizes a stoicism generally contrasted against the emotions and expressions of nonwhite players, he says. 

Images of women wielding traditionally masculine skills also pervade action films over the past two decades, including “Kill Bill,” the most recent Star Wars films, and comic book-inspired heroes such as Wonder Woman, notes Roberta Chevrette, co-author of “Dangerous Dames: Representing Female-Bodied Empowerment in Postfeminist Media.”

“These portrayals of women are ‘dangerous’ in a couple of ways,” says Dr. Chevrette, professor of rhetoric, intercultural communication, and gender studies at Middle Tennessee State University. “They’re dangerous to patriarchy in that they actually do threaten it, because here you have representations of women doing things that they previously wouldn’t have been pictured doing, and you have them appearing in genres that they previously wouldn’t have been pictured in.”

Still, even as “warrior” ideals are being celebrated in more diverse ways, it doesn’t change one of the ongoing problems men face, says Michael Addis, professor of psychology and director of the Men’s Well-Being Research Group at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

“Culturally, we tend to hide the emotional and physical vulnerabilities of men,” he says. “This goes from the individual level of not wanting to talk about depression and anxiety, not wanting to talk about grief and sadness and loss and fear, all the way up to the cultural level of how the men we celebrate tend to continue to be stoic men, strong men, men who appear invincible.”

Mr. Carrillo agrees, and one of the reasons he wrote “The Big Man Bible,” he says, was to argue that “the most ultimate form of masculinity is being vulnerable and letting yourself love and be loved.”

At the same time, however, he celebrates what he calls “the big man’s beatitudes,” which affirm the unique qualities of a big man’s outsize strength, emotional resilience, and backbone with the power to protect and provide. 

“Blessed are the scorned big men, for they understand the struggle and draw power from it,” he writes. 

First of two parts. Part 2: Why Americans struggle over the future of masculinity 

Kara Donovan thought she had a good thing going when she started making money baking for friends and family in 2014. She’d always had a knack for baking sweet treats. She figured she’d use her hobby to earn some extra income for their house of six – herself, her husband, and four children. It was a good way to spend time with their kids before they started school full time.

Her small operation was successful. It helped them save money on day care expenses, too. Then someone in their community anonymously reported Ms. Donovan’s side gig. Officials with the state of Rhode Island – a highly restrictive state when it comes to cottage food law – shut it down. Under state law, only registered farmers are allowed to sell food made in their home. 

Ms. Donovan’s side gig of making pretty cakes and cookies, effectively, was illegal. It hurts, she says. Not just as a crafty baker who enjoys what she does, but as a parent and provider. Her family had gotten used to “having this little bit of extra income, whether the way I obtained it was right or wrong,” Ms. Donovan adds. “Then, all of a sudden, it was taken away from me.” 

But as Ms. Donovan was forced into renting out space in a local community kitchen to continue her work in Rhode Island, voters in nearby Maine were moving in a very different direction.

For years, food rights activists have lobbied for less stringent cottage food laws. That in some ways came to fruition in November, when 60% of Maine voters approved the nation’s first “right to food” amendment, enshrining it in the state constitution. Under the amendment, Mainers have the “natural, inherent and unalienable right” to produce, consume, and perhaps sell food they grew or raised. 

Proponents of the amendment described its passage as a direct challenge to a system centered heavily around large food corporations, as well as among the strongest efforts to date nationally to relocalize the food system. 

The Maine amendment comes at a curious time in how Americans feel about food. The pandemic caused a spike in food insecurity, with the challenges at one point encompassing more than 54 million Americans. And between isolation and bouts of unemployment, the pandemic also prompted many Americans to rethink how they obtain their daily food. Some took to the soil, with rows of tomatoes, okra, and cucumbers in their backyards reducing the need to hover around each other in grocery store aisles. Others hocked food to neighbors. 

Amid these shifts, some policymakers and thought leaders see a rising alignment between food security and the “food sovereignty” movement for local and individual agency. 

“I think a lot of people have started to wake up to how vulnerable we are as a society and in our own community to the global food system, a very unjust food system,” says Mariana Chilton, director of Drexel University’s Center for Hunger-Free Communities. “And also, a lot of people were getting very excited about growing their own food or raising their own chickens.” 

A trend beyond Maine

The Pine Tree State isn’t alone in recent action to boost food sovereignty. 

Wyoming kicked off the trend in 2015, when the state legislature approved the Food Freedom Act, which allowed for the sale and consumption of homemade goods. North Dakota followed suit in 2017, when it approved a similar law. And in April, both the Montana and Colorado legislatures passed local food choice measures, easing regulations on direct consumer purchases.

The passage of food rights policy such as Maine’s is seen as a building block by some Americans who are seeking answers to food insecurity, particularly in the American South, where some of the nation’s highest rates of childhood hunger are found. Five of the top 10 states for childhood food insecurity can be found in the region, including in Arkansas (more than 23%) and Louisiana (23%), according to Feeding America.  

For someone like Sunny Baker, co-director of the Mississippi Farm to School Network, food sovereignty and food rights are interwoven. 

“School food, in some ways, is a right to food – it’s a right for kids to get free mails, or reduced-cost meals,” Ms. Baker says. “We saw in the pandemic how vital and important those meals were, especially as people started losing jobs in the economy.” 

In the nonprofit network she directs, a key goal is to connect local farms with schools, bringing locally grown fresh produce to children.

But if advocates like Ms. Baker are to push for their own policy similar to Maine’s in the future, they’re thinking carefully about the framing.

Robert F. Bukaty/AP/File

Volunteers Holly Roberts (right) and Terry Lord pick fruit to be bagged and given away at a food pantry at the First Universalist Church in Norway, Maine, on Nov. 25, 2020. Voters in Maine approved a ballot measure on Nov. 2, 2021, to create a new constitutional right for people to grow food. Some Americans see laws on "food sovereignty" as a path toward greater food security.

“We want to design it in a comprehensive way from the beginning, so that it does not turn into this cycle of perpetuating hunger with food pantries – or solving hunger in a silo, as opposed to as a part of this larger system of a better economy that is better serving all,” Ms. Baker says. 

More sovereignty, less safety?

Maine’s own right to food amendment arose from years of local food sovereignty work. 

In the early 2010s, several towns across Maine passed local ordinances allowing for direct (face-to-face) sale of homemade foods like jams to customers without government oversight. Complaints about food safety – a top concern for those opposing the amendment, alongside animal welfare – would be reserved for the seller. 

The local laws in Maine paved the way for a similar statewide law in 2017. 

The U.S. Department of Agriculture was not shy in voicing safety concerns. Maine legislators eventually fell in line by excluding meat and poultry from the law. 

“A loaf of bread is different than a meat pie. You undercook a meat pie, and you could be sending people to a hospital,” says Diego Rose, a researcher at Tulane University in New Orleans who studies nutrition issues, including regulation of cottage foods. “It’s taken a lot of work to develop a food safety system that works pretty well. If you think about how much food 340 million people eat, and how you hear about outbreaks, it’s pretty rare that it happens.” 

On the surface level, food freedom laws are often distinct from the idea of food as a human right. The United Nations has asserted simply that “the right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.” 

Meanwhile, the food freedom movement is made up of an eclectic band of folks who often lack an ideological bond. Libertarians, alternative food enthusiasts, and back-to-the-land evangelists have combined in an effort to deregulate food production, often through cottage food laws. 

A building block for a future food system 

Food rights advocates say such deregulation doesn’t go far enough. Dr. Chilton and some food security researchers argue for including a right to be free from hunger or food insecurity. 

Such ideas have begun to work their way into the global consciousness. 

Food sovereignty concepts have spread across the globe in recent years. For example, for the past decade, so-called peasants’ movements such as La Via Campesina have asserted their voice against the agriculture industry’s role in free trade negotiations, which in turn promotes the dominance of industrial food production over locally grown, subsistence foodways. 

Ecuador is among many nations recognizing food as a stand-alone right. Its constitution states that “food sovereignty constitutes an objective and strategic obligation” that guarantees its citizens “self sufficiency in healthy food, culturally appropriate in a permanent form.” 

Many U.S. food rights advocates borrow from that logic.

In their eyes, a right to food amendment would ensure that every person has access to good, healthy, and culturally appropriate food that also contributes to sustainability – sustainable for communities that produce it, and for the environment. It would ensure that low-income communities own, and control, more of the food system they partake in. 

“People who are poor don’t have the time, they don’t have the land, they don’t have the private property in which they can grow their own stuff,” says Dr. Chilton. “I think that we need more provisions that ensure the conditions in which everyone has access to food, and that would be about ensuring the appropriate economic conditions.” 

In her view, while Maine’s amendment didn’t go that far, it’s “a great start.”

But even so, Ms. Donovan is still waiting for her own sense of agency. Rhode Island has yet to approve a broad-based cottage food law, though the state’s governor added it to the budget this year. 

“It blows my mind that we would be so against a thing that would bring small businesses together,” she says. “I’m losing time at home. I’m also spending extra money and in the long run, I’m not really making any because I’m paying out for rental space.” 

However, Ms. Donovan stresses how much she loves her work. It’s why she’s stuck with it, despite some of the challenges she’s met from both her neighbors and lawmakers alike. 

“It’s a lot of sleepless nights, because you’re working when the kids are in bed,” she adds. “We’re all just trying to do this thing. We love it. It provides a little extra for families to buy groceries.” 

Toni Morrison wrote just one stand-alone short story in her career, and page for page, it is as powerful and audacious an exploration of racial bias in America as her 11 novels. 

“Recitatif,” first published in 1983 and rereleased by Knopf on Feb. 1, is the story of two poor girls, Twyla and Roberta, one white, one Black – though we’re never told which is which – who meet when they share a room in a state shelter for four months. They’ve landed there in the late 1950s at the age of 8 because of their mothers’ inability to take care of them. Years later, their paths cross again, having landed on opposite sides of the track in an upstate New York town – and on opposing sides of school busing protests. 

All five sections of this episodic story, which spans more than 20 years, are narrated by Twyla. She begins, “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s.” 

Morrison wrote “Recitatif” in 1980, and explicitly characterized it as an experiment about what happens when you remove all racial codes from “a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” 

Staff

"Recitatif" by Toni Morrison, Knopf, 96 pp.

What happens is profoundly thought-provoking. Even four decades after this story was written, readers are ineluctably drawn into a quandary about which character is white and which is Black. But here’s the brilliance of Morrison’s experiment: Each conjecture exposes the reader’s own racial preconceptions. 

In her superb introductory essay, Zadie Smith comments, “When reading ‘Recitatif’ with students, there is a moment where the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.” 

At every turn, Morrison withholds key details and plants deliberate decoys to keep us questioning our judgments. Smith amusingly compares the resulting uncertainty to “that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of.” 

Is a white mother more likely to go out dancing all night – and is dancing a euphemism for more shameful activity? Is a Black mother more likely to object to her daughter rooming with someone from “a whole other race”? Who’s more likely to tell her daughter that the other kind “never washed their hair and they smelled funny”? 

Morrison even plays with the food. Is a Black or a white kid more likely to appreciate the shelter’s meals, which Roberta loathes and Twyla loves – Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail? Or does Twyla’s gusto have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that hot meals are a welcome change for a child whose mother’s “idea of supper was popcorn and a can of Yoo-Hoo”?  

When the two mothers come to visit, Twyla’s shows up for chapel bare-headed and empty-handed in tight green slacks “that made her behind stick out.” Roberta’s mother, “Bigger than any man,” with a huge cross on her chest, spurns the other woman. She carries an enormous Bible and a lunch of chicken legs, ham sandwiches, oranges, a thermos of milk, and “a whole box of chocolate-covered grahams.” We wonder whether her illness – which we later learn sends Roberta back to the shelter several times through her teens – is also code, perhaps for addiction or mental illness. 

“Recitatif” is about class as much as race. At 8, Twyla is constantly ranking herself. She writes that she and Roberta were low on the shelter’s pecking order – even lower than Puerto Ricans and Native Americans because “we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.” They’re also both F students, Twyla because she couldn’t retain lessons, and Roberta because she couldn’t read at all. But young Twyla has her own hierarchy: “A pretty mother on earth is better than a beautiful dead one in the sky even if she did leave you all alone to go dancing,” she writes.  

Held in even less esteem than the girls is a mute kitchen worker named Maggie, “with legs like parentheses.” One day, when Twyla and Roberta come across the shelter’s mean older girls tormenting Maggie, they don’t intervene. Morrison returns to the shameful incident repeatedly to highlight blind spots in her characters’ self-awareness, including how the powerless treat others even worse off. 

The interplay between class and race also comes to the fore when Twyla, a restaurant server who’s married to a firefighter, comments on Roberta’s new wealth after she marries a rich older widower with four kids and a prestigious job: “Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world,” Twlya says bitterly. Is she talking about white people, or rich people?

Smith notes that readers tend to identify with the narrator along racial lines, with white readers thinking Twyla is white, and Black readers feeling she’s black. Presumably, Morrison had a firm idea which of her characters was white and which Black, but she never tips her hand.

“Recitatif” is a shrewd feat of composition and social commentary. Smith calls it “a perfect – and perfectly American – tale, one every American child should read.” Why limit it to children? Its short length would make it an ideal, accessible selection for book groups and community-wide reading programs, sure to spark self-scrutiny and discussion. Both timely and timeless, it’s a story I can’t recommend highly enough.

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

Reuters

A vendor waits for customers at his stall in a street market in Istanbul, Turkey, Jan. 4.

It’s not a term that immediately stirs political passions. Yet public demand for statistical integrity, or truth in data, drives much in the news these days. A year ago, the military in Myanmar declared an election count invalid and took power, triggering massive resistance. Protests in Brazil have been driven in part by government undercounting of COVID-19 deaths. Europe is still recovering from a financial crisis over the euro caused by Greece fudging its debt levels.

Even the World Bank got caught doctoring data to favor China about its investment climate. China itself faces internal criticism over the reliability of its data. In December, a former finance minister said the country’s official statistics do not correctly reflect economic changes.

Now it is Turkey’s turn. On Saturday, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sacked the head of the national statistics bureau, Sait Erdal Dincer, after he released figures showing a 19-year high in inflation at 36%, one of the highest rates in the world. Mr. Dincer, who is the fourth chief of the Turkish Statistical Institute in the last five years, said he was simply following the procedures of Eurostat. The president said he was exaggerating the numbers.

Just a month earlier, Turkey’s political opposition staged a protest at the bureau, claiming it was underreporting the inflation rate. Mr. Erdoğan’s opponents are demanding transparency in all economic data and independence for the central bank and similar bodies. Turkey is facing a downward spiral in the value of its currency because the president has taken personal charge of economic policy. As a result, many Turks are facing financial hardship.

Any economy relies on the accuracy and transparency of its statistics. Governments that rely on heavy secrecy and bogus data for political purposes usually can expect a backlash when the public senses the effects in daily life. In global challenges, too, leaders must rely on statistical honesty, such as the need for each country to meet carbon-cutting targets in the struggle against climate change.

Clear and straightforward statistics help lift a society, highlighting both its weaknesses and successes. They are essential to set better policy, guide business, and assist citizens in civic responsibilities. “If we surrender to the feeling that we can no longer afford to know what is true, then we are depriving ourselves of a vital tool,” wrote journalist Tim Harford in a 2020 book on statistics, “How to Make the World Add Up.”

He suggests the antidote to cynicism about statistics is to “welcome information with curiosity and with constructive skepticism.” Faced with new data, he says, the public can learn to stop to think, put numbers in context, and ask questions. In Turkey, politics now turns not only on the integrity of statistics but also on the ability of its citizens to discern the truth in them.