from Aubrey Organics
http://www.aubrey-organics.com/news/article.cfm?story_id=69
Into the 21st Century
Food Fight for the Future
(From Fall 1996)
by J.P. Harpignies
From millennia as gatherers and hunters, and later farmers, we have
recently evolved into a species in which very few people (at least in
the industrialized nations) have the slightest idea where their food
comes from, or even what it looks like in its original form. This is
captured in a scene from the film Repo Man when the protagonist opens
a refrigerator and eats out of a large can simply labeled "Food."
The shadow of this disconnection is that our culture is obsessed with
food. Obesity is at record levels, eating disorders are virtual
epidemics and books on dieting are ensconced on the best seller lists
as new generations of gourmet diners and shoppers search for greater
and more exotic culinary thrills.
Industrial agribusiness, with its emphasis on uniform mono-crops,
fertilizer and pesticide use and genetic manipulation of plants and
animals, continues to dominate over the world's food supply, even
though it has become the most environmentally damaging industry
around. Its growth has been paralleled since mid-century only by that
of a medical and pharmaceutical complex that, until very recently,
ignored nutrition as a factor in human health.
We have, for the most part, been converted into what Wendell Berry
calls "industrial eaters," constantly absorbing strange, ersatz
foodstuffs of unknown synthetic origin because they are appealingly
displayed on our T.V. screens. Even in this most fundamental aspect
of our animal lives-eating-we have been radically severed from the
natural world.
But there is enormous resistance from the grassroots, a "nutritional
counterculture" that has continued to grow exponentially since the
late 1960s. If one adds up the organic farming proponents,
anti-pesticide campaigners, food justice advocates, biodiversity
exponents and rural land use reformers with the millions of "health
food" consumers and the booming natural products industry that serves
them, the picture of an enormous rebellion emerges.
Despite the immense power of multinational industrial agriculture and
high tech food processors, large numbers of informed citizens are
rejecting their wares, and more importantly, their world view. They
are refusing to eat mono-cropped, pesticide-drenched grains,
antibiotic- and hormone-laced meat, genetically engineered
"Frankenfoods" and irradiated spices. They are also deserting a
medical establishment ignorant about nutrition, and they are doing it
in a wide variety of ways: by their consumption patterns, by
political action and pressure, by grassroots education, by "green"
entrepreneurship, and by organizing farmers' markets, food co-ops,
food banks to feed the hungry, international "fair trade"
initiatives, etc.
Making the Connection
Here are a few questions worth pondering before gulping down that sandwich:
* What is the environmental cost of your food? What kinds of
chemicals were used in its production, transportation and processing:
inorganic fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, hormones, fossil
fuels, preservatives and artificial flavorings and chemicals? How
much did its production contribute to soil erosion, water
contamination, aquifer depletion and destruction of wetlands and
other natural habitat, including rain forests? How far did it have to
travel to reach your table?
* What is the social cost of your food? Who is exploited and
who loses? Who is bankrupted and driven off the land as a result of
your food choices? Under what conditions do those who produce food
labor, and what is their compensation?
* What is the cost to the animals that provide your food? How
much needless suffering are they subjected to in order to maximize
profits for those who raise them and trade in their products?
* Finally, what is the spiritual cost of your food? If much of
your nutriment, some of which is transformed into the living cells of
your body, comes from a dead and soulless agriculture, what is the
cost to your spirit? (From Common Harvest. Food Action Network, 1992.)
Those who discover the real answers to those questions usually wind
up radically altering their food consumption patterns. And despite
agribiz's claims, genuine alternatives do exist. Organic farming,
almost extinct by the late 50s, is thriving. Though still only a tiny
fraction of total U.S. acreage (no more than 1%), it is exploding in
popularity in all its forms (Biodynamic, eclectic, French and
Biointensive, Permaculture, Fukuoka, traditional native methods such
as southwestern "dry farming," etc.) This despite massive government
subsidies to toxic agribiz and enormous legal and credit impediments
thrown in its way.
Largely an offshoot of the weapons industry, the farm chemical
industry (particularly in the area of fertilizers) grew out of the
need to find a use for stockpiles of nitrogen-based chemicals after
World War II. No surprise, then, that the resulting farming
methodology consists of "napalming" the soil, feeding it junk food
and torturing it into yielding uniform, tasteless, nutritionally
empty crops.
To achieve a genuinely sustainable food system, more complex issues
than whether food should be organically grown (certainly a vital
first step) need to be addressed. The large cartels could conceivably
grow food "organically" (though most likely in large scale
mono-cultures, probably using some form of genetic manipulation) if
the market grows enough to make it profitable. In fact, some are
beginning to explore this possibility, threatening to drive even more
small farms out of business.
A sane society would take into account the scale of agricultural
enterprises and the need for small and medium farmers to prosper.
Several movements point us in the right direction. Farmers' markets,
also an endangered species until 25 years ago, have made a
spectacular comeback, with more and more organic produce available.
A few key organizers have also managed to set up markets in poor
urban neighborhoods (i.e., the Bronx's Sunday Market and La Marqueta
in New York City), and the visionary WIC Farmers' Market Nutritional
Program for low income families has done unmeasurable good in helping
fresh produce get to those who need it most at a very low cost to the
taxpayer.
Farmers' markets make sense. They help farmers survive, revitalize
urban areas where they are held, and help consumers develop a
relationship with the food they eat and those who grow it. Why not
buy the freshest (ideally organic), locally-grown produce from those
who grew it, instead of giving money to corporate predators such as
A.D.M. Cargill, Grace, Monsanto, et al?
Another visionary impulse afoot is the Community Supported
Agriculture (CSA) movement. About a decade old in the U.S., CSA was
developed in the Biodynamic Farming community and is based on Rudolf
Steiner's ideas on voluntary, neither capitalist nor communist
"associative economics." In the basic CSA model, a farm and a group
of consumers form a partnership of sorts. The consumers as a group
raise money and buy shares of the farm's output before the harvest
season, take charge of distribution and often do some work, though
usually not actual farm labor. Each CSA set-up is different, but as a
rule, farmers are freed from seeking commercial credit and the
shareholders develop an active relationship with the origin of their
food and get the freshest possible produce. Sometimes the land is
placed in a land trust as well. CSA's have boomed-from two in 1986,
to as many as 500 to 600 today, though they are multiplying so
rapidly, no one knows the exact figure.
CSA is a fascinating, hopeful model, and its success reveals how deep
the yearning is on the part of many people to reestablish a
connection with the land-with real food and the natural world. But it
is still a tiny movement, and there is a limit to how far this
concept can spread. Besides all the usual problems inherent in
building visionary movements on a shoestring-conflict, neurosis,
burn-out, etc.-the main issues facing CSA are economic: How to secure
reasonable, livable incomes for farmers and farm workers, and
especially, how to secure agricultural land in a socially Darwinian,
"free market" economy that allows (and demands!) the commodification
of everything, including land, air, water and now even plant, animal
and human genes!
Obviously, it is not possible for small organic farms to compete with
large scale, industrialized agriculture in terms of price or quantity
and, as land prices soar, population expands and "development" paves
over the world, it is very hard to hold on to farmland. Unless
society's hierarchy of values radically changes so that farmland,
wilderness and other natural resources are protected, positive
movements such as CSA will only be tiny islands of sanity in a toxic
wasteland.
Perhaps most heartening is the recent rise of a national movement of
local and regional food activists seeking to draw the outlines of a
sustainable and just food production and distribution system. Called
SAWGs (Sustainable Agricultural Working Groups), they bring together
farmers and farmers' market organizers, CSA groups, community food
banks and state and private nutrition education efforts to build
grassroots institutions and networks and create a powerful voice for
food sanity. These activists realize that, although the "food
counterculture" is a strong force, unless its disparate stands can
coalesce around a unifying vision, its potential to bring about real
change is next to none. If change is not implemented, more will go
hungry, poor communities will continue to suffer from illnesses
caused by pesticides and poor nutrition, and small farms will
disappear, while specialty divisions of the transnational food
cartels corner the "health foods" market.
If these same corporate behemoths paving over the planet also become
the dominant players in natural foods, it will be impossible to avoid
a great deal of corruption. The health food movement is part of an
immense but inchoate popular resistance to a corporate, sterile,
cyber hell of a future.
Growing and eating untainted, unprocessed food grown in real living
soil become, in this context, acts of political, aesthetic and
spiritual rebellion. And it is on this simple gut level that the war
for the soul of our culture can be best experienced. But the
connections must be made between healthful, organic food and
protected ecosystems, prosperous small scale farming and social
justice in food labor, distribution and world trade, if this movement
is to become more than a specialized niche market for the well-to-do.
This is not a romantic, neo-luddite perspective. Organic farming,
bioremediation of water and soil, holistic medicine and eco-design
and construction, to name only a few disciplines, all make use of
highly sophisticated technologies. The point is not to reject
technology, human creativity and invention, but to question and
challenge the values that have permitted us to develop catastrophic
and unsustainable technologies. Must we allow every half-baked
attempt to redesign vast natural forces we don't fully understand
only to face the "collateral damage" years later? Or do we develop
"biophilic" technology that emulates the wisdom and sophistication of
many ecosystems to gently and harmoniously fit ourselves back into
the food chain, that web of life we are on the verge of rending? How
we do something as fundamental as grow and distribute food is a very
good indication of where we stand as a species.
To begin to make some sense of our relationship to food we must
expand our concept of health. Individual well being is connected to
collective social, ecosystemic and biospheric health. How we obtain
our food, how we relate to those who grow it, how connected we are to
the living worlds of plants and animals: these are all health issues.
An unsustainable, greed-driven agribusiness poisoning the land and
genetically "engineering" freak plants and animals cannot produce
healthy food. When only the rich consume organically grown foods and
bottled water and take expensive antioxidants to protect themselves
from U.V. rays, carbon monoxide and industrial and agricultural
chemicals while everyone else eats poison, we cannot speak of a
healthy society.
In a healthy society we would viscerally feel our interdependence
with the soil, water, animals and plants that support us at the top
of the food chain. How we eat and how our food producing system
functions should reflect that understanding.
J.P. Harpignies is a frequent Organica contributor.
