The folks over at Cyber Ecology are continuing the food systems discussion.
Tenniel does a great job of covering the possibilities for local involvement with our food. She discusses everything from putting in your own garden to Community Supported Agriculture to local farmers markets and food co-ops. The gist of her main point is that we need to reconnect with our food. We need to make an effort build a relationship with our food. That may mean we try to grow some of our own food or it may be that we make more of an effort to understand the origins of our food. It’s up to us to begin to take the action necessary to establish our connection. Read more….
06/06/2003
Impeachable Offense?
Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction: Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
John Dean writes:
President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation. Read more…
A long but very well written summary of what’s going on with Georgie Boy.
06/06/2003
Is Georgie Boy Arrogant?
06/06/2003
Patriotic Son
Ashcroft is a scary, scary man.
Of course, what is the man without the Patriot Act?
06/06/2003
The Meat of Capitalism
Serona over at Cyber Ecology has a follow up on meat and mad cow disease. I thought I’d point out that the problem isn’t mad cow disease. It’s really just a symptom. The problem is “our” food system which has evolved away from meeting human needs and which is increasingly ecologically destructive. More specifically, the problem is capitalism.
Want evidence that capitalism doesn’t work? Walk into a grocery store anywhere in the U.S. and look at the garbage that is being sold. Multinational corporations are not concerned with providing healthy food which has been grown using ecologically sustainable practices. They are interested in generating maximum profit which is why grocery stores are full of products that kill people. It’s true that there is a growing health food industry but that’s not an indicator that capitalists are interested in human health or ecological sustainability. It’s just a new source of profit.
Call me a radical, but it seems to me that our food system should provide food which nourishes the human body not food which makes it sick. I’d also go so far as to suggest that democracy should extend beyond government. Our food system should a part of democratic process. Our economics should be a part of democratic process. In fact, democratic process should be the foundation of our society. As it stands now, multinational corporations are not democratic. Nor are we taught to consider the social and ecological costs of the products we consume.
There are many aspects of our food system which should be examined. Of primary importance is the centralization of food production. Centralization refers to the scale of production sites, what many call factory farming. The centralized food production system is about short-term efficiency and short-term profit. It’s a system tied to a transition to chemical-based agriculture and a corresponding concentration of land into the hands of fewer, larger landholders. According to this articlebyGail Feenstra:
Many of these farms are highly specialized, growing mainly one crop. Small family farms are quietly disappearing, replaced by quickly expanding suburban developments, or in some regions, impoverished rural towns…
Our current, more centralized system is highly dependent on fossil fuel inputs for machinery, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, food processing and distribution. Fossil fuel inputs have increased dramatically over the last several decades so that today, we put 9.8 kilocalories of fossil fuel energy into our food system for every one kilocalorie of food energy we get out…
As the food system has gotten more centralized, fewer landowners actually live on and work their land, so they lose the intimate contact that is necessary to care for the land, water and other resources sustainably…
If we are going to move towards something different we need to develop an understanding of what currently exists and how it evolved. Of course it’s not just about opposing what exists but presenting and creating alternatives. What kind of food system would be better? How would decentralized food production work? Why would it be better? Would it be more democratic? How would it tie in to the larger global context? As we enter this new century we see the continued growth of a movement to combat global capital. Across the planet activists continue to rally each year in opposition to entities such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. The beauty of this movement is that it’s activists increasingly understand the root problem of global capitalism as a global process. It’s a movement that extends itself to confronting war, biotechnology, racism, arms proliferation, imperialism… the whole enchilada. Biodiversity, ecological sustainability, and food security are important issues within this larger movement and they will need to be explored further.