If what we have been saying for many years is true, namely that
industrial food production does not give nutritious, healthy food,
then it is normal that consumers eventually feel the lack of
nutrition and go for something better.
c0e433b1-b084-19a6-600b-d6531c9c1a2d@lobo.net"
type="cite">
Food Liberation: Why the Food Movement Is
Unstoppable
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/37564-food-liberation-why-the-food-movement-is-unstoppable
Over the long run of history, the most effective opponents of
excessive wealth and privilege have not normally been city
dwellers, workers or unions. Instead, they have usually been
those with close links to food and the land, what we would now
identify as the food movement.
Even today, in more than a few countries, food is the
organizing principle behind the main challengers of existing
power structures. In El Salvador, the national coordinator of
its Organic Agriculture Movement (MAOES) is Miguel Ramirez who recently explained:
We say that every square meter of land that is worked with
agro-ecology is a liberated square meter. We see it as a tool
to transform farmers' social and economic conditions. We see
it as a tool of liberation from the unsustainable capitalist
agricultural model that oppresses farmers.
According
to Ramirez, the Salvadoran organic agriculture movement wants
much more than improved farming. It is seeking enhanced
political rights, long-term ecological sustainability, social
equity and popular health. Ramirez calls it "this titanic but
beautiful struggle, to reclaim the lives of all Salvadorans."
They may be small farmers, but they have a grand ambition. This
ambition is even shared worldwide. But how realistic is it?
Are they right to imagine food and farming are the missing
vehicle for transformative social change?
The question is timely. Not long ago, The New York Times
asserted that the center aisles of US supermarkets are being called "the morgue" because
sales of junk food are crashing; meanwhile, an international
consultant told Bloomberg magazine that "there's complete
paranoia" at major food companies where food movements are being
taken very seriously.
Food movements are rapidly growing across the world. In the US
alone, there have been surges of interest in heirloom seeds, in
craft beers, in traditional bread and
baking, in city garden plots, in organic food and in
opposition to GMOs. Simultaneously, there has been a massive
growth of interest in food on social media and the initiation or renewal
of institutions, such as Slow Food USA and the Grange movement, to name just a few.
Even at the normally much quieter farming end of the food value
chain, agribusiness has had to resort to buying up "independent" academics and social media
supporters to boost the case for GMOs and pesticides.
All of a sudden, individuals all over the globe are
scrutinizing the products and processes of the food system.
The Direction of the Food Movement
The food movement has a unique philosophy. Unlike all other
systems of Western thought, its philosophy is based on a
biological understanding of the world. It seeks to replace
political and economic ideologies deeply embedded in our culture
with a biologically-inspired imperative which fulfills the need
to align human needs with the needs of ecosystems and habitats.
It is a philosophy which recognizes that our planetary problems
and our social problems are really the same problem and seeks to
transform our relationships with each other and with the natural
world accordingly.
For this reason, the food movement is unexpectedly radical. Its
philosophy exposes longstanding weaknesses in some of the most
fundamental ideas underpinning Western political establishments.
So, while neoliberalism and socialism are ideological variants
of enlightenment thought, the food movement is concerned with
erasing (at least so far as is possible) all ideologies
because all ideologies are, at bottom, impediments to an
accurate understanding of the world.
This philosophy is apparent in five of its most notable
qualities:
1) The food movement is a leaderless movement
The food movement has no formal leaders. Even the most famous
members of the movement -- such as Frances Moore Lappé, Vandana
Shiva, Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan -- do not set goals,
give orders or decide on the movement's tactics. These
individuals are not power-brokers but rather sources of
inspiration. The food movement is a social movement that is
organic, anarchic and self-organized. It is a food
swarm, and the absence of formal leadership within it is not a
sign of weakness but of strength.
2) The food movement is a grassroots movement
The food movement is also unusually inclusive. It is composed
of the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, of amateurs
and experts, of home cooks and celebrity chefs, farmers and
gardeners, parents and writers, the employed and the unemployed.
There is no upper limit to membership of the food movement. It
is not defined in opposition to anything -- it would include the
whole world if it could -- and so there is no essential sense in
which it is exclusive. Exclusivity is often the Achilles heel of
social movements, but though its opponents have tried to label it as elitist, for good reasons,
they have not succeeded. Granted, Prince Charles is a very
enthusiastic member, but so too are hip hop artists from Oakland, the landless peasant movement of Brazil, the
instigators of the Mexican soda tax and the urban agriculture movements of Detroit,
Chicago and Cleveland. Such groups are neither elite nor
elitist. The food movement reaches across class lines. It is
indeed beyond grassroots.
3) The food movement is international
The food movement is international and multilingual. In each
locality it assumes different forms. The Campaign for Real Ale,
Via Campesina, the Zapatistas, Slow Food
and Europe's anti-GMO movement are very
different, but instead of competing or quarreling, there are
remarkable overlaps of purpose and vision between the parts.
This was on display at last winter's British Oxford Real Farming Conference where food
producers and good food advocates from all over the world shared
stages and perspectives and the effect was to complement and
inspire each other.
4) The food movement is low-budget
The fourth distinguishing characteristic of the food movement
is that it has little money behind it. Despite efforts by
corporations, such as the Walmart Foundation, to sway the
movement's direction through multimillion-dollar donations to the Food
Research and Action Center and Feeding America, on the whole,
the movement owes little to philanthropic foundations or
billionaire backers. Instead, it consists overwhelmingly of
amateurs, individuals and small groups and whatever money they
possess has followed, not led them. This is an indication that
the food movement is spontaneous, vigorous and internally
driven.
5) The food movement has many values
The food movement has multiple values and many component parts.
It integrates concerns about human health, animal welfare,
agricultural sustainability, ecological sustainability, food
justice, political empowerment and more.
The Philosophy and Synergy of the Food Movement
The food movement embodies a profound philosophical shift.
The narrative dominating international food policy, especially
post-1945, has been that food is a commodity (when it is not a weapon) and agriculture
is a business. This conceptualization of food is an ideological
extension of the current dominant Western philosophy, which is
atomistic and mechanistic, so that in the formal and official
worlds of business, government, the law and education, phenomena
are assumed to be unconnected until proven otherwise.
This ideology allows the agriculture "industry" in the US to be
exempt from most anti-pollution legislation and for doctors not
to be educated in nutrition. This ideology also values the
health requirements and food needs of one species (humans) --
and usually just a few of those -- above that of all other
organisms.We are thus surrounded in everyday life by
institutions and practices whose founding rationale is the
ideology of disconnection.
In contrast, the food movement believes in something very
different: that the purpose of life is health and that the
optimal and most just way to attain human health is to maximize
the health of all organisms, with one of the most effective ways
to do that being through food.
This belief system is derived from practical experience. The
food movement has internalized certain observations, such as the
potential of compost to improve crop growth and soil function,
the human health benefits of a varied diet, and the successes of
numerous farming systems in the absence of synthetic inputs. It
also has noted apparent powerful connections between health,
agriculture, animal welfare and the environment. These
connections allow for the existence of a virtuous circle in
which the most ecologically healthy farms generate foods that
are the healthiest and the tastiest. These farms are also the
most productive. (For US examples, see here, and for an example from rice, see here.)
Food philosophy thus replaces the neo-Darwinist narrative of
life-as-competition with the idea that life thrives in the
presence of other life. There is perfectly good evidence for
this -- we know, for example, that the tens of millions of
species on Earth are interdependent. Plants and algae excrete
oxygen, which all animals need. Animals eat plants and algae,
but excrete nitrogen and phosphorus, which all plants and algae
need.
Similarly, all biological organisms are, in fact,
self-optimizing and self-repairing systems. They therefore tend
to maximize their own robustness and health unless, as
unfortunately but commonly occurs, they are actively prevented
from doing so by a limited environment or a deficient diet.
The Origins of Food Philosophy
This food philosophy has three notable antecedents. One is
philosopher Peter Singer's famous anti-speciesism argument from
his book, Animal Liberation: that humans have a duty
of care towards all animals, with the crucial
difference being that the food movement extends Singer's
argument to all organisms, not just higher animals.
The second precedent is Gaia theory, which proposes that life
forms create and enhance their own living conditions. The main
difference being that food philosophy applies this thesis to
every scale, notably to soils and to landscapes.
The third precedent is Barry Commoner and his four laws of
ecology. His second and third laws are consistent with food
philosophy. However, Commoner's first law: "Everything is
connected to everything else" needs modification. The reason is
that all things are not connected equally -- most connections
occur through food. Commoner's fourth law, "There is no such
thing as a free lunch," is flatly contradicted by the virtuous
circle of the food movement. All ecological systems generate
synergies, and synergies between organisms are essentially free
lunches; that is why species diversity and biological
productivity on Earth have risen over the eons.
Food philosophy, therefore, represents a major split from
post-enlightenment philosophy in its vision of life and biology.
It doesn't ask, as Descartes did, What does rational
thought reveal about how we should live? It asks:
What does nature reveal about how we should live?
We might thus summarize food philosophy as follows:
(1) Biological interactions allow synergisms of individual
health and system productivity, which can be taken advantage of
in good farming.
(2) Biological interactions occur primarily through food, which
represents the chemical energy running through the system.
Implications of Food Philosophy for the Food Movement
The attitudes of the food movement reflect this philosophy.
Since the philosophy is universal, constructive, inclusive,
flexible and nonviolent, so is the movement. For example,
whereas people outside of the food movement tend to see the
issues of human health, food quality, animal welfare and
ecological and agricultural sustainability as concerns to be
solved separately (if at all), those inside the food movement
are likely to see them as connected and therefore insoluble
except together.
Consequently, alliances between individuals and between
organizations can and do form around common goals, and the food
movement emerges as a synergy between issues formerly identified
as distinct, channeling a vast reservoir of positive social
energy in consistent directions.
Being guided by a food philosophy causes its members to use
whatever resources are at hand in the most appropriate manner.
They do not await orders. They develop arguments, write letters,
make calls, avoid products, share information and so on,
wherever they perceive the need or opportunity to be greatest,
just as the workers of an ant or bee colony do whatever job
appears in front of them without explicit instructions. To the
multinational corporations who are its targets, movement
activity may feel like a piranha feeding frenzy. Blood is
scented; arguments are sharpened; protests register on social
media; more attackers arrive; the target howls; opportunistic
journalists pile in (and maybe some legislators too), until
finally the target agrees to amend, label or remove the
offending product, ingredient or publication. These are food
swarms and they are what direct democracy looks like. Similarly,
a government can instruct people that irradiated or GMO food is
safe to eat. But it cannot make them eat it.
Resistance based on food logic is always likely to beat
enlightenment logic when the subject is food because it is both
rational and relatively easy for the people to form their own
opinions and spend their money elsewhere. The food system is
perhaps the one domain where the people retain this power,
certainly more than they do in any other domain of public life.
The successes of the food movement are now sufficiently evident
so that major parts of the old environmental movement, plus the
health and wellness movements, and even parts of the labor
movement have begun to reframe their activities as coming from a
food system perspective. Some have largely migrated into the
food movement altogether. For example, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is much
better known to the public and has been more successful through its food
connections than through its union ones. To a significant
degree, once-separate social movements are converging to become
branches of the food movement.
In other words, food is a highly successful rallying point. It
serves well because food is not only a conceptual framing for much of human affairs that is
strongly distinct from the standard enlightenment framings
of economics and social Darwinism, but also because it acts as a
potent organizing principle for individuals to act around. The
frame used by the food movement precisely reflects the key
biological reality that a universal daily requirement of all
humanity is food. And the same is true for other species. Thus,
our good food also needs good food, and so on ad (almost)
infinitum. Anyone who adopts that devastating logic has a
huge advantage, not only in understanding how the world really
works, but also in acting on that information.
How Will the Food Movement Impact Society?
Ideas are the currency of power. Philosopher Peter Singer wrote
Animal Liberation in 1975. It
spawned the international animal rights movement and drove
society-wide debates on the human usage of animals for research
and in agriculture. Forty years later, the increasing popularity
of veganism shows his ideas are still gathering momentum.
Singer's achievement was to show that enlightenment thinkers had
attempted to rationalize -- rather than ditch -- the concept of
human exceptionalism, which dated back at least to the Bible's
authorization of the dominion of "man" over the Earth. At a
stroke, Singer destroyed the arguments for treating animals
badly and provided a perfect example of how enlightenment
rationalizations have functioned to constrain modern thought,
and most particularly, the human potential to do good.
Because they go far beyond our treatment of sentient animals
and extend to all organisms, the implications of food philosophy
are significantly more profound and far-reaching than those of
Peter Singer. Food philosophy is an intellectual key to
overthrowing mechanistic reductionist society. To the many
individuals who suspect that enlightenment thought is the engine
driving our societies over an ecological cliff, food philosophy
offers the conceptual way out, and just as the food movement is
feeding and growing as a consequence of its philosophy, so also
the expansion of the food movement will in turn enable this
philosophy to challenge existing political systems.
In just this way, enlightenment thinkers laid the groundwork
for a meritocratic and commercial society to replace feudalism
and their ideas justified the necessary concepts that the
founders of the new society came to rely on: mechanization,
individualism and competition. Nowadays, their ideas are used
for preserving this order, even as the intellectual flaws of
that understanding are increasingly manifesting as ecological
crises, not least in the form of global climate change -- a
crisis that the food movement could play a critical role in
addressing.
Confronting Climate Change
The food movement did not come together to solve the issue of
climate change but many in the food movement believe they have
the tools to largely solve the problem. The reasons are simple.
First, perhaps as much as 50 percent of all greenhouse gas
emissions result from the activities of the industrial
food sector. Secondly, carbon can easily be removed from
the air and stored in soil and in the process create the type of soil actively desired
by organic and agroecological farmers. These farmers are still
developing their techniques for carbon sequestration, but
anecdotal evidence suggests that soil sequestration can combine
with food production to store many tons of carbon per acre per
year. Thus, as a recent report suggests, the food
system desired by the food movement can make our atmospheric
carbon problem manageable and perhaps solve it completely.
The leaders of the mainstream climate movement, however, seem
to believe climate solutions must be technical or social, but
windmills, solar power, electric cars, dams, divestment, and
infrastructure protests are largely symbolic actions. Unlike
reducing demand for energy by reforming and localizing the food
system or storing carbon in soil, they do not necessarily reduce
overall use of fossil fuels and do nothing to prevent the loss
of greenhouse gases from ecosystems. Worse, as
resource-inefficient ways of generating and storing energy,
technofix solutions have the effect of increasing other forms of
pollution.
Hopefully sooner, rather than later, the well-meaning but
misled climate movement will come to understand the error of
singling out individual forms of pollution, like carbon dioxide
or methane, and become the next social movement to join the food
liberation movement.
In any event, the food movement is going to continue to grow,
and its vision will force a social and intellectual
transformation of our society. The benefits of this
transformation will be immense.
_______________________________________________
Livingontheland mailing list
Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/livingontheland
