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.
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