Take Back Our Power and Dignity: Stop the Earth-Killing Machine of Corporate Global Food
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We’re often asked, “Why do you publish books about organic gardening AND politics AND science? They are totally different. Why not just stick to gardening?” Our answer is simple. We don’t see them as totally different. They all factor into sustainability. Our mission at Chelsea Green is to do our part to help build a sustainable world. We’ve been told that we suffer from the crazy leftist pinko idea that we need the Earth to survive.
Nowhere is the intertwining of organic gardening, food safety, politics, and science better summed up than in the brief epilogue of Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. I’ve posted it below. Enjoy, and pass it on.
The following is an excerpt from The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved:
Throughout this book I have reiterated the urgency of becoming more connected to the sources of our food and water. I have reported on some movements that I see happening, and I have tried to weave these movements together into a coherent analysis. In order to thrive, we must reclaim simple sustenance as an activity we are more directly engaged in, interacting with other organisms in our midst.
The future is scary. Climate change, chemical pollution, radioactive pollution, genetic pollution…need I go on? Current trends give rise to widespread despair. These bleak realities of how we have been degrading our earth and squandering our precious resources make me lose hope—sometimes. I also despair over the widening gulf between rich and poor, and over unjust wars that I fear will be avenged against the children I love. At least my basic needs are met, though. I have plenty of water and food, a comfortable home, and no crushing debt. My despair is about the future, and meanwhile life goes on.
For many people, despair is in the here and now. Around the world, one group of people living precariously close to the edge are farmers. The “Green Revolution” seduced farmers to abandon traditional agricultural practices for “improved” high-input methods, with promises of dramatic increases in yields and productivity. The high-tech seeds, chemicals, and irrigation all cost money, though, so farmers everywhere got caught in a spiraling cycle of debt and dependence.
For astonishing numbers of farmers, despair has led to suicide. India in particular has had a huge epidemic of farmer suicides. Vandana Shiva reports that twenty thousand farmers committed suicide in India between 1998 and 2000.1 Some five thousand farmer suicides have been recorded since the late 1990s in a single southern state, Andhra Pradesh. The typical method is to drink pesticides. According to an Indian reporter who has visited and documented hundreds of families in which farmers have killed themselves, “The suicides are a symptom of vast agrarian distress.”
Suicide is a way out for struggling farmers in other places, too. An analysis of U.S. suicide data from 1980 to 1985, a period of great crisis for farmers, found that farmers had higher suicide rates than a control group; the analysis also identified a relationship between suicide rates and farm economic conditions. The widow of a New Zealand farmer who hanged himself in 2001 attributed her husband’s death to the epidemic of mad cow disease: “It was a very real illness brought on by the BSE crisis and the gradual decline of the farming industry. It hit him very badly. Farmers have been under an incredible level of stress and what they are going through now must be soul-destroying.”
Our first task is to overcome despair and not allow it to swallow us up. We must try to find hope, believe in the future, be willing to move forward, and reinvent change. “There is, in many indigenous teachings, a great optimism for the potential to make positive change,” concludes Winona LaDuke. “Change will come. As always, it is just a matter of who determines what that change will be.”
The act of suicide can be an expression of desperation and escape— or a grand gesture of defiance to inspire change. One farmer who killed himself on the world stage, sacrificing his life to draw attention to the plight of farmers everywhere, was Kyung-Hae Lee, former president of the Korean Advanced Farmers Federation. Lee stabbed himself in the chest, beneath a banner reading “WTO Kills Farmers,” outside a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Cancun, Mexico, on September 10, 2003.
Lee’s words in a Korean farmers’ publication a few months before his suicide seem in retrospect to explain his action: “Human beings are in an endangered situation,” he wrote. “Uncontrolled multinational corporations and a small number of big WTO members’ officials are leading an undesirable globalization [that is] inhumane, environment-distorting, farmer-killing, and undemocratic. It should be stopped immediately.”
In order to heed Lee’s message and stop the earth-killing machine of corporate global food, we must strengthen and build movements for more sustainable, localized, healthy food. The people I’ve met, who have inspired me to write this book, offer abundant evidence that small, localized underground food movements are happening everywhere. Join them and broaden their vision.
All the other chapters of this book include recipes, mostly because I wanted to keep all this information and ranting grounded in the pleasures of the palate. I love sharing my ideas about food, but it is ironic to me that part of this process has been creating recipes that people follow, because I hardly ever follow recipes. I often consult recipes, typically checking several different sources, but then I end up ignoring them, varying the ingredients, using what’s around, and learning from my experiments. That’s what I like for people to do with my recipes.
Recipes offer step-by-step instruction, and some people want that very badly. Beyond food, people love recipes for health, wealth, spiritual well-being, sexual prowess, and a better world. I’m afraid that in the end I have no easy-to-follow recipe to offer my readers for how we can go about taking back community control of our food and water and, more broadly, our power and our dignity. There are no easy formulaic answers.
But as we search for answers, and allies, we can get our hands dirty working the soil and growing some of our own food. We can get to know farmers and support local markets. We can get to know plants, learn to save seeds, and learn how to heal our bodies and our souls. These activities ground us in the earth, and out of them grow health, abundance, community, and dreams of a better future.
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