Eating is a political act

“We’ve got to live in the real world. If we don’t like the world we’re living in, change it. And if we can’t change it, we change ourselves. We can do something” – Nikki Giovanni

I love to eat. I love to cook. I love to entertain my friends around a table full of delicious food. But I never thought that it could be a political act. I never thought that “each trip to buy food is really a visit to the polling place, and everyday we each have dozens of votes to cast for the foods we buy and dozens of the polling places where we can vote, from grocery stores to farmers’ markets” (Hamilton, p.22). Who knew that by the simple act of eating we become involved in not only local, but also in global politics.

Looking back I am wondering – is ignorance really bliss? Is it right that “what you don’t know cannot hurt you”? I now know that I will never be able to look at food in same way as I did before. Now I know that by supporting the existing food industry, I am “helping to create a homogenized international culture that sociologist Benjamin R. Barber has labeled “McWorld” (Schlosser, p.229). I don’t want to be part of the world’s McDonaldization.

The Indian philosopher, environmental activist, eco feminist, and author of several books Vandana Shiva writes, “What we are seeing is the emergence of food totalitarianism, in which a handful of corporations control the entire food chain and destroy alternatives so that people do not have access to diverse, safe foods produced ecologically.” Pretty scary word – totalitarianism. For most of us this word refers to images of a dictatorship, but according to Robert Conquest, a well-known writer and researcher of the Soviet Union, totalitarianism is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single political person, faction, or class, recognizes no limits to its authority and attempts to regulate every aspect of public life wherever possible.

For Vandana Shiva, food totalitarianism is “an authoritarian system that takes away my freedom to grow quality food.” Totalitarianism is the way in which international corporations and trade organizations reinforce their treaties on to countries. In her interview to CorpWatch (the organization which investigates and exposes corporate violations of human rights, environmental crimes, fraud and corruption around the world),  she describes how the agricultural agreement, crafted by Vargill and a US delegation, was “sold” to the world with the promise that it would remove subsidies. “But the subsidies for corporations like Cargill have doubled in the US since the closure of the Uruguay round in the last 5 years. Rich countries are subsidizing agribusiness by up to $343 billion a year. While in a country like India, agriculture is negatively subsidized up to minus 23 million dollars a year. This is not about competition. This is about monopolies.”

                         

Isn’t it hypocrisy on the part of these institutions (WTO, IMF, World Bank) to announce that their sole mission is to promote democracy, eliminate hunger and poverty, support industrialization and development of nations? “In India we are being forced to import meat and waste from slaughter houses. We are being forced to import wheat, sorghum and milk, which we produce in abundant quantities. And those imports are destroying our markets, pushing our farmers into suicide. It is a system that is worse than any dictatorship that we are familiar with.” (Shiva).

The 11^th principle of The Earth Charter states “Require multinational corporations and international financial organizations to act transparently in the public good, and hold them accountable for the consequences of their activities.” In her interview with CorpWatch  Vandana Shiva explains why its taken so long for citizens of the United States to recognize how the food industry is manipulating their rights - “The regulatory agencies that should have been controlling Monsanto, that should have been holding Cargill to account, were actually held captive by these corporations. And on behalf of these corporations, the regulatory agencies in the United States have lied to the American public.”

I have to confess – I never thought about these issues before. It is not a topic I would research and read about. Maybe this is one reason that I feel so embarrassed now for my ignorance and I would say even arrogance. People and nations are exploited in our name, and we don’t even think about it. Why in the world we don’t think about this? Maybe because it didn’t happen overnight. Mostly it was and is unnoticeable by the general public.

They say that if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will leap out right away to escape the danger. But, if you put a frog in a kettle that is filled with water that is cool and pleasant,
and then you gradually heat the kettle until it starts boiling, the frog will not become aware of the threat until it is too late.

German philosopher, Karl Jaspers once said,  “It is not easy to see through totalitarianism. It is like machinery that starts itself while its very operations often fail to grasp what they are already putting into effect… To speak in mythical terms, it seems like a soullness, daemonic something which seizes everybody – those who drift into it blindly as well as those who half-knowingly bring it about” (Jaspers).  And maybe we don’t see it because we don’t want to. Or maybe we don’t see it because we are masterfully manipulated. Any totalitarianism is built on propaganda and food totalitarianism is no exception. We just call it advertising and consider it an organic and necessary part of the capitalist economic system. In reality we are methodically deprived of our rights.

There was a story in Time magazine about a man who had been pulled over by the state police in Michigan, accused of using his pickup truck for the transporting illegal cargo. Do you want to guess what was in his truck? “This was the culmination of a string operation that resulted in seizure of the cargo. But this was no ordinary drug bust; the driver of the mud-splattered pickup truck was a dairy farmer dealing in raw milk” (Wright & Middeldorf, p. 1). Raw milk!!! Are you kidding me? My first thoughts – why is it illegal to sell raw milk? Why can’t I buy it? Who decided? Hm… and who is benefiting from this policy? 

It’s pretty obvious that the beneficiaries of this policy are not diary farmers or we – the costumers. Beneficiaries are big corporations who have monopolized food production and distribution. But look how they camouflage their interests and convince us that it’s “in our own interest” to delegate all of our rights to them. In regard to raw milk, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that unpasteurized milk contains E.coli, salmonella, and listeria – dangerous to our health. See, it’s not about corporations, it’s about us. They have our best interests at heart.

When I was first introduced to the western democratic model (on international training for non-profit organizations) I was told that the only healthy model is the collaboration and cooperation of three sectors – governmental, business and civic, or the so called third sector. To function productively and for everybody’s benefit, these sectors should be interdependent but not interchangeable. What I see now is that government and business sectors are totally merged and power is not distributed equally among all players. We delegated all our rights and responsibilities to them. The only way to gain power back is to admit that we don’t really have a democracy, (even though we like to believe that we do) but that we have, according to Kevin Phillips, a plutocracy in which there is a “fusion of money and government.”

Go to any supermarket and you will see about 30,000 different items. The first impression is that we have abundant choices, but in reality there are only a handful of companies who are branding almost identical products and creating an illusion of variety. In the book Hope’s Edge Frances Moore Lappe and her daughter Anna Lappe, make the point that only 138 people – 117 men and 21 women – are in charge of the decision making boards of these companies. “Rather than coming to us from thousands of different farmers producing different local varieties, these products have been globally standardized and selected for maximum profit by just a few powerful executives” writes Brian Halweil in his essay Food Democracy.

Going back to the frog fable, I can see that our ignorance on where food comes from, and how it’s produced and distributed, allows us to feel comfortable. We don’t notice how the water is getting hotter and hotter. Because we see only a little piece of the big picture, it’s easier to manipulate us. We need to step back, connect the dots, and start acting. In the Stolen Harvest Shiva talks about the importance of the development of food democracy; when concerned citizens, such as environmental activists, social activists, consumer activists, farmers, public interest scientists, educators and consumers will unite to fight back.

In the mid-1990s a professor of food policies, Tim Lang, developed the term “food democracy” as a response to growing corporate control and the lack of consumer involvement in the food system. At the core of food democracy is the idea that people can and should be actively participating in shaping the food system, rather than remaining passive spectators on the sidelines. In other words, food democracy is about citizens having the power to determine agro-food policies and practices locally, regionally, nationally, and globally. (Hassanein, p.79).

I started reflection on this topic with the notion that we can “vote with our fork”. According to this position a person who has more money to spend on food of his choice has more votes. But this alone is not enough to change food totalitarianism and achieve food democracy. What about those who have little income and few choices? Can they vote with their forks? Real food democracy means – one person- one vote. The idea of food democracy is to decentralize power, remove it from corporate control, and bring it to people.  

Reference:

Hamilton, N.D., (2004). Essay – Food democracy and the future of American values. Journal of Agricultural law. www.NationalAgLawCenter.org

Hassanein, N. (2003). Practicing food democracy: a pragmatic politics of transformation. Journal of rural studies. 19; 77-86.

Jaspers, Karl. The Fight Against the Totalitarianism. 

            http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/jaspers02.htm

Lappe, F. M., Lappe, A. (2002). Hope’s edge: the next diet for small planet. Tarcher.

Schlosser, E. (2001). Fast Food Nation. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Shiva Vandana – Interview to CorpWatch http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=573

The Earth Charter - http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html

Wright, W., Middendorf, G. (2008). The fight over food: producers, consumers, and activists challenge the global food system. Pennsylvania State University Press.