The Pillar of the Sacred
…never before in human history have so few people (proportionately speaking) had anything to do with the growth of their own food. The steady migration of people from farms or rural areas to cities or suburbs, a migration pattern now being replicated across the globe, means that very few of us have any realistic or honest idea of where food comes from, and under what conditions it can be expected to be safely and reliably produced. Food is conveniently and cheaply purchased at the store. It is a commodity we don’t need to worry ourselves much about because economic efficiency combined with the promise of biotechnology will insure (we presume) that food will always be there when we need it.
Stan:
Big hat tip to DeAnander… while we were talking on the phone, she was browsing away and emailed ths link mid-sentence with the subject line: this is major creepy.
LINK
The existence of a Doomsday Seed Vault run by Agribiz seems a fitting post in conjunction with Wirzba’s reflections through what might be rightly described as a Christian agrarian socialist perspective (he wrote the intro for Wendell Berry’s booked collection of essays entitled The Art of the Commonplace (another hat tip to De).
Each day I become more convinced by the aggregation of evidence that a food-praxis mode of resistance must be thrown into the middle of the political mix. In the Food and Finance pamphlet we have over at IA, we’ve attempted to unpack finance as a dominator practice, but the important point is that ths dominatin is exercised over and through food… so this relation of money as a dominator-medium to our most recurrent dependency is there for any of us who want to drop down from the theoretical clouds and put the living human body back into our politics.
From the underground food movements described in Sandor Katz’ excelent book (yet another hat tip to De), to the feminist food praxis of Susan Bordo and Penny Van Esterik to the issued related to climate change that have now captured the attention (if not the clarity) of the general American public… this is an issue that goes both broad and deep. And it is deeply, disruptively political, whether you are challenging a homeowners association on the right to grow a vegetable garden to asking elected officials why they ocntinue to subsidize Archer-Daniels-Midland, Monsanto, and Cargill.
5 December 2007, 7:48 amDeAnander:
Erratum! Monsanto and Syngenta not funding Seed Vault after all — Gates is still involved, but the Evil Twins are not :
7 December 2007, 7:32 pm