Arrested for feeding the poor & contempt for the peasant
Two good posts on food [hat tip to Jim Wallis and Audrey Mantey]
a food praxis cross-post from Jim Wallis’ blog
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Arrested for Feeding the Poor (by Alan Clapsaddle)
Unconscionable: adjective
1. not guided by conscience; unscrupulous.
2. not in accordance with what is just or reasonable: unconscionable behavior.
3. excessive; extortionate: an unconscionable profit.
I have had some “unconscionable” things on my mind a lot lately as I have been working with the 20-somethings who make up Orlando Food Not Bombs and University of Central Florida’s Rock For Hunger. All three of these definitions of the word apply to the actions of the city of Orlando, in enacting an ordinance to try and stop these groups from sharing food with the poor and homeless in downtown Orlando.
Orlando Food Not Bombs (FNB) has been sharing food with the poor and homeless in Lake Eola Park since the summer of 2004. Some local business owners and residents, who were upset with seeing the poor fed in the park, complained to city government leaders. The mayor and city council reacted by passing an ordinance specifically designed to stop FNB from sharing food. The ordinance limits a group that is going to feed 25 or more people to no more than two such feedings in a park per year, and requires that a permit be obtained.
When the ordinance was first passed, the groups moved to the sidewalk and streets a block or so away from the park, but after continued city harassment moved back to the park. FNB, acting with churches and groups such as Code Pink and the ACLU, began sharing food in a manner that strictly complied with the ordinance. Each group would serve no more than 24 people, had a table clearly labeled with its name, and the dishes (which are collected and washed) were counted to make sure there were no more than 24.
Despite all of this, on April 4, 2007, at the conclusion of an Orlando police undercover investigation that, according to the Orlando Weekly, cost taxpayers $65,000, FNB member Eric Montanez was arrested. His alleged crime: feeding more than 24 people. His weapon: a ladle.
The result was twofold. One: A jury who understood the concept of unconscionability” found Eric “not guilty.” Two: The arrest scared away groups and people who were participating, especially some of the church groups, who were afraid of being labeled “law-breakers.”
Yes, it is unconscionable to let people go hungry, in a city of plenty in a nation of plenty. It is a higher magnitude of unconscionability to persecute those who feel called to serve the poor and subject them to arrest and prosecution.
A month later, six more FNB members were arrested for violating another city ordinance, “disturbing … (the) repose of any individual ….” The specifics of their offense: protesting the anti-feeding ordinance outside a restaurant venue where the mayor was holding a campaign fundraiser. Again, even in a country with a president who confines dissenters to fenced-in “free-speech zones” out of the line of sight of where he is appearing, last month an Orlando jury who understood the concept of “unconscionability” found them all “not guilty.”
Orlando Food Not Bombs and Vagabond Church of God have filed suit in federal court in Orlando to overturn this unconscionable ordinance. This matter has been working its way through the courts for more than a year and has survived all of the city’s legal challenges to stop it. The federal court trial begins in Orlando this week. Let us pray for a court that understands “unconscionability.”
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Rev. Alan Clapsaddle is a Social Justice Advocate/Blogger in Orlando, working with the National Homeless Coalition and LA2W.org. Alan serves at First UCC Church of Orlando.
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Monbiot’s piece on “peasant productivity”
I suggest you sit down before you read this. Robert Mugabe is right. At last week’s global food summit he was the only leader to speak of “the importance of land in agricultural production and food security”. Countries should follow Zimbabwe’s lead, he said, in democratising ownership.
Of course the old bastard has done just the opposite. He has evicted his opponents and given land to his supporters. He has failed to support the new settlements with credit or expertise, with the result that farming in Zimbabwe has collapsed. The country was in desperate need of land reform when Mugabe became president. It remains in desperate need of land reform today.
But he is right in theory. Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.
In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are 20 times as productive as farms of more than 10 hectares. Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold…
FULL
Legume Sam:
It’s really great that Orlando has such a great Food Not Bombs local. Here it’s just me.
12 June 2008, 1:42 pmHoward:
If you read the end of the 25th and the beginning of the 26th chapter of Matthew as a single narrative unit, you find that Jesus calls on his followers to feed the hungry, visit those in prison, and help the the sick, and he condemns those who won’t do so. The very next thing that happens is that the rulers get together to figure out how to kill him.
I guess he really “disturbed their repose.”
12 June 2008, 3:01 pmDeAnander:
Hmmm, well, the whole point of industrialised farming was not to improve productivity per hectare — despite all the propaganda to that effect. It was to reduce the number of people paid to work on farms — “downsizing” so as to reduce salaries, food, etc. paid to farm workers; to force those displaced farm workers into cities as cheap factory labour; and to replace those workers with fossil fuelled equipment, whose manufacture and feeding (unlike simply paying or feeding workers) concentrated still more wealth in the hands of industrialists… Industrialised farming is not about producing food; it is pure dogwaggery, focussed on creating a market for chemicals, equipment, patented seeds and fossil fuel. Producing food is not the point; and these days, the food produced is (as M Pollan has pointed out at length) barely recognisable as such — it is really feedstock for further profit-generating, fossil-fuel-burning industrial processing. The dysfunction is so complete it’s staggering.
The problem of feeding people is actually fairly simple (so long as population doesn’t expand beyond the ultimate carrying capacity of available arable land): small farms and local markets, combined with a national/regional system of emergency food transport in case of local disasters such as drought, flood, or massive pest swarms, make for a robust and secure food system… but not a maximally profitable one.. The industrial food system is geared to maximise money profit, not to maximise productivity per hectare or food security or health. Food shortages are not, in the last analysis, really due to a scarcity of fossil fuels; they are due to a deliberate wrongheadedness and a perversion of the very purpose and meaning of farming…
13 June 2008, 1:20 ambadri:
legumesam . curious where is this one person FNB !
14 June 2008, 12:10 ami am in san francisco . we typically have several person each day but have now and then done it alone on my days .
so true DeAnander .
Legume Sam:
Pomona CA FNB…
16 June 2008, 2:05 pmY.K.:
Anyone know about this method?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17rice.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
The question here may still be ownership because the farmer may require more land (but less water).
17 June 2008, 4:58 amRyan:
YK:
I am familiar with SRI - system of rice intensification - and was in attendance at a symposium in Kathmandu, Nepal, where Norman Uphoff, gave an explanation of how the system works and the results of field tests in various countries. Very promising work, especially for the farmers with small land holdings. I had dinner with Norman (who’s daughter used to be my docter when I was a kid in Ithaca) that evening and got more of the full story about his effort to actually get this research funded and taken seriously. Since he is a professor of political science he is having a lot of trouble getting the “ag-engineers” at cornell (and probably other places) to take the research seriously. Regardless it seems that the method of growing rice is successful, and that will ultimately bring it to greater use. It takes more intense labor than rice paddy methods, but that is something that poorer farmers often have more of than space.
He talked about some tests on millet and other grains, and I did some test plots of my own here in Vermont last year. I tried some upland himalayan rice that is normally grown dry (not in patties) and it tillered like crazy - unfortunately the season is just too short and I got started to late (I started the seed in the greenhouse in Late May early June). With another month I would have had a pretty good crop I think. . . I also tried some wheat with this method, with a lot less tillering, and even some widely spaced corn that also tillered well, though the number of ears wasn’t increased very much.
Anyway, great postings again Stan. Keep feeding the roots!!
20 June 2008, 10:28 pmWaldow:
Responding to the Monbiot piece:
Want to produce food in the US? Try Craig’s List. Lease land for $100-$200 an acre per year and go to it. At least here in Oregon it works for us.
21 June 2008, 3:26 amStan:
Waldow, I don’t see a category on Craigslist that gets this specific. How would you bird-dog leaseable land on CL. Services? Housing? Maybe we just don’t have it here. Great idea though.
21 June 2008, 4:59 amWaldow:
My wife found us good south slope land to lease under the “farm and garden” section where people often post “pasture for rent” notices, and by posting “wanted ads” there. She weeded through ads and email, and then I went out an visited a few land owners. Many of these people were thinking of somebody with horses, calling a few turned some people who did’t mind some pigs, goats, or veggies instead. We settled on working with a kind and reasonable old repair-man with a walrus mustache sitting on 28 acres. He traded a couple year’s lease in exchange for my labor to fence the 7 acres we’re using. He needed his Doug Fir’s thinned, so minus the cost of some creosote, we got posts cash free too. We need the luck.
We’ll be needing the food. My little carpentry contracting company is deep in debt cause I stupidly did fine work for shit prices (Oh well, it was more fun and exercise than my dot com job… each boom is a little smaller than the next, and each dip… yaw pitch we’re up to our hips…)
We read USDA articles about the advantages of farming leased land for years, but wrote them off as state propaganda to encourage some kinda’ serfdom. Why this isn’t “serfdom” is because my contract doesn’t give anybody a share of my crop, and no bank will hold a note on the farm either, because we’re being deliberate and crazy cheap. And who’s to say where it is? Why I’ve forgotten the street address myself?!
I hope somebody reading this gets another project like this going soon. You could get the rights to an acre for a few bucks a day, get some exercise with your food security. You might get to be one of the last to starve in your neighborhood! You’re garenteed to meet some real characters too.
25 June 2008, 2:26 ampeggy:
Waldow, that’s an amazing story. I certainly don’t think you’re alone. In the 1980s, there were a bunch of different families from different places that all decided independently of each other to settle around Branchport, New York, build our own houses and “live off the land.” This bunch was part of a larger bunch in the central New York region centered around Ithaca. Many Mennonites have farms in that area, too. Needless to say, the Mennonites were vastly more successful than us. But still, a few of us were moderately capable of creating productive organic gardens. The produce was sold in the local farmer’s market, but the money from that was not enough to sustain a family that wants its kids to grow up healthy and happy with many options ahead of them. So … as children were born and grew up, people made compromises, and slowly our little group of urban expatriates dissolved.
25 June 2008, 6:14 amBut quite a few families whose founders were working class people from the region still stayed in their exact same places and ultimately had wonderful grandchildren running all around. The adults hold a range of interesting jobs. Their favorite pastime is hunting. Bow-hunting takes unusual skill and strength, and a girl I know who was a teenager at the time took tremendous pride in killing her first deer with a bow. Some are dishonest and mean and others are quite the opposite. Some more educated people refer to them as hillbillies, but for others, a few of these hillbillies are lifelong dear friends.
Elaina:
Woo hoo! Go Orlando!!!!!
26 June 2008, 9:18 am