SpikeSilverback
09-09-2009, 11:13 AM
Truncated article. Get all of Wendell Berry's comments at the link below.
Spike
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_food_is_power_and_the_powerful_are_poison ing_us/
>Posted on Sep 6, 2009
>
>By Chris Hedges
>
>Our most potent political weapon is food. If we
>take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise
>produce locally, we can begin to break the grip
>of corporations that control a food system as
>fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our
>financial system. If we continue to allow
>corporations to determine what we eat, as well
>as how food is harvested and distributed, then
>we will become captive to rising prices and
>shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap,
>mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat.
>Food, along with energy, will be the most
>pressing issue of our age. And if we do not
>build alternative food networks soon, the social
>and political ramifications of shortages and
>hunger will be devastating.
>
>The effects of climate change, especially with
>widespread droughts in Australia, Africa,
>California and the Midwest, coupled with the
>rising cost of fossil fuels, have already
>blighted the environments of millions. The poor
>can often no longer afford a balanced diet.
>Global food prices increased an average of 43
>percent since 2007, according to the
>International Monetary Fund. These increases
>have been horrific for the approximately 1
>billion people-one-sixth of the world's
>population-who subsist on less than $1 per day.
>And 162 million of these people survive on less
>than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as
>much as 60 percent of their income on food,
>according to theInternational Food Policy
>Research Institute.
>
>There have been food riots in many parts of the
>world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico,
>Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania,
>Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have
>introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops
>guard imported wheat. India has banned the
>export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And
>the shortages and price increases are being felt
>in the industrialized world as we continue to
>shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food
>prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans,
>or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And
>in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the
>food stamp program, according to the Food
>Research Center. The average monthly benefit was
>$113.87 per person, leaving many, even with
>government assistance, without adequate food.
>The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11
>percent of households, struggle to get enough
>food, and one-third of them have to sometimes
>skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated
>some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal
>year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new
>fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60
>billion, according to estimates.
>
>Food shortages have been tinder for social
>upheaval throughout history. But this time
>around, because we have lost the skills to feed
>and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for
>most of us to become self-sustaining. The large
>agro-businesses have largely wiped out small
>farmers. They have poisoned our soil with
>pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy
>and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of
>antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped
>nutrients and phosphorus into water systems,
>causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our
>rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the
>onslaught of changing weather patterns and
>chemical pollution, are declining in the
>Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out
>the tomato crop. The draconian Food
>Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our
>governing elite to corporations, means small
>farms will only continue to dwindle in number.
>Sites such as La Via Campesinado a good job of
>tracking these disturbing global trends.
>
>"The entire economy built around food is unsafe
>and unethical," activist Henry Harris of the
>Food Security Roundtabletold me. The group
>builds distribution systems between independent
>farmers and city residents.
>
>"Food is the greatest place for communities to
>start taking back power," he said. "The national
>food system is collapsing by degrees. More than
>50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central
>Valley of California. What happens when gasoline
>becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the
>cropland? The monolithic system of food
>production is highly unstable. It has to be
>replaced very soon with small, diverse sources
>that provide greater food security."
>
>Cornell University recently did a study to
>determine whether New York state could feed
>itself. The research is described in two
>articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the
>journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.
>If all agricultural land were in use, and food
>distribution were optimized to minimize the
>total distance that food travels, New York state
>could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of
>its food needs met from within its boundaries.
>This is not encouraging news to those who live
>in New York City. New York once relied on New
>Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead
>of having food shipped from across the country.
>But New Jersey farms have largely given way to
>soulless housing developments. Farming
>communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up
>and desolate, have been gutted by industrial
>farming.
>
>The ties most Americans had to rural communities
>during the Great Depression kept many alive. A
>barter economy replaced the formal economy.
>Families could grow food or had relatives to
>feed them. But in a world where we do not know
>where our food comes from, or how to produce it,
>we have become vulnerable. And many will be
>forced, as food prices continue to rise, to
>shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced
>foods, already a staple of the nation's poor.
>Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes
>and heart disease, is often the only food those
>in the inner city can buy because supermarkets
>and nutritious food are geographically and
>financially beyond reach. As the economy
>continues to deteriorate, the middle class will
>soon join them.
>
>"It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at
>any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly
>as we are wasting our land," Wendell Berry
>observed in "The Unsettling of America." "Our
>bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the
>virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine
>and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal;
>they are growing useless like our 'marginal
>land' because we have less and less use for
>them. After the games and idle flourishes of
>modern youth, we use them only as shipping
>cartons to transport our brains and our few
>employable muscles back and forth to work."
>
>Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his
>family has farmed for generations, argues that
>local farming is fundamental to sustaining
>communities. Industrial farming, he says, has
>estranged us from the land. It has rendered us
>powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left
>us complicit in the corporate destruction of the
>ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has
>been as devastating as its physical cost.
>
Spike
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_food_is_power_and_the_powerful_are_poison ing_us/
>Posted on Sep 6, 2009
>
>By Chris Hedges
>
>Our most potent political weapon is food. If we
>take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise
>produce locally, we can begin to break the grip
>of corporations that control a food system as
>fragile, unsafe and destined for collapse as our
>financial system. If we continue to allow
>corporations to determine what we eat, as well
>as how food is harvested and distributed, then
>we will become captive to rising prices and
>shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap,
>mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat.
>Food, along with energy, will be the most
>pressing issue of our age. And if we do not
>build alternative food networks soon, the social
>and political ramifications of shortages and
>hunger will be devastating.
>
>The effects of climate change, especially with
>widespread droughts in Australia, Africa,
>California and the Midwest, coupled with the
>rising cost of fossil fuels, have already
>blighted the environments of millions. The poor
>can often no longer afford a balanced diet.
>Global food prices increased an average of 43
>percent since 2007, according to the
>International Monetary Fund. These increases
>have been horrific for the approximately 1
>billion people-one-sixth of the world's
>population-who subsist on less than $1 per day.
>And 162 million of these people survive on less
>than 50 cents per day. The global poor spend as
>much as 60 percent of their income on food,
>according to theInternational Food Policy
>Research Institute.
>
>There have been food riots in many parts of the
>world, including Austria, Hungary, Mexico,
>Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Yemen, Mauritania,
>Senegal and Uzbekistan. Russia and Pakistan have
>introduced food rationing. Pakistani troops
>guard imported wheat. India has banned the
>export of rice, except for high-end basmati. And
>the shortages and price increases are being felt
>in the industrialized world as we continue to
>shed hundreds of thousands of jobs and food
>prices climb. There are 33.2 million Americans,
>or one in nine, who depend on food stamps. And
>in 20 states as many as one in eight are on the
>food stamp program, according to the Food
>Research Center. The average monthly benefit was
>$113.87 per person, leaving many, even with
>government assistance, without adequate food.
>The USDA says 36.2 million Americans, or 11
>percent of households, struggle to get enough
>food, and one-third of them have to sometimes
>skip or cut back on meals. Congress allocated
>some $54 billion for food stamps this fiscal
>year, up from $39 billion last year. In the new
>fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, costs will be $60
>billion, according to estimates.
>
>Food shortages have been tinder for social
>upheaval throughout history. But this time
>around, because we have lost the skills to feed
>and clothe ourselves, it will be much harder for
>most of us to become self-sustaining. The large
>agro-businesses have largely wiped out small
>farmers. They have poisoned our soil with
>pesticides and contaminated animals in filthy
>and overcrowded stockyards with high doses of
>antibiotics and steroids. They have pumped
>nutrients and phosphorus into water systems,
>causing algae bloom and fish die-off in our
>rivers and streams. Crop yields, under the
>onslaught of changing weather patterns and
>chemical pollution, are declining in the
>Northeast, where a blight has nearly wiped out
>the tomato crop. The draconian Food
>Modernization Safety Act, another gift from our
>governing elite to corporations, means small
>farms will only continue to dwindle in number.
>Sites such as La Via Campesinado a good job of
>tracking these disturbing global trends.
>
>"The entire economy built around food is unsafe
>and unethical," activist Henry Harris of the
>Food Security Roundtabletold me. The group
>builds distribution systems between independent
>farmers and city residents.
>
>"Food is the greatest place for communities to
>start taking back power," he said. "The national
>food system is collapsing by degrees. More than
>50 percent of what we eat comes from the Central
>Valley of California. What happens when gasoline
>becomes $5 a gallon or drought sweeps across the
>cropland? The monolithic system of food
>production is highly unstable. It has to be
>replaced very soon with small, diverse sources
>that provide greater food security."
>
>Cornell University recently did a study to
>determine whether New York state could feed
>itself. The research is described in two
>articles published in 2006 and 2008 by the
>journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.
>If all agricultural land were in use, and food
>distribution were optimized to minimize the
>total distance that food travels, New York state
>could, the researchers found, have 34 percent of
>its food needs met from within its boundaries.
>This is not encouraging news to those who live
>in New York City. New York once relied on New
>Jersey, still known as the Garden State, instead
>of having food shipped from across the country.
>But New Jersey farms have largely given way to
>soulless housing developments. Farming
>communities upstate, their downtowns boarded up
>and desolate, have been gutted by industrial
>farming.
>
>The ties most Americans had to rural communities
>during the Great Depression kept many alive. A
>barter economy replaced the formal economy.
>Families could grow food or had relatives to
>feed them. But in a world where we do not know
>where our food comes from, or how to produce it,
>we have become vulnerable. And many will be
>forced, as food prices continue to rise, to
>shift to a diet of cheap, fatty, mass-produced
>foods, already a staple of the nation's poor.
>Junk food, a major factor in obesity, diabetes
>and heart disease, is often the only food those
>in the inner city can buy because supermarkets
>and nutritious food are geographically and
>financially beyond reach. As the economy
>continues to deteriorate, the middle class will
>soon join them.
>
>"It is clear to anyone who looks carefully at
>any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly
>as we are wasting our land," Wendell Berry
>observed in "The Unsettling of America." "Our
>bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the
>virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine
>and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal;
>they are growing useless like our 'marginal
>land' because we have less and less use for
>them. After the games and idle flourishes of
>modern youth, we use them only as shipping
>cartons to transport our brains and our few
>employable muscles back and forth to work."
>
>Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky where his
>family has farmed for generations, argues that
>local farming is fundamental to sustaining
>communities. Industrial farming, he says, has
>estranged us from the land. It has rendered us
>powerless to provide for ourselves. It has left
>us complicit in the corporate destruction of the
>ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has
>been as devastating as its physical cost.
>