Another sense-filled article. Orginally published at Counterpunch. By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF.
Why do we tolerate it — and the near-totalitarian control exercised over our food supply by a handful of giant agribiz combines? In part we tolerate monopoly and lousy quality in our food economy because the public believes industry propaganda that (in Margaret Thatcher’s infamous phrase) There Is No Alternative.
Exactly. Why? How have we allowed ourselves to be relegated to being simply consumers and wage slaves?
Many well-substantiated studies show that intensive biotic polyculture — that is, the cultivation of many species of food plants in a small footprint, using biotic soil amendments and nutrient recycling — produces far more food per hectare than factory farming; uses far less water; and builds, rather than destroying, topsoil.
Although more human ingenuity, care, and attention are required, the adoption of permaculture principles and techniques reduces the drudgery of food production considerably; the permaculturist is assisting food to grow rather than forcing it to grow (or more hubristically, “growing” it), which is much less work all round than our cartoon cultural memory of dawn-to-dusk backbreaking peasant labor (which became backbreaking to pay “tribute” and debts to people with weapons and ledgers, not survive).
Through force and the inherent threat of force, peasants have been coerced into growing cash crops, to pay taxes, rent, mortgages. This inevitable leads to soil depletion as farms become strip mines to make money, reducing the cash crop returns, or forcing the farmers to use more and more chemical inputs – more debt, more need for cash, more intensive farming, more depletion of the land, more debt, more chemicals… and on it goes. Apparently 35 Uk farmers per day are now going bankrupt. Historically this has often been the norm. Small farmers fail to make the income needed to farm the chemical way, and are forced into selling their land, which invariably ends up in the hands of bigger and bigger agro companies, who only care about their ability to pay shareholders dividends today. Screw tomorrow, screw the land, screw the quality of the food being produced. Just so long as profits are made. But you cant keep taking, cant keep spraying more and more poisons. The strip mining mentality impoverishes everything.
My own [Stan's] anecdotal evidence, without using worm castings but using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.
They want to sell you mass-produced food, for money… which you have to work for. Let us not forget that Enclosure (forcing people off the land, or separating them from their land) was the method used to compel people into the monetized industrial economy in the first place. A 12-foot garden bed is three-feet by four-feet. How many of these can you build on a half an acre? The key is always in the design.
But by design, we mean learning — as in the design philosophy of “permaculture” — how to work with nature, and not to attempt the vain conquest of nature. The key to that design — aside from the mechanical tricks of trellising, water catchment, etc. — is to create the conditions for increasing dynamic biotic complexity, beginning at the micro-level with the soil itself.
Of course they dont want ordinary people to realise that growing food is actually quite easy. Far easier than the 40+ hour per week wage slavery in which many of us are imprisoned.
36 million households in the US are “food insecure,” because food is largley available only on the monetized economy; and poor people have very little money. This is a food issue. The food we do eat is filled with chemicals and contaminants — because the regulatory agencies (like the Food and Drug Adminsitration) have been converted into industry advocates by the determining role of money in politics (Ethanol, for example, is a vote-buying scheme, with ADM behind the scenes.). And because the industrial methods of farming require chemicals and contaminants to compensate for their pathogenic and violent treatment of creatures and biotic systems. These are food issues.
Health authorities increasingly acknowledge that the “western diet,” especially the western/industrial junk-food diet, is associated with the onset or the exacerbation of many debilitating diseases and conditions. Meanwhile, our medical care system is in crisis, in an endless death spiral of increasing demand and increasing cost. Our hospitals contain McDonald’s franchise outlets. These are food issues.
Our children are subjected to crap-food propaganda in school; and they eat crap food there. Corporations are behind this; and they intentionally addict our kids to crap-food. Some schools have begun to grow their own food; and the gardens are used as practical pedagogical tools as well as a source for clean food, with great success. Behavioral problems drop dramaticaly when kids eat clean, fresh food. These are food issues.
Food issues, food politics – probably the most important politics, and yet it is rarely discussed as such.
Food dependency has always been the most essential weapon of the oppressor. That applies to the abused wife who will be cast into penury if she leaves her abuser (we ask, “How will she eat?”); and it applies to the alienated suburban technodrone, who knows — deep down — that he doesn’t know how he would eat without money. It applies to the indigenous population forbidden to grow their traditional crops by colonial masters; kicked off the best arable land by colonial masters; made dependent on second-rate food exports from the colonising nation; etc. It applies to the yeoman farmer deprived of common land and forced into the pool of desperate, hungry, deracinated wage-slaves who staffed the first industrial factories. It applies to citizens of Zimbabwe forbidden by President Mugabe and his political clique to keep vegetable gardens in the yards of their urban and suburban homes.
Our masters have manipulated us into food insecurity, into giving control of our food supply to huge faceless corporations and their shareholders. But it doesnt need to be this way – there are alternatives.
The kitchen garden — the “victory garden” — represents not only the ability to sustain resistance (or aggression) against a foreign enemy, but the ability to resist domestic authority and to withdraw, at least partially, from the money economy and the wage-slavery and debt on which it is based.
Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.
