Food democracy
According to Heifer International the typical supermarket contains 30,000 items. About half those items are produced by 10 multinational food and beverage companies. And 138 people - 117 men and 21 women - form the boards of directors of those 10 companies. We’ve got a lot of (standardised) products, but not always that much choice.
So, given some of the food sort of issues that are currently floating about, it’s probably worth introducing the concept of food democracy into our political lexicon.
Just as democracy returns power to the voting public, food democracy returns power to the eating public. The parent who lobbies her child’s school to serve more fresh foods raised nearby is declaring food democracy. So is the chef who peppers his menu with the names of farmers and fishers who supplied the food. The politicians in developing countries who decide to protect their farms from the ravages of international trade-they declare food democracy, as do the grandmothers in Italy, Zimbabwe and Japan who scorn homogenized fast food and champion culinary heirlooms and home recipes tied to their landscape and passed down for generations.
…Although the notion of food democracy might be abstract, regaining it demands some very concrete ingredients. For instance, farmers who raise just one or two crops will have a hard time feeding their neighbors. And communities that lose their butchers and bakers and ranchers and farmers will have a hard time regaining any level of self-sufficiency.
In New Zealand we produce a lot of food for a global market, but it is also being increasingly standardised and removed from our view. Industrial dairy, caged hens and fertilizer are fed into a supermarket duopoly that separates us, as eaters, from the source of our own food.
We aren’t always entitled to know where our food comes, how it got to us and what happened to it along the way. Food democracy is about restoring the right to know and right to choose.
February 27th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
We arrived back in New Zealand two and a half years ago.
I’m Dutch, my husband is Pakeha.
I have always lived in a city and growing citrus for example is impossible in Holland. We have been able to rent(for as long as we want because it’s surplus to requirement) a farmhouse with a hectare of land around it.
We spend $ 150 dollars on seeds two years ago and we still live on that investment. We eat two meals a day out of our own garden and that is enough. We bought a couple of Chicks and some pigs and they provide us with eggs and the pigs are for breeding with. We barter and give away excess food. We live like millionaires on a shoestring. I advise everybody to do the same. It is after all the most rebellious thing to do in a corporate world. Take back your food, take back your live, take back your responsibility were it concerns you livestock. Peace
February 27th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
>>I advise everybody to do the same.
Do you pay more in tax than you receive in state benefits?
February 27th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
You have all the “food democracy” you want: The freedom to grow and raise your own food, or start a company that sells exactly what you choose.
I suspect, though, that advocating “food democracy” really means that you can’t be bothered to go to all that trouble (or to any trouble at all, for that matter) and that you’d much rather just legislate to force others to pander to your particular wants.
“Food tyranny” might be a better term.
February 27th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
I certainly think it’s good for us as consumers to try and address these issues. But one thing I’m unclear about is whether it has implications for government policy. Does anything in New Zealand legislation and regulations need to be changed to facilitate this, or is it purely a matter of us as individuals making an effort?
February 27th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Given food miles and “fair” trade are now widely discredited fads, this is the latest one. The article is about US supermarkets of course, and supermarkets everywhere are highly competitive and sensitive to consumer demand - incredibly so. THAT is food democracy.
I’m appalled you even quote a piece which suggests that in Zimbabwe grandmothers could even CHOOSE to scorn fast food, given how hard it is to get any. Yes, priorities right there!
One of the great damnations for relatively poor but efficient agricultural producers like Vietnam and Thailand is the nonsense of food self sufficiency by the likes of Japan, which heavily protects its very inefficient rice sector.
Food democracy exists, now, it is called choosing what you buy, choosing what you grow and how much or how little involvement you want in the food you eat. Go the whole way and you’re a farmer, the opposite is to eat at restaurants.
The greatest way the right to choose can be guaranteed is free trade in food.
February 27th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
LibertyScott, you’re a complete idiot…
“The roots of the story go back decades, but Engdahl explains the science of “biological and genetic-modification of plants and other life forms first” came out of US research labs in the 1970s when no one noticed. They soon would because the Reagan administration was determined to make America dominant in this emerging field. The biotech agribusiness industry was especially favored, and companies in the early 1980s raced to develop GMO plants, livestock and GMO-based animal drugs. Washington made it easy for them with an unregulated, business-friendly climate that persisted ever since under Republicans and Democrats alike.
Food safety and public health issues aren’t considered vital if they conflict with profits. So the entire population is being used as lab rats for these completely new, untested and potentially hazardous products. And leading the effort to develop them is a company with a “long record of fraud, cover-up, bribery,” deceit and disdain for the public interest - Monsanto.
Monsanto chose milk as its first GMO product, genetically manipulated it with recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), and marketed it under the trade name, Posilac. In 1993, the Clinton FDA declared it safe and approved it for sale before any consumer use information was available.
…The information was suppressed, and rBGH milk is unlabeled so there’s no way consumers can know. They also weren’t told this hormone causes leukemia and tumors in rats, and a European Commission committee concluded humans drinking rBGH milk risk breast and prostate cancer.
This was policy, and it was “key to understanding (the Foundation’s later efforts) in the revolution in biotechnology and plant genetics.” Its mission from inception was to “(cull) the herd, or systematically (reduce) populations of ‘inferior breeds.’
Engdahl explained how four agribusiness giants used “stealth, system, and a well-supported campaign of lies and distortion” to progress toward Henry Kissinger’s ultimate goal - controlling oil to control nations and food to control people. The pursuit of both are ongoing with little public knowledge of how far advanced things are and how reckless the scheme is - to genetically engineer all plants and life forms and to control world population by culling its “unwanted” parts.
Excerts from a review of F. William Engdahl’s “Seeds of Destruction”.
Since it is the other prong of the stated goal being implemented by the financial plutocracy that runs everything, wouldn’t it be more coherent with the Green POV of things to call what’s happening with food “Peak Food”?
And the version of reality that i live in tells me that it takes more than the public being able to vote in what gets called Democracy, to have power serve the general interests of the population; in fact the track record shows that they will collectively vote away their power time and time again, as no one ends up believing in or representing it.
DSC 08
February 28th, 2008 at 2:01 am
even, I feel it is my duty to inform that… you’re a complete idiot… is the very phrase that got me a telling off from the blogmeister for breaching Frogblog’s rules of etiquette.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:19 am
To BluePeter,
You are a nasty patronising so and so, with a really nasty little mind.
My husband has a well paying job. We pay all our dues and receive absolutely no state benefits. We just choose to live with as low as possible carbon footprint and as sustainably as we can. We try to walk away from consumerism and built together with other well meaning people a community built on something other than greed and money. This after all the green party blog, you dunce.
I find your comments generally mostly ignorant and I don’t understand why you comment here at all since you seem so hostile to anything green and based on sensible social interaction.
But you pass the line when you start smearing people.
February 28th, 2008 at 4:47 am
travellerev, I salute you for doing what most of us only wish we could do. Referring to your first post of course. I do have a vege garden although the spuds and pumpkins seem to have taken over this year. It’s very relaxing as well as healthy for me and the planet. I like that. I trip chain to keep my car use as low as possible although it is a bit of gas gazzler but thats a good incentive not to go for sunday drives. I even found energy saving replacements for candle bulbs. I managed to get 14 years of use from the energy saver in the laundry, good example long term thinking if I may say so.
Anyway don’t let BluePeter get you down. It’s good to know you’re doing it because you want to not because you have to.
February 28th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Thanks for that comment Kevin.
It seems you are up early.
Funny that, our spuds and pumpkins seem to have taken over too.
Lol
February 28th, 2008 at 7:08 am
Yes, my whole point is that it is a matter of choice, and people can make full use of the choices available to them. If this becomes a synonym for taxes, regulatios etc, then it is the antithesis of this.
Even, well done - I think your post speaks much more of you than me, since you simply abused me and then went into quotes of conspiracies. Keep up the great work.
February 28th, 2008 at 8:39 am
LibertyScott, my post does speak more of me than you…and mayby you are just a little better off knowing what’s going on under the gloss of “free trade”(with all it’s binding anti-sovereign regulations) relating to food; or mayby not, and you don’t believe that there’s a possibility conspiracies and unchecked power can shape what goes on in life?
By all means, get your nose out of joint over an inconsequential put down on a blog while a global food system that can give give rats leukemia and tumors is implemented for millions purposely(and we are not rats), including in NZ.
I’m not sorry for the put down, like most people i’m not a saint and not 100% right all the time which is good(and perhaps unlike most people i know this, especially in the realm of politics); so i believe a slight belittlement when deemed appropriate isn’t the end of the world and much preferable to a dis-connected sterile world where one is damned by faint praise.
DSC 08.
February 28th, 2008 at 8:43 am
travellerev,
My apologies, I have misinterpreted your post. It sounded like a subsistence arrangement.
Not that I have anything against this, however if everyone lived like this, then we’d have no healthcare, welfare and infrastructure.
I’m interested in green technology - particularly power generation, and environmental issues generally. I question what I see as utopianism and the need to align so strongly with the failed far left.
February 28th, 2008 at 9:10 am
Liberty, not sure why you think food miles and fair trade are “widely discredited”, is it because the terms are so open to interpretation, as well as being so contextual (e.g. efficiency of british farmers vs nz farmers)? - that particular example seems to be more of a widely touted ‘exception’ than the ‘rule’. I tend to buy under the ‘official’ fair trade label due to the environmental and labour standards which other companies will not or cannot implement and thus in turn tell us about their own efforts, and so I consider it reasonably useful.
Obviously putting Zimbabwe in the post was a massive mistake (hopefully you don’t put on your blog ‘greens endorse famine!!’
February 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Mouldwarp, it appears the point of the post was
, not ‘tyranny’.
There are obviously some regulatory connotations in regards to labelling, and even’s post did raise a point amidst all the other stuff, like how accountable companies are about telling us what happens to our food. I wouldn’t imagine our rights are that hard to reconcile with freedom - but it would seem that without being coerced, those companies that choose not to label their food in regards to ingredients or processes could still ‘get away’ with that by selling the cheapest particular product…
February 28th, 2008 at 11:03 am
Sorry Liberty, didn’t mean to imply you WOULD run those types of headlines, very LOL story about the earthquakes-climate change too - that knob, hope he doesn’t consider himself a journo.
February 28th, 2008 at 11:27 am
BluePeter what is your version of Utopianism?
February 28th, 2008 at 11:58 am
I don’t hold utopian views. I prefer pragmatism.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
“Food democracy exists, now, it is called choosing what you buy”
That would be true if we all had the income to make the choices we want to make - either to buy particular food or to buy or rent land to grow it. We’d also need to reign in companies who take more than their fair share of the commons - fish for example.
Yup, it’s been a great year for pumpkins. I’ve also got basil coming out of my ears (I’m about to tuck into sandwich with home made pesto, and with rocket, arugula and tomato out of the garden, the bread and avocado is commercial though, but I’m getting there! By the way does anybody know where to get sunflower seeds for a good oil-producing variety?)
February 28th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
>>very phrase that got me a telling off from the blogmeister for breaching Frogblog’s rules of etiquette
Indeed.
With all due respect to the editors - how can I say this in the gentlest, kindest, non-offensive, carbon neutral manner possible - the application of the etiquette policy seems to be a little….one sided.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
StephenR - The problem with food miles is that while it may be legitimate in terms of air freight, for sea freighted goods the carbon impact is very low compared to the means people actually GET to the shop to buy the food. I’m happy for there to be an objective measure of carbon footprint of food production and distribution, but to highlight the trunk transport side of things distorts things significantly. It is a particular fetish in the UK, still.
On fairtrade my blog has a lot of points as to why it is not a good idea, it encourages overproduction, poor quality, is subject to significant gameplaying and there is evidence that most of the fairtrade “premium” is taken by retailers. There are also likely to be better ways to improve the lot of farmers (and labourers) than messing with price signals.
and yes the earthquake caused by climate change guy, is a graduate of drama school, naturally!
Even - I know about the WTO, having actually been involved a little in negotiations with it. There is no free trade in food, and that is largely the fault of the EU, Japan and the USA, but the WTO is a structure to advance towards that with no ratcheting back. If what you claim is true, then presumably those involved can be sued for negligence and recklessness.
I find you calling me an idiot demonstrates more about you’re own inability to put together a cogent structured argument than a series of claims of conspiracies, which look mostly like scaremongering. Companies want to make products that kill and injure people, and “nobody knows”, except you and those who agree with you - even their COMPETITORS don’t know, and wouldn’t exploit that fact.
I don’t want praise, but you addressed nothing that I said, and didn’t suggest any options. So what is it? You want to force people to not be able to trade what they produce, force people to not be able to buy what they want? I have no argument with you if you don’t want to use force.
February 28th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Mmm. On Fair TradeI don’t know whether to post here or there…Trade Aid has a lengthy FAQ that you might have seen http://www.tradeaid.co.nz/Fair%20Trade/FAQs#price which of course does not erase incidences of whatever-happened-that-was-bad. On quality, I know their chocolate and tea is damn fine though…
The Trade Aid guys are fully aware of the non-free markets that we have and tend to be associated with those lobbying for their repeal, like Oxfam. It’s making do with the current situation i’d say…Wouldn’t have a problem with properly accountable ‘fair trade’ (env/labour standards, money going towards building schools, digging wells etc…which presumably aids economic development) when the only other choice may be to sell only the rawest, least profitable materials to Europe etc..
February 28th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
The choice we have here is illusory. What value the choice among many tweaks to a denatured product? This flavour, that cut, the other twist. How devalued is our sense of food.
To be topically literal about it, I find one, and on some days two, varieties of milk in my supermarket that that are not homogenised. The staff don’t even seem to know what un-homogenised is, let alone have any idea of the philosophical, commercial or health reasons I would want to buy unhomogenised milk and not the other stuff.
I once counted over 40 varieties of humus; not one of them claiming to be GE free or organic. Every one but two being some ‘added value’ choice, not a choice of quality or providence for example, no expressions of the essence of good humus.
Don’t get me started on the zillions of options provided for what passes as bread on those shelves! What about some real bread….!
February 29th, 2008 at 2:16 am
Stephen, fair point. You can choose to pay an inflated price for “fair trade” rather than buy something else with the difference, but my chief concern is most of that premium being held onto by the retailer. The accountability for the premium seems to be very low, and there are a mountain of other reasons to not send signals to keep overproducing inefficiently.
February 29th, 2008 at 2:45 am
even, Can you clarify your comment “a global food system that can give give rats leukemia and tumors is implemented for millions purposely”?
Do you mean like Ford with the Pinto. They know it’s dangerous but their cost/benefit analysis concluded that it will simply be cheaper to settle the court cases than to fix the product. Or like the tobacco industry, they hope they can supress the evidence long enough to retire in luxury?
Or do you actually mean that there is a global population control program?
February 29th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Kevyn, pretty much yes to your questions but a thing is, which i won’t say anything more about, this kind of stuff isn’t even the A or B game, anyway here’s some more blurbs from same book review drawn on above.
Incidently, before i go on any further, all this friggin nonsense and much more besides, NZ wouldn’t have to be beholden to in the first place if people had enough sense to vote for getting back ownership of their own money supply-DSC 08!!
ahem…
“Rockefeller Foundation funding was the Gene Revolution’s catalyst in 1985 with big aims - to learn if GMO plants were commercially feasible and if so spread them everywhere. It was the “new eugenics” and the culmination of earlier research from the 1930s. It was also based on the idea that human problems can be “solved by genetic and chemical manipulations….as the ultimate means of social control and social engineering.” Foundation scientists sought ways to do it by reducing infinite life complexities to “simple, deterministic and predictive models” under their diabolical scheme - mapping gene structures to “correct social and moral problems including crime, poverty, hunger and political instability.” With the development of essential genetic engineering techniques in 1973, they were on their way…
…Argentina became the first “guinea pig” nation in a reckless experiment with untested and potentially hazardous new foods. No matter, potential profits are enormous so concerns for public safety and human health are ignored. Let the revolution begin in real time.
By the end of the 1980s, a global network of genetically-trained molecular biologists were ready to kick it off, Argentina was their first test laboratory, and it was hailed as a “Second Green Revolution.” Look what followed. From 1996 to 2004, worldwide GMO crop planting expanded to 167 million acres, a 40-fold increase using 25% of total worldwide arable land. An astonishing two-thirds of the acreage (106 million acres) was in the US. By 2004, Argentina was in second place with 34 million acres while production is expanding in Brazil, China, Canada, South Africa, Indonesia, India, the Philippines, Colombia, Honduras, Spain and Eastern Europe (Poland, Romania and Bulgaria). The revolution was on a roll and looks unstoppable…
..Monsanto then pressured the government to recognize its “technology license fee.” A Technology Compensation Fund was established and managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. It forced farmers to pay a near-1% fee on GMO soybean sales. Monsanto and other GMO seed suppliers got the funds. By 2005, Brazil’s government relented. It legalized GMO seeds for the first time, and by 2006, the US, Argentina and Brazil accounted for over 81% of world soybean production. It “ensure(s) that practically every animal in the world fed soymeal (is) eating genetically engineered soybeans.” It also means everyone eating these animals does the same thing unwittingly….”
And while people are still coming to grips with GMO, nano-food technology is expected to start it’s own march this year too. hoo hum….well what u expect, our monetary financial system is a treadmill like those the lab mice have, this other stuff is a natural consequence.
DSC 08.
February 29th, 2008 at 10:49 am
The all-knowing FAQ would probably disagree with you on a few points there libertyscott…