food movement

At one eloquent and entrepreneurially-impeccably-credentialed end of the spectrum stands farmer Joel Salatin:

Don't let them confuse you. Organic farming is not an industry. It is a movement. It is part of a movement that began when the first indigenous peoples fought against the Conquistadors. It is fighting back against the modern Conquistadors, the multinational corporations, those who would patent and genetically modify life and destroy diversity.



Well, being stubborn, slogan-loving Americans, we could try to come up with names anyway: Foodie, locavore, vegan, localism, smallism, anti-GMOism, anti-Conquistadorism, anti-Twinkie-ism, raw milkism, school lunchism, ethical treatment of animalism, family farmism, urban farmism, farmers market vs. Walmartism, heirloom variety-ism, real foodism, slow foodism, indigenous culturism, nurture capitalism, biocharism, terroirism.

Or we can zoom out, and zoom down, and look for the broader and deeper process of which all this food related activism is a part. Here are some of the persectives of people who have been working for decades to transform the food system (or create new ones):

Think: Eliot Coleman's advice, "Feed the soil, not the plant."

Think: Gary Snyder's observation: "Food is the field in which we daily explore our harming of the world."

Think: Joan Gussow's aphorism, "I prefer butter to margarine, because I trust cows more than I trust chemists."

Think: Odessa Piper's insight, "Local is the distance the heart can travel."

This enterprise that we are a part of, with its new organic farmers and the host of small food enterprises that are emerging to bring their produce to market, is about an economy that does less harm. It's about rebuilding trust and reconnecting to one another and the places where we live. It's about healing the social and ecological relationships that have been broken by hundreds of years of linear, extractive pursuit of economic growth, industrialization, globalization, and consumerism. It's about pulling some of our money out of ever-accelerating financial markets and its myriad abstractions -- called, with more than a little irony, securities -- and putting it to work near where we live, in things that we understand, starting with food -- creating a more immediate and tangible kind of security.


This attention to and, even, celebration of the small, the slow and the local can seem, at times, rather precious against the scale of global economic, political, and environmental challenges. But it was agriculture that gave birth to the modern economy, and, as Paul Ehrlich recognizes, it must be agriculture that we fix if there is to be a postmodern economy:

The agricultural revolution led to a period of cultural evolution unprecedented in its rapidity and scale ... It is a story that starts with the obtaining of food but returns us to two aspects of human behavior that, although present in hunter-gatherers, became even more important in sedentary groups-religion and violence.


Can we imagine a pro-soil, pro-earthworm, pro-small farmer, anti-fiduciary-razzmatazz, pro non-capitalist-pig movement that becomes as robust in this second decade of the 21st century as the anti-war movement was in the 1960s?

Peace Now. Fertility Now. Food Here Now. Slow Money.

From: Will the real food movement please stand up?
http://www.grist.org/sustainable-food/2011-05-02-will-the-real-food-movement-please-stand-up