Of Reading and Relationship

I haven't been able to write for more than a week, and in that time I've read and listened to more news about the destructive practices of Monsanto, the projected consequences of the demise of honeybees, and more calls for increased organic food production practices. So much to write about, so little time to prepare and write! That will change soon.

Those will be future topics, but today I'll share a bit about a book I recently began reading Diet for a Small Planet, a book I had heard about from Audobon Magazine's list of the top ten must-reads in food writing. After reading the first chapter, I knew I had to share what I was reading. Despite being published initially 40 years ago, and last published 20 years ago in an anniversary edition, the book continues to connect with issues and problems that concerns us about food today. The author, Frances Moore Lappe, makes two initial statements in her introductory pages: first, "There is no away. ...everything is connected" (xli); second, "we are defined by relationships" (xxix); and third, "...but for me, the issue of Diet for a Small Planet is about abundance, not scarcity. The issue is how we use that abundance" (12).

I'll keep coming back to these ideas as I talk about her book and in future posts related to this and other topics. When she wrote "there is no away," she was talking about the falsity of thinking that we can produce nuclear waste, for example, and put the radioactive waste away somewhere--there is no place to put it away safely with 100 percent confidence.

To broaden that idea, we cannot escape the consequences of our actions, not in our personal relationships, not in our relationship to the growing and tampering of our food. Policy can push farmers into producing more and more crops to the detriment of the soil, and we cannot escape the infertility and erosion of that soil brought about by unsustainable farming practices. Just as the decision to tamper with nature and evolution in force feeding cattle grain and antibiotics has led to the consequence of antibiotic resistance in strains of staph that now infects much of our commercially grown meat and the subsequent evolution of "super bugs," both of which have health consequences for consumers as well as the animals produced for food. Or consider in the same light the policies and health issues surrounding the "deconstruction" of corn to make high fructose corn syrup. Type 2 diabetes should come to mind as the natural consequence, not to mention the problems associated with Monsanto and genetically modified crops (of which corn tops that list).

And what of relationship? Somewhere man began to see himself as ruler over nature, superior to nature. There has been a blurring of the relationships between man, animal, and the earth--water, air, and soil, and all its creatures. Are we, collectively, thinking we can use and abuse these relationships yet still be smart enough, or science will be good enough, to make the subsequent problems go away? What of our relationships to other human beings and their ability to feed themselves? There are any number of cases we can find where corporations and countries have taken over farmland from independent farmers to produce food for export and reducing a country's ability to feed itself. Haiti should come to mind.

Joe Collins and Frances Moore Lappe founded The Institute for Food and Development Policy to address issues around hunger and the injustices that cause hunger. Follow the links and look around; you'll find news that won't appear on Fox News, or likely any other news network. This Food First link will connect you to the Institute's blog. When Lappe began looking into issues of hunger decades ago, she felt a responsibility to do something about and so joined forces with her co-author from another book, Collins, to create the institute and make a difference. Not everyone can make a difference in that way, but I think that by being more knowledgeable about how food gets to our table, and by voting with our consumer power, we can all make a difference collectively.