English Assignment
Nov. 11th, 2010 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI spent an hour at a friend's house writing. It's supposed to be conversational-level, playing with voice. I don't feel like I did a great job but it's supposed to be all surface and no content. If pressed I would call it an overview. Here it is, unedited:
Everyone eats, therefore everyone needs the means to eat. All modern issues touch on agriculture and food culture; likewise food issues impact each of us directly. Some of these impacts are terrible.
A huge percentage of the world's population has neither enough food nor the expectation of enough food in the future. Likewise a huge percentage of the world's population is harmed by the food they do eat, either through malnutrition and diseases conventionally associated with starvation or through diabetes, heart disease, and the other ills of the affluent world.
We don't value food. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay for quality food. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay for skilled people to be secure in agriculture as a legitimate occupation. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay to reduce that food's negative impact on our environment.
Our lack of attention to the food we eat and its means of production is our own undoing. Without a social culture which supports healthy eating we are lost in the bright maze of supermarket convenience foods, at the mercy of advertising and of manufactured products designed to pull levers of desire forged in the very different circumstances of our evolution. We have forgotten how to fit cooking into our lives and so the ingredients in our premade foods are determined by a company's bottom line.
The agricultural system from which we get most of our food is a flailing, headless beast. Subsidies for corn and soybeans in the West trickle down to encourage feedlot beef, cheese, and caged chicken in our diet, yet our own nutritional data tells us that a varied diet is optimal for our health. We claim to support food security in poorer countries but use conditions attached to loans to bludgeon them into accepting our cut-rate food at the expense of their own agricultural systems. Monocultures march across the land, strip-mining nutrients from the soil, releasing carbon into the atmosphere, and destroying wild lands and aquatic systems alike.
These issues are diverse and entangled, but it's because of that entanglement that solutions are so plentiful. If we wish to leave our food to experts as we do with so much else in our lives, then we must make sure those experts are indeed expert: instead of letting the cultural stereotype of the dumb farmer turn our bright minds elsewhere, we need to encourage our farmers to be ecologists, nutritionists, and problem-solvers who think outside the conventional corn row. Instead of industrialising cooking so that, as the founder of MacDonalds famously said, “even monkeys can do it” we need to return joy and creativity to cooking both in the home and in the people we pay to feed us.
We do this by valuing food.
We need to value food culturally: we need to appreciate good food and the people who provide it each and every time we eat. Our cooks and our farmers nourish us. They deserve enough of our respect that we're at least as willing to support them with our praise and our money as we are movie stars and video game designers.
When we respect our food and our farmers we eat better. We take joy in the myriad flavours and textures available; we appreciate freshness as well as exotic flavours. We begin to grow our own food, or appreciate the people who do. Food systems become more local and agriculture more diverse; our food supply then becomes more secure because our eggs are in so many different baskets.
When people who grow food become glamorous, or at least not culturally stigmatised, we pay them a living wage instead of demanding that they work a day job to subsidise the agricultural work they do. When they are making a comfortable wage they are free to experiment with new foods or with better ways of growing food. When they are not straightjacketed by subsidies only for certain crops they can work with ecosystems as a whole. They have the time and mental energy to learn from their land. They have the luxury of keeping their livestock in humane conditions.
When we value our food and our farmers we treat agriculture as a cutting-edge science. We subsize education and research on the topic, not leaving scholarships and research money to come from corporate entities with specialised vested interests.
When we begin to learn how good food affects us, we engage on the topic, not only culturally but also politically. We support everyone's right to food, to good food, and to safe food. We favour systems which allow us to easily eat well and fight against the huge weight of the destructive agro-industrial system around us.
And when it comes right down to it, that fight is both easy and pleasurable. All we need to do is engage ourselves is to have something really good to eat, ideally with a friend.
More good food will follow.
Everyone eats, therefore everyone needs the means to eat. All modern issues touch on agriculture and food culture; likewise food issues impact each of us directly. Some of these impacts are terrible.
A huge percentage of the world's population has neither enough food nor the expectation of enough food in the future. Likewise a huge percentage of the world's population is harmed by the food they do eat, either through malnutrition and diseases conventionally associated with starvation or through diabetes, heart disease, and the other ills of the affluent world.
We don't value food. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay for quality food. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay for skilled people to be secure in agriculture as a legitimate occupation. We would rather buy more food more cheaply than pay to reduce that food's negative impact on our environment.
Our lack of attention to the food we eat and its means of production is our own undoing. Without a social culture which supports healthy eating we are lost in the bright maze of supermarket convenience foods, at the mercy of advertising and of manufactured products designed to pull levers of desire forged in the very different circumstances of our evolution. We have forgotten how to fit cooking into our lives and so the ingredients in our premade foods are determined by a company's bottom line.
The agricultural system from which we get most of our food is a flailing, headless beast. Subsidies for corn and soybeans in the West trickle down to encourage feedlot beef, cheese, and caged chicken in our diet, yet our own nutritional data tells us that a varied diet is optimal for our health. We claim to support food security in poorer countries but use conditions attached to loans to bludgeon them into accepting our cut-rate food at the expense of their own agricultural systems. Monocultures march across the land, strip-mining nutrients from the soil, releasing carbon into the atmosphere, and destroying wild lands and aquatic systems alike.
These issues are diverse and entangled, but it's because of that entanglement that solutions are so plentiful. If we wish to leave our food to experts as we do with so much else in our lives, then we must make sure those experts are indeed expert: instead of letting the cultural stereotype of the dumb farmer turn our bright minds elsewhere, we need to encourage our farmers to be ecologists, nutritionists, and problem-solvers who think outside the conventional corn row. Instead of industrialising cooking so that, as the founder of MacDonalds famously said, “even monkeys can do it” we need to return joy and creativity to cooking both in the home and in the people we pay to feed us.
We do this by valuing food.
We need to value food culturally: we need to appreciate good food and the people who provide it each and every time we eat. Our cooks and our farmers nourish us. They deserve enough of our respect that we're at least as willing to support them with our praise and our money as we are movie stars and video game designers.
When we respect our food and our farmers we eat better. We take joy in the myriad flavours and textures available; we appreciate freshness as well as exotic flavours. We begin to grow our own food, or appreciate the people who do. Food systems become more local and agriculture more diverse; our food supply then becomes more secure because our eggs are in so many different baskets.
When people who grow food become glamorous, or at least not culturally stigmatised, we pay them a living wage instead of demanding that they work a day job to subsidise the agricultural work they do. When they are making a comfortable wage they are free to experiment with new foods or with better ways of growing food. When they are not straightjacketed by subsidies only for certain crops they can work with ecosystems as a whole. They have the time and mental energy to learn from their land. They have the luxury of keeping their livestock in humane conditions.
When we value our food and our farmers we treat agriculture as a cutting-edge science. We subsize education and research on the topic, not leaving scholarships and research money to come from corporate entities with specialised vested interests.
When we begin to learn how good food affects us, we engage on the topic, not only culturally but also politically. We support everyone's right to food, to good food, and to safe food. We favour systems which allow us to easily eat well and fight against the huge weight of the destructive agro-industrial system around us.
And when it comes right down to it, that fight is both easy and pleasurable. All we need to do is engage ourselves is to have something really good to eat, ideally with a friend.
More good food will follow.
