Agri-Awareness

Food is terrorism
Lay your body down
Food is terrorism
Take a good look around

How we choose
To feed the best and starve the rest
Unquestioned, unexplained
Who will lose?
Who will tip the scale of all this greed?

“Food is Terrorism” by Chicago chanteuse Anne Harris is from her superb 2008 album Gravity and Faith. Harris is an extraordinarily talented musician, vocalist and songwriter whose songs are about pertinent topics and feature elegant words and incredible insight.

About this song Harris says, “How can it be that profiteering and the struggle for power and control determine who will eat, what they’ll eat, and how much they’ll consume?” The Reader’s Digest answer to her query is greed, cunning, apathy and poor oversight. For a less condensed answer, let’s start with a brief overview of agriculture.

Though homo sapiens have been walking upright for a million years or more, it wasn’t until about 10,000 years ago that agriculture became part of the picture. Our ancestors were nomadic hunter/gatherers. They foraged for their food. They didn’t intentionally plant it until people started communing in settlements, at which time cultivating food became necessary to sustain the community.

That’s how people fed themselves over the next few thousand years — you grew it, you ate it. Our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of jumping in the car and driving to KFC for a bucket of chicken when they got hungry. In fact, my great-aunt’s chicken and dumplin’ recipe (circa 1920) begins, “Grab the plumpest hen in the yard … ” The point is that until very recently, people knew where their food was grown and bred, and they knew who was growing and breeding it.

Morph to the 21st century, and global food production and supply is dominated by enormous agri-businesses, such as Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, and Cargill, all of which employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Because it would be impossible to sufficiently convey the dangers that these uber-large corporations present to the human race within my paltry 750 word allotment, I suggest you read the following books, which will help you grasp the severity of such monopolizations: Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press) by Vandana Shiva, Invisible Giant: Cargill and its Transnational Strategies (Pluto Press) by Brewster Kneen, and Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re Eating (Yes Books) by Jeffrey M. Smith.

Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) spreads its corporate arms over 60 countries and lulls us into a false sense of security with feel-good slogans like, “ADM: Connecting farmers’ crops with the needs of the global marketplace,” following stories on NPR.
Monsanto has patented genetically modified seeds and fast-talking salesmen, who hoodwink farmers the world over into believing that theirs is the only way to farm. Then they coerce the farmers into signing binding contracts that cost the farmers plenty in cash and mental anguish.

Cargill boasts 160,000 employees in 67 countries. “It is important to have market dominance” and “The world is our oyster” are numbers one and two of the privately held company’s Nine Strategic Beliefs. Cargill’s revenue will top the $100 billion mark this year.

If this information doesn’t make you nauseated, it should at the very least make you concerned. It is downright scary that something as fundamentally necessary as food is controlled by so few who seemingly have no conscience for anything except their own vested interests and the almighty bottom line. If these global agri-businesses are actually doing what they profess, then how is it that world hunger currently affects one in six humans? How is it that there are 1 billion hungry people on our planet?

To combat these global behemoths we must again rely on ourselves and our neighbors for the food that we eat. Community Supported Agriculture, a collaborative effort to build more locally based, self-reliant food economies, is a positive trend that is taking hold in Middle Tennessee. We should give kudos to people like Bill Campbell of Sylvan Park who has picked up the gauntlet. For the past couple of years Campbell has grown “community tomatoes,” which are free for the pickin’. This summer he’s added a stand of corn to the offering. One yard, one field, and one farm at a time, Community Supported Agriculture is taking root, and that, my sisters, is the answer to how we will tip the scale of all this greed.