Good article — worth a read.
What Michael Pollan Hasn’t Told You About Food
Patel’s new book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System makes visible the people behind the abstraction and reveals a global food system that, with our complicity, continues to alienate farmers and consumers alike, all while fattening the pocketbooks of a few middlemen.
To read Patel is to understand the logic behind the sweets company, Nestle, acquiring the weight loss magnate Jenny Craig or why WalMart is free to raise prices in areas where they have already killed off the competition. In the language of markets, these problems are not “self-correcting.” Only the profound failure of the prevailing metaphor of the Invisible Hand hampers us from seeing what Patel has spent years of research making visible. In an interview with AlterNet, Patel explains how, “the way we choose food today comes from distinctly abnormal roots,” how these roots connect us to farmers and consumers around the world, and why we should get angry, not feel guilty.
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Why is it that only rich people get to have pleasure? Why is pleasure not the birthright of everyone? The rich and radical moment is when you take this idea that pleasure should be the right of everyone and you go do something about it The slow food movement was responsible for helping to drive up agricultural wages and instrumental in creating a two hour lunch break. They did this, not through individual shopping choices, but through concerted political action and working with people, organizing, being democratic, and then taking on power.
I think this emphasis on joy and reconnecting with our joy can actually be very political. Obviously, it’s been derailed in some ways by the bourgeois circle jerk of olive oil and red wine enthusiasts, but it can be very radical. I think that should inform the kind of changes in the way we get our food. Staying out of the supermarket, going to your local farmers market, and getting involved in community food policy councils are all good ideas. The spirit behind it is not that “we must have the finest tomato” but rather, everyone has the right to good food. That democratic impulse is what needs to propel us to a better food future.
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I can vouch for the Slow Food movement. A few years back, we held numerous Slow Food events in Salem, OR. Not only did we feature wholesome, vegetarian soups and breads for a meager price, but we talked about serious food issues too. It was a great experience for those who participated and I had fun washing the dishes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately, mostly in terms of countries in the world which are literally incapable of feeding themselves. I’ll do a blog post about it, I think.
My view of the supermarkets is that you can buy many different things, including nutritional substances. I know little or nothing about our “food system” in this country. I know we subsidize agriculture, and most of the subsidies go to corporations which don’t need it to prosper.