- I'd like to know where my food comes from and how it was grown/produced.
- I'd like to have real choices in all types of food, not be limited to eating GMOs, foods that have additives etc.
- I'd like to be able to buy most things without having them travel hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of miles to get to me.
- I'd like to be able to buy fresh as much of the year as reasonable and have regional food processing done (like the time when every town or area had a brewery, which is happening again....) so that I could support local growers year round.
- I'd like to have more of the price I pay for food go to the people who raised/produced it and less to the intermediaries, packaging companies, shippers and marketers.
- I'd like to see healthy, fresh, sustainably raised/produced food available to everyone at a fair price.
- What happens when the activism to get these things may hit declining returns relative to the effort to get them done?
- What might be the countervailing activities that don't get put into action until the threat to the existing system takes a harder form?
- And, what may be some unintended consequences of successfully changing the food system?
Worth some thought and some conversation....
Paula's questions grew out of an observation made in reprising our conversation on alternate food initiatives, and a reference to "limits" of the effort. She kindly made my comments actually sound, well, like I had a clue what I was testing…(-: Following is a response to her query:
ReplyDeleteYou said it, presciently, the alternate food initiative just seems to get swallowed by the total commercial food infrastructure. For a solid reason, the latter is levels of magnitude closer to providing the total necessary energy input to support a society even if the function is riddled with both chemical, biological, physiological, attitudinal, moral, and destructive process components.
It has also had a couple of centuries to become the coin of the realm, entrenched infrastructure, has captured how many jobs, and to purge any major part would be like losing an economic leg. It's a piece of virtually every 401K in the US, and its practitioners are frequently held up as models of managerial excellence. It encompasses every culture that has been melded into the nation, each by the way likely bringing some additional form of created food to the table.
You may have been a tad young, for sure, but the closest the US came to changing the game was WWII, where the "Victory Garden" briefly changed the food supply balances. But imagine the surpluses then thrown onto markets when the military demands ceased. Basic economics, politics, subsidies, made the food game a growth market, and set the hook for a vended rather than DIY system. Ultimately even more economics were wrapped around that as food storage and preparation became a major component of hard goods manufacturing, the related food supply chains and vending strategies then interactively linked to those appliances. No return path.
Assuming for the sake of argument that the constantly replicated "S" shaped growth curve works for alternate food as in every other natural system, all starts with rates of change very low, accelerates, has an increased rate, then rate slows again, going to a limit (see, got it in) or asymptote. No more growth, no more change, flat-lined, and maybe even a reverse gear. Been documented ever since it was recognized, and likely fits cannibalization of the composite processed food industry by any alternate sourcing or movement.
My point is there is a point in conceptualizing roughly what that eventual state looks like, if for no other reason than to see how far you can go and know when you've arrived.
The thinking starts by recognizing that there are parts (many) of what's in place that can't be easily or efficiently, or generically transformed via the culture you're advocating. A couple hundred years ago, yes, but then some fool discovered the periodic table and we've birthed "better living through chemistry" ever since, likely not reversible.To pull this in, there is somewhere out there, and I suspect closer than one would emotionally wish, a practical limit to how far the alternate food mantra can be pushed before encountering two counter influences; a natural time-indexed limit to how many "foodbits" you can shift, how much you can induce sustainable consumption style change, and where you might start to cannibalize some traditional food business, becoming a mosquito bite to big or chemical food, precipitating a backlash.
Not suggesting in any sense that should be a deterrent, just the need to recognize and perhaps describe as a reality to be kept in mind, if nothing else to keep score and know when to duck.
In the interim indulge the sheer joy of being in the embryonic stage of something societally meaningful, where, if you can keep its funding flowing, you're in a creative and fun and exciting part of a worthy game. And quit reading the contents on processed food containers, albeit, 'tis a grand way to reinforce a diet, or brush up on organic chemistry…
Now that's a "comment." Thanks.
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's possible for me to be deterred. And I think there will be pockets of change with a "shadow" food system here, like there is a shadow government in Great Britain from what I've been told. Maybe it will be the "parallel universes" where they both exist side by side. Whatever the form of the change that comes, I believe a change is in process because there are too many people who are not happy with the status quo. I see it as a matter of equity not just something for the well-to-do. Since eating isn't optional it is something that everyone has a stake in, but until recently not very many people thought very much about.
I'm pretty good at ducking.