In order to solve world hunger we need to rethink our current relationships with how our food is produced and distributed and we need to rethink how we relate with each other and our planet. |
| Roots Community Garden in Las Vegas, NV. Photo courtesy of iSickles Media |
The night was still warm while I sat on the simple chair
listening to insect songs which sounded both familiar and strange. The stars
seemed brighter than usual in the southern skies of Zambia. In the dim
candlelight Batata (father) gestured
to the saved pumpkin seeds spread on the mealie sack covering the hard packed
earth. He told me the seeds were from pumpkins he grew before and pumpkins his
father grew before and pumpkins his father grew and his father before that. I
sat silently in awe staring at those seeds and the long link to the past they
represented. How amazing is it to have such a connection to your ancestors and
the land stretching back generations? Links like this seemed to be disappearing
where I came from along with so many others.
Saving seeds links us with our deep past and growing our own
food connects us with the soils of the earth, the water from the sky, and the
sunshine coming from light-years away to warm and feed us. These connections
are lost when we can’t save seeds and a laboratory is needed to serve as a
middle-man between us and our food. Gardening and farming requires intimate
knowledge of our natural environment and we need this intimacy with the natural
world now more than ever. We are forgetting where our food comes from and how
to grow it and by forgetting such vital information we are forgetting how to
sustain ourselves in a most basic way. We are forgetting how to feed ourselves
and have become dependent upon food companies to provide us with food and
water—at a price.
Oddly, our current system of industrial food production and
distribution isn’t organized with the goal of feeding people—it’s organized
around making as much money as possible for certain people. Food companies are
not asking, “How do we feed as many people as possible?” They are asking, “How
do we make as much money as possible off of selling food to people?” The main
block between people and food in this system, it’s most sacred rule, is if you
don’t have money, you don’t get food.
We need a new pattern of organization. In the previous blog,
GMO's Will Not End World Hunger, I pointed out the cause of world hunger isn’t
due to inadequate food production; it is our way of distributing and granting
access to the food that is causing world hunger. So, we need to change the way
we distribute and allow access to food. This is simple to say, but complicated
to do because it essentially requires us to completely rethink our economic system. It requires us to rethink our relationship with our food and how it is
produced. It requires us to rethink our relationships with each other and with
our entire planet. The solution to world hunger is allowing more people access
to food through fairer distribution and trade. Instead of blaming poor people
for being poor, let’s change our systemic pattern of organization instead.
Local sustainable production through community gardens and urban agriculture
will do far more to end world hunger than GMOs created in a laboratory. So will
redesigning our current distribution systems to focus on actually feeding
people as the primary goal instead of profit being the only consideration.
We need to take back control of food production by producing
locally and consuming locally and we need to stop wasting so much of what is
already produced. Support local urban agriculture, join a farmer co-op or CSA, and
shop farmers markets. Start your own garden because, in my experience with gardeners,
sharing food is inevitable! Support measures which make it easier to farm and
garden in your area while working to change laws which make it illegal or very
difficult. Learn more about co-ops and the emerging co-operative economy. Support
organic food production which nourishes and conserves our soils while leaving
room for other species on this earth.
Sources and Things to Check Out:
APA format:
Sources and Things to Check Out:
My subversive (garden) plot. (Video)
By Roger Doiron for TEDxDirigo.
September 2011
A guerilla gardener in South Central LA. (Video)
By Ron Finley for TED
February 2013
Why Food Should be a Commons not a Commodity (Blog)
By Jose Luis Vivero Pol for
Shareable
It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado. (Article)
By Kirk Johnson for the New York
Times [U.S. Section]
June 28, 2009
Trader Joe’s Ex-Exec Opens Nonprofit Grocery (Article)
By Rachel Brugger for Urban Farm
Online.com
June 5, 2015
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Food Waste (HBO). (Video)
By Last Week Tonight on YouTube
Published July 19, 2015
The Story of Solutions (Video)
The Story of Stuff Project
Written by Annie Leonard and
Jonah Sachs
Directed by Louis Fox
Produced by Free Range Studios
October 2013
APA format:
Brugger,
Rachel. (2015, June 5). Trader Joe’s Ex-Exec Opens Nonprofit Grocery. UrbanFarmOnline.com. [Web Article].
Retrieved from http://www.urbanfarmonline.com/urban-farm-news/2015/06/05/trader-joes-exec-opens-nonprofit-grocery.aspx
Doiron,
Roger. (2011, September). My subversive (garden) plot. TEDxDirigo. [Web Video]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/roger_doiron_my_subversive_garden_plot
Finley,
Ron. (2013, February). A guerilla gardener in South Central LA. TED. [Web Video].Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_finley_a_guerilla_gardener_in_south_central_la?language=en
Free Range
Studios. (Producers) & Fox, Louis (Director). (2013, October). The Story of Solutions. The Story of
Stuff Project. [Web Video]. Retrieved from http://storyofstuff.org/movies/the-story-of-solutions/
Johnson,
Kirk. (2009, June 28). It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado. New York Times, U.S. [Web Article].
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/us/29rain.html?_r=1&
Last Week
Tonight. (2015, July 19). Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Food Waste (HBO).
HBO. [Web Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY
Vivero Pol, Jose
Luis (2013, October 9). Why Food Should be a Commons not a Commodity. Shareable. [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.shareable.net/blog/why-food-should-be-a-commons-not-a-commodity
