Let me reveal to you one fact about food. Western countries support the giant food producers with subsidies totaling $360 billion. Go Google it yourself, and you will get this information. Food industry globally, is a multi trillion dollars business, an extremely massive industry.
I have a question. Are you an environmentalist? Anyone? If you are, and wants to stop world hunger, here is what you should do. First of all, try everything in your power, to stop the grain cartels, including revoking their corporate charters. I know this sounds a bit insane for a normal citizen, but whoever who has connection to the federal government, there is every possible chance this can be achieved. Then, understand how federal farm policies are driving local economies into ruin and farmers into suicide the world over. Get involved with the local state and national campaigns to change their policies. There are also human rights, feminist and pro democracy movements in poor countries who could use our money and out help.
You got to realize, refraining from factory farm animal products is a righteous act, for animals and the earth, but it will not save a single hungry person. Buying soy burger is an emotional fix that does not address the tenacious and terrible roots of power and inequality. Check the label, you are probably giving money to the very corporations that are creating the problem.
Remember I briefly discussed about Ghana in my last post? Now, let's take Japan as another example. If the Japanese weren't replying on the fisheries around the world and trade with agriculture exporting nations, two thirds of the country would be starving. Likewise in Great Britain, over half of the country's food comes from outside its borders. There are clearly more people in those countries then the land can support.
Because there's no mass starvation in Japan or Great Britain, and the stores are filled with staples, no one realizes that they are collectively overshot their locality, their bioregion and their country. Has any of you wonder how many people can the planet support? If you use 1800 CE as your benchmark, there were roughly 1 billion people at the start of the fossil fuel age. If you use 8000 BCE, the beginning of agriculture, there were about 8 million of us at the start of the fossil soil age.
Human life, like all life, require resources. But the link between cause and effect, between consumption and degradation, has been broken in our cultural consciousness. Do you realize that agriculture increases human numbers through the very act of destroying the landbase?
When a forest is cleared for crops the loss of biodiversity translates into more food for people. Soil begins to deplete immediately but that won't be noticed for many years. When the soil is finally ruined, which is the fate of nearly all agricultural soils, it will stunt ecological recovery for decades. But, while the soil is steadily eroding, crops will support the growing village.
This is not a romanticize life in a hunter gatherer culture, means our primal ancestors. Breast feeding is often toted as hunter gatherer birth control, but it's only about 80% reliable. Lactation will stop a woman's menses, but she may still ovulate, which means she can still conceive. Some cultures have a different views of sexual intercourse altogether. Semen is believed to contain a life force that strengthens a man if kept and weakens him if spent. In some cultures, like the Melanesian Islands, semen is passed from older men to younger in religion rituals, while sexual intercourse with women is considered a duty for procreation, to be avoided as much as possible.
Like almost everything that humans do, sex is a social institution. Who does it, why they do it, how they do it. The answers are shaped by the culture we live in. Ok, lets not prolong the discussion about sex. But, I want to be clear that social hierarchies based on sex, race, age or even status, exist in many hunter gatherer cultures.
Let me tell you guys some interesting facts about one of the hunter gatherer culture in Paraguay. The Ache, live in the tropical rainforest of Paraguay, where married women are completely dependant on their husbands for meat (food). It was up to each individual man whether or how much to share. Not only that, but the food that the women collected also belonged to their husbands. The women could only eat after the men had taken what they wanted. Now, in this real life scenario, an existing primal culture, where men in many societies restrict the amount of resources that their wives can use, even food resources.
Food taboos are common throughout the world, in both hunter gatherer and agricultureal societies, and the most common taboos involve what and when women are allowed to eat. Another example is the Chipewyans, where women only ate after the men took what they wanted, which meant they often got nothing. Also, in parts of Indonesia, all meat belongs to men. If any of you stayed in Australia before, or have studied about Australian Aborigines, you will know that the order of preference in food distribution is old men, hunting men, children, dogs and the women, blatantly prevent women from eating animal fat most of their lives.
For most women in our industrial, media saturated culture, every meal has been turned into a tightrope strung between self loathing and chronic hunger, at any given moment, approximately 70% of women are on some sort of diet, and almost half are continually gaining and losing weight. Bear in mind, eating disorders are now third most common chronic illness in adolescent girls.
Now, as we have seen, agriculture is the drawdown of fossil soil and the monocropping of continents. But, agriculture is also the devastation of human culture. The myth of civilization is that it creates security, when what it creates is centralized social hierachy and systematic hunger.
You must realize, that famine is a creation of farming. Millions of people have starved over the last six thousands of years! The myth is that civilization has been a net plus for human rights and human happiness. Since history belongs to the victors, that is what the civilized would say, but they are the ones who owned the slaves, the rest of us. We are living in a brief historical moment when cheap fossil fuel has made unimaginable consumption possible. To grind the grain of the civilized, female slaves spent their lives bent over on their knees and hands, leaving their arthritic and deformed legs and spines to speak to us in silent outrage. The question is, are you listening? Agriculture foods, the grains, the beans and vegetables, we are all urged to eat in the service of world community, are the foods of displacement and destruction, not justice or peace. To be blunt, they are the foods or slavery, and when this short moment of oil engorgement fades into memory and then into myth, we will be left with sweat. Grain requires sweat.
The planet wants to be living a community. not a monocrop. Agricultural food is soaked clean through in oil and blood. Take the fossil fuel out of the equation and tell me where there is room for human rights. Agriculture, its foods, its civilizations, is the end of the world.
Like almost everything that humans do, sex is a social institution. Who does it, why they do it, how they do it. The answers are shaped by the culture we live in. Ok, lets not prolong the discussion about sex. But, I want to be clear that social hierarchies based on sex, race, age or even status, exist in many hunter gatherer cultures.
Let me tell you guys some interesting facts about one of the hunter gatherer culture in Paraguay. The Ache, live in the tropical rainforest of Paraguay, where married women are completely dependant on their husbands for meat (food). It was up to each individual man whether or how much to share. Not only that, but the food that the women collected also belonged to their husbands. The women could only eat after the men had taken what they wanted. Now, in this real life scenario, an existing primal culture, where men in many societies restrict the amount of resources that their wives can use, even food resources.
Food taboos are common throughout the world, in both hunter gatherer and agricultureal societies, and the most common taboos involve what and when women are allowed to eat. Another example is the Chipewyans, where women only ate after the men took what they wanted, which meant they often got nothing. Also, in parts of Indonesia, all meat belongs to men. If any of you stayed in Australia before, or have studied about Australian Aborigines, you will know that the order of preference in food distribution is old men, hunting men, children, dogs and the women, blatantly prevent women from eating animal fat most of their lives.
For most women in our industrial, media saturated culture, every meal has been turned into a tightrope strung between self loathing and chronic hunger, at any given moment, approximately 70% of women are on some sort of diet, and almost half are continually gaining and losing weight. Bear in mind, eating disorders are now third most common chronic illness in adolescent girls.
Now, as we have seen, agriculture is the drawdown of fossil soil and the monocropping of continents. But, agriculture is also the devastation of human culture. The myth of civilization is that it creates security, when what it creates is centralized social hierachy and systematic hunger.
You must realize, that famine is a creation of farming. Millions of people have starved over the last six thousands of years! The myth is that civilization has been a net plus for human rights and human happiness. Since history belongs to the victors, that is what the civilized would say, but they are the ones who owned the slaves, the rest of us. We are living in a brief historical moment when cheap fossil fuel has made unimaginable consumption possible. To grind the grain of the civilized, female slaves spent their lives bent over on their knees and hands, leaving their arthritic and deformed legs and spines to speak to us in silent outrage. The question is, are you listening? Agriculture foods, the grains, the beans and vegetables, we are all urged to eat in the service of world community, are the foods of displacement and destruction, not justice or peace. To be blunt, they are the foods or slavery, and when this short moment of oil engorgement fades into memory and then into myth, we will be left with sweat. Grain requires sweat.
The planet wants to be living a community. not a monocrop. Agricultural food is soaked clean through in oil and blood. Take the fossil fuel out of the equation and tell me where there is room for human rights. Agriculture, its foods, its civilizations, is the end of the world.
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