“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”
-Henry Kissinger
Politicians and warmongers know it. Activists who go on hunger strikes know it. Controlling food is an effective means to manipulate people. In wartime, aggressors attempt to cut off their enemies supply lines – starve out the enemy and perhaps they’ll simply surrender.
Well, there is a more surreptitious war going on within our own country, and it concerns our food. Who are the aggressors? Multi-billion dollar corporations in collusion with government agencies where they have easily managed to place toadies who insure that policy favors their true masters. Watch documentaries like Food Inc, The Future of Food, Farmageddon; read books from Michael Pollan, Joel Salatin, and Marion Nestle and you’ll see specific examples of how this has happened and continues to shape food policy in our nation. Do you want the same company that brought us DDT and Agent Orange deciding what kind of food should be available to you and your family? Well, too bad if you don’t, because they already are. Monsanto and other mega corporations have a tight grip on the FDA and USDA, many of our legislatures, and the agricultural departments of many of the land-grant universities.
It is terribly overwhelming for those of us who have educated ourselves about many of the issues with genetic modification of our food to know how to fight back. After all, most of us simply do not have the funding that these mega corporations do. Monsanto, for instance, has a team of ex-military commandos as who patrol the country to inspect farmers and then enforce the company’s will. Because they have well-placed officials guarding their interests with the government, such as the FDA’s Michael Taylor (former chief lobbyist for Monsanto) they are able to get away with atrocities against small farmers, and ultimately, all of us. Monsanto has modified their seeds so that they are dependent upon their herbicide Round-Up to grow, and so that the seeds terminate after one generation. You must go back to Monsanto year after year to get more seed, and cannot save seed. Even if you do, it won’t grow properly. But the seed is only neutered in that regard – it will, in fact, infect neighboring fields with its genetic material, so that those “friendly inspectors” I mentioned earlier can show up on a farm and accuse them of patent infringement. Many family farms have been hurt because of this tactic. And it is, make no mistake, a strategy on their part. After all, it insures their growth – like the 77% increase in profits reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. That funds a huge legal department that is aggressive in its pursuit of anyone who does not kneel before Monsanto, which fancies itself a sort of feudal lord.
So what do we do?
Well, what we can do best – act locally. Grow some of your own food. Buy heirloom seeds (http://rareseeds.com/, http://www.seedsavers.org/, http://sustainableseedco.com/) and plant them, even if you can only do container gardening on a balcony. And save the new seeds created when you grow those vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Share them. Protect them. They are under attack.
So, what happens when you do just that, and your local government decides to punish you for it? “That would never happen,” you say, “why would any municipality get upset over one of its citizens trying to do something positive in the community?”
Well, that’s what the city of Oak Park, Michigan is doing. There is a resident family who have chosen to plant a vegetable garden, instead of wasting their front lawn on grass. And now they are facing court action and possible jail time for daring to reject having grass lawn. You know, the stuff that let’s face it, is not sustainable, and its history isn’t exactly something to be celebrated. As the book Food Not Lawns points out:
“French aristocrats popularized the idea of the green, grassy lawns in the eighteenth century when they planted the agricultural fields around their estates to grass to send the message that they had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Meanwhile French peasants starved for lack of available farmland, and the resulting frustration might well have had something to do with the French Revolution in 1789. (p. 12)”
These days, in the U.S., the roles have reversed somewhat. We “peasants” are encouraged to grow lawns and let the “aristocrats” grow the food, because the leaders must have learned something from the French Revolution – it’s better for them to control our food under lock and key while keeping the peasants mollified with other distractions. Also, so long as the aristocrats are in charge of food, why not make changes to it that will create even more dependence, like controlling seed availability and distribution so that it is only given to those who bow before the masters who hold the seeds year after year?
But – there is hope. The situation in Oak Park is one that local folk can fight face-to-face. Maybe the officials in Oak Park don’t see the bigger picture, and providing them with information that helps them to see that they are really not pursuing what can be described as the best interests of their citizenry will change their minds. I mean, let’s face it, growing up in the age of the “Little Houses” that Malvina Reynolds wrote about, it is easy to simply not think for one’s self about why you wouldn’t want to have a grass lawn, but the world in which that idea of suburbia was created no longer exists. Food shortages are already occurring, and predictions are that they will only get worse. We are dealing with oil shortages, whether real or manufactured – but what’s the difference when your gasoline costs $4+ a gallon? That means it’s more expensive to go and get food from the store, as well as the cost of the food having gone up because of the petroleum products that went into growing, packaging, and transporting it. People have been especially hard-hit by unemployment in Michigan, and while there are “improved” numbers, most people aren’t dealing with a surplus of income these days, so their food budgets are tight. I know ours is!
So why in the world would local officials want to discourage local gardens? Surely they recognize the issues described in the previous paragraph, in addition to the weaknesses within the corporate food system – and if they do not, then it is their responsibility to educate themselves in order to best serve their citizens. How can they responsibly suggest that they have the authority to determine food policy in their community if they don’t possess the knowledge to make educated decisions about it?
I’m going to be emailing Kevin Rulkowski, the Director/City Planner of Oak Park, Michigan. Perhaps you have something to say about this matter too – you can email him here.
Let’s not allow our right – or that of anyone else- to grow our own food be eroded. Speak up. Fight back. Let’s not forget what Thomas Jefferson said: “All authority belongs to the people.” This truly is OUR LAND. Let’s not forget that, friends.
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