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Food Politics

Posted at 9:37 PM on July 7, 2008 by Vera Schabicki (2 Comments)

One of my favorite magazines, The Nation, has done some thoughtful (and sad) articles about food and politics lately. In Manufacturing a Food Crisis, Walden Bello explains how Mexico, the "inventor" of corn, has become a massive importer of this staple of their diet. (Hmmmm, could the IMF and the World Bank be involved?) Reed Lindsay painfully and fully describes the high cost of a destroyed local food economy in Haiti on the Death Plan. Frances Moore Lappe describes the cost of agribusiness and lays out a plan for more local control of food in A Shortage of Democracy, Not Food in the July edition of The Progressive.

There are many informative articles in other venues as well. Recently, The Week and The Economist come to mind. My mom described a series of articles in the Sacramento Bee (Sacramento, a place with a very damaged real estate and gas economy) that shows local people starting food gardens on abandoned lots, and a resurgence in home gardening. Someone said that big box stores have experienced something like a forty percent increase in vegetable gardening revenues...... certainly it seems that the issue of local food is not marginal and elitist........... I wish I was doing a better job of promoting this Locavore Nation blog. Most of the people I mention it to are kind but not interested........ Have other people experienced this as well?

Best Wishes, Vera

Comments (2)

Vera, I've been thinking about your post all day. I believe the articles you reference are helping to raise awareness about the problems with our broken global food system. The good news is that with this awareness (and the pinch of increasing food costs), more folks are starting to grow their own food (veggie seed/seedling revenues up, as you note). Also, there are ways to build community - and raise awareness about many issues in these articles - using the internet. We have a Yahoo Group in SW Michigan that is growing by leaps and bounds and it's proven to be a great way to connect folks interested in local food. Thanks for your thought-provoking post.
Donna

Posted by Donna McClurkan | July 8, 2008 7:52 PM

Hello Vera,
It's Paulette in Seattle. I agree that these are issues that need to be talked about. How we do it is important. After all, it took took time for people to buy into this system! People's lifestyles and class identities are involved. Once you "made it", you didn't have to prepare for the winter because you could just get everything at the store. You were either weird or quaint to do things the "old" way.

It is exciting that urban neighborhoods without access to grocery stores are getting involved with gardens. This is real.

Paulette

Posted by P. Thompson | July 16, 2008 5:52 PM