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Question: Recovering Food Wisdom

Answer: The average American body presents traces of 29 pesticides. Herbicides like glyphosate are ubiquitous and up to 11% of organic crops in the United States are cross-contaminated. ‘Tolerable intakes’ and rates of exposure to these poisons are based on ‘outdated science’ (Provenza, 2018, p. 35). The circulation of toxins throughout our ecosystems occur apace through the grasshopper effect, where persistent organic pollutants (POPs) like DDT and carbofuran ‘hop’ through a series of evaporation and deposition events, accumulating in the landscape and wild food sources, and in our bodies (Hird & Zahara, 2017, p. 129). Globally, but disproportionately in the Global South, farmers and food workers are subjected to poisons, without personal protective equipment (PPE), causing chronic illness, cancers and birth defects. Half a century since Rachel Carson observed ‘in a very real and frightening sense, pollution of the ground-water is pollution of water everywhere’ (Carson, 1962, p. 53), the toxicity in our food system is widely acknowledged by scientists and policy-makers yet insufficient action is being taken to rein it in. Use of synthetic fertilizer rose by a factor of 10 between 1950 and 1998, while pesticide use climbed forty-fold from the mid 1940s to the 1970s (Clapp, 2016, p. 53).

The production of cheap food and its proponents has always required the ‘suppression of political dissent’ (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 151; see also Sinclair, 1906; Hightower, 1975). Observe how Carson was dismissed variously as a barren and hysterical female, a luddite and a communist, following the publication of Silent Spring (1962). Explaining how pesticides contaminate soil and water and their link to human and ecosystem health, Carson presented the futility of just focussing on the curing of diseases like cancer, rather than eliminating their causes. The greatest threat she posed to the growing agribusiness sector was her ability to share her understanding of deep ecology with a wide audience. She was a champion for sophisticated biological controls that could target pests in a way that chemical poisons could not, comparing the ‘chemical barrage…hurled against the fabric of life’ to a crude ‘cave man's club’ (cited in Souder, 2012, pp. 353–354).

The true cost of polluting factory farms and the vast, poisoned monocultures required to produce raw ingredients for the foods that are slowly killing us ‘never appears on the menu’ (Schlosser, 2002, p. 9). Meanwhile the pursuit of ‘wellness’ is a multimillion dollar industry populated by health-fixes like Goop, SoulCycle and Moon Juice – the very existence of which broadcast that ‘the contemporary world is toxic, and that to endure or thrive within it requires extraordinary measures of self-regulation and self-purification’ (Wallace-Wells, 2019, p. 188). As we continue to degrade our natural environments and ignore the impacts of climate change, the ‘purity arena’ is likely to expand, providing solace through conscious consumption and self-improvement. This is no substitute for political action. Not only it is time ‘to reacquaint ourselves with the defining characteristics of food that keeps us, and the planet, healthy’ (Blythman, 2020a); it is time to join the resistance against a corrupt food system. This means disengaging from a ‘monocultural mindset’ that displaces ecologically sound and truly sustainable food production and nutritional wisdoms based on generations of traditional learning (Shiva, 1993).

(Source: , 22 Sep 2021)

Source Link: https://doi-org.onlinedatabase.librarynet.com.my/10.1108/978-1-83982-722-820211011