Truthdig - Reports - Food Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us.
“It is clear to anyone who looks carefully
at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting
our land,” Wendell Berry observed in “The Unsettling of America.” “Our
bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the
manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become
marginal; they are growing useless like our ‘marginal land’ because we
have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of
modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our
brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.”
Berry, who lives on a farm in Kentucky
where his family has farmed for generations, argues that local farming
is fundamental to sustaining communities. Industrial farming, he says,
has estranged us from the land. It has rendered us powerless to provide
for ourselves. It has left us complicit in the corporate destruction of
the ecosystem. Its moral cost, Berry argues, has been as devastating as
its physical cost.
“The people will eat what the corporations
decide for them to eat,” writes Berry. “They will be detached and
remote from the sources of their life, joined to them only by corporate
tolerance. They will have become consumers purely—consumptive
machines—which is to say, the slaves of producers. What … model farms
very powerfully suggest, then, is that the concept of total control may
be impossible to confine within the boundaries of the specialist
enterprise—that it is impossible to mechanize production without
mechanizing consumption, impossible to make machines of soil, plants,
and animals without making machines also of people.” READ MORE ...