Into the Mouths of Babes
The intelligent desire self-control; children want candy.
Rumi
Naked lunch is the frozen moment when everyone sees what is at the end of every fork.
William Burroughs
It's an infinitely loopy enterprise to criticize critics, yet sometimes it needs to be done. New Yorker magazine sandwiches an attack on organic foods ("Paradise Lost" May 15) between ads for pearls and sports cars. To be sure, there are sprouts and greens inside the article, praise for the good intentions of the organic movement's idealistic founders and their followers crafting an alternative to the 20th Century industrialization of agriculture. The German invention of artificial fertilizer at the dawn of World War I was so remarkably similar to the high explosives being simultaneously pioneered that Timothy McVeigh bought two tons of ammonium nitrate over-the-counter at a farm supply store to blow up the Federal Building in 1995.
The magazine's nutritious agricultural education, though, is served between two soft white pieces of Wonder Bread. Writer Steve Shapin describes in painful detail what he calls the "late capitalism" hypocricies of Big Organic. Whole Foods Inc. swallowing whole small, cooperative health food stores, making billions for itself, shareholders and an anti-union boss. The outrageous prices of organic food ("3.98 for a five-ounce plastic box of Earthbound Farm organic baby argula salad") The move away from local to global, with organic's reliance on fossil-fueled distribution, wasteful as its conventional cousins.
The conclusion of Mr. Shapin's article is where the reader bites into gristle and glass shards. He quotes Earl Butz, Richard Nixon's Agriculture Secretary, as saying, "someone must decide which fifty million of our people will starve if the nation returns to organic methods." As if that wasn't enough of a hippie holocaust, Shapin adds this unsubstantiated claim--"if artificial fertilizers disappeared from the face of the earth, two billion would perish."
Then the desperation really begins. "Some highly valued features of the modern world order" would necessarily vanish along with industrial agriculture. Which would those be, pray tell Mr. Shapin? A McDonalds, Wendy's and Burger King clustered together on the same Pennsylvania Turnpike exit? Mass diabetes in low-income areas of New York City? Or perhaps the profits of those jewelry stores and sports car dealerships that depend on an unequal distribution of power that exists only when people are disconnected from the land?
It wasn't always this way. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were contestants in the early American battle between two Utopias--a republic of small, fiercely independent farmers (Jefferson), and urban centers where manufacturers could be easily taxed by a strong federal government (Hamilton). It looks to me like we've lost most of the small farms and many big factories, leaving us with the strong government--at least until Japan and China call in their loans. Mr. Shapin even uses big government's favorite reason for existence--human rights--to allege that it is only genetically modified Frankenfoods that keep African famine victims alive.
I am not an expert on Africa, but I've been living on Mindanao in the southern Philippines for over a year, and since Easter practiced tropical agriculture and community development at the Baptist Rural Life Training Center in Cotobato Province. Now I'm planting trees and farming on twenty hectares only seven degrees north of the Equator. The problems here are the same as the world's, and maybe the solutions too. Organic agriculture is still naturally practiced by many Filipinos, but artificial fertilizers and pesticides blanket huge plantations--bananas, pineapples, mangos, coconuts and rice--poisoning water and workers alike with harsh chemicals banned in the U.S.A.and putting farmers more into debt. Yet so much of the land lies fallow or underutilized while the feudal system thrives. Tenant farmers, for instance, often aren't allowed to plant fruit trees by landlords worried about losing title in government land redistribution program.
There is a booming population of mouths to feed in this Catholic and Christian counry and it's the poorest who have the most children. While rich westerners talk about "being able to afford kids," the poor can't afford not to have them. They are a free ticket in life's lottery--one of them might be the breadwinner to bring the whole family out of poverty. More free labor and hands also help with cleaning, cooking, childcare, fishing and faming.
It is one of those "valued features of the modern world order," the huge and growing division between rich and poor, that is the disease whose symptoms are overpopulation and malnutrition. The root causes are spirtual problems that 21st Century science alone can't cure.
"Paradise Lost" ends with its saddest quote, from an organic farmer who sold his business to a giant corporation. "This is just lunch for most people," Gene Kahn of Cascadia says. "Just lunch. We can call it sacred, we can talk about communion, but it's just lunch." It's true. Eating a Campbell's soup-for-one in front of the T.V. is a meal without a prayer of going down easily. |
