|
“Food is not a commodity. It’s the very basis of life.” Technically speaking, Vandana Shiva is wrong. Millions of tons of undifferentiated Number 2 yellow corn shipped across oceans show that edible crops are, indeed, a commodity.
In the world we have to learn how to live in, however, she is right.
Dr. Shiva, In her late 2007 interview with Steve Curwood of the radio show “Living on Earth,” explains something of how farmers and consumers around the world need to build a million different bridges to begin the daunting transition from commodity to the common good.
“Food production is not an industrial activity. It is nurturing the land,” she told Curwood, the eco-show’s founder and long-time host and executive producer. “It is conserving resources. It is giving livelihoods. It is shaping a culture.”
There is no future in ramping up food production that pulls more from the earth than it gives back. We accepted that system because of its short-term economic efficiency that—in the longer term now being visited upon us—has piled up ecological and social debts while not nourishing enough people, granting enough livelihoods and too often destroying cultures that really did nurture the land.
Inner-city teacher and would-be hero-garden revolutionary Katie Olender writes in this update about one of these million bridges, this one in a tough part of a city in Michigan, a state going through its own tough transition. Her class of globally diverse immigrant children responded to her novice efforts at community gardening with a unifying interest and energy that is nothing about commodity, and everything about caring. And that’s just in the planting of sunflowers, not even a food crop that conjured images of family meals or favorite recipes. Read more >>
Agri…culture, the cultivation of fields for human benefit, requires the kind of connections that Shiva proclaims on the world stage and Olender is bravely nurturing in her outdoor education space.
We at Rodale Institute are still nurturing our farm as well, despite our choice to begin the carefully limited use of genetically modified crop varieties. These are growing only within the conventional plots of our long-term organic v. non-organic (modern) agriculture approaches. If this move raises questions for you, and it probably should, read what our research team has to say about it >>
Greg Bowman and the
Rodale Institute editorial team
PS: Olender’s budding horticulturists had the benefit of experiencing Sunflower House before they were turned loose with seeds and tilled soil. The book (written by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Kathryn Hewitt) is beloved by hands-on teachers, but be very careful: If you read it to children, you must give them a place to plant their own version of a sunflower circle that becomes, as it grows, whatever they imagine it to be, and then dies to be born again in the seeds that remain after its death.
|
