All I Want: Another Good Reason to Store Food, Preserve Food, Grow Your Own
Sharon June 23rd, 2009
I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Now, I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don’t want your pleasure yacht.
All I want’s just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.
We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.
So, I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
Think me dumb if you wish, Mister,
Call me green, or blue, or red.
This one thing I sure know, Mister,
My hungry babies must be fed. – Jim Garland “All I Want”
Yesterday the UN announced that there are now more than 1 billion chronically hungry people in the world. Think about that – one out of every 6 people in the world isn’t just poor, but chronically, constantly hungry, with all that implies about health, welfare and future. One out of every six people goes hungry *ALL THE TIME.* The increase last year was the single biggest on record, and those numbers are expected to rise by another 11% over just 2009. 11% means another 110 million people will be starving by the end of this year.
Already, one out of every 5 people in the world will not live to be 40. In the poor world, one out of every five children born will die before they turn five years old. Imagine that – life in a world where death is that ubiquitous, where childhood is so very short. Those numbers are going up fast – hungry people die.
Today, we get from Agricultural Industry Forecast Don Coxe predicting widespread world starvation the next time we get a major crop failure. I agree with his prediction – world consumption is banging hard against supply and prices are still extremely high – one major crisis will send that number skyrocketing even further. Coxe says,
‘”When we have the first serious crop failure, which will happen, we will then have a full-blown food crisis, which we will not be able to get out of because we will still be struggling to catch up (as a result of diminished crop yields),” he told the publication.
He suggested that even could happen this year.”
He goes on to observe,
‘ “We’ve got complacency. So for those reasons I believe the next food crisis – when it comes – will be a bigger shock than $150 oil.”
Coxe, a leader of the Coxe Commodity Strategy Fund, said farms operations around the world also have cut back on expansion plans because of the worldwide economic crisis, calling into question whether production could meet demand.
Already, he suggested, demand for staples is moving beyond supply.
“During this decade, the annual increase in hectares of global cultivated farmland has been roughly 1.5 percent, at a time global demand for grains and soybeans has been growing at double that rate,” he told Commodities Online. “We will be dealing with mass starvation with the first serious crop failure. It could happen as early as this fall if for instance we have a killing freeze in Iowa in August.”
He said a reduction of just four weeks in the growing season would “dramatically reduce yields.”
Coxe said one only has to reach back 35 years to review an era when there were shortages because of poor crops. The surpluses that had existed suddenly were gone, he noted.
“In fact, the major inflation of the 1970s was driven more by food than by oil.”’
Whether it happens this year or next, or five years from now, we are on the cusp of a food crisis on a scale we’ve never seen before. And that crisis is not limited to the poor world – while they are starving, the reverbations of their hunger affect us. First of all, there’s the political destabilization that is a logical consequence of widespread hunger. Second, there is the fact that while most poor Americans still have food, real hunger here is on the rise as well. Finally, there is the fact that all of us will live in this world of people stunted by hunger and want, whose capacities will shape us endlessly.
We have shifted the poor off our agenda – last year commitments poured in from the rich world to the poor. Now most rich nations have declined to pay up – and after the rich worlds created dependencies on money and imported grain that can no longer be met in place, as the rich world warmed the world.
What does this have to do with food storage, with food preservation and gardening? The truth is this – our actions have helped impoverish others beyond the comprehension of most of us. We consumed the resources, built with coal and oil and plastic. We burned the fuel that warmed the world. We fed our grain to cars and livestock, and drove up food prices. We wanted avocadoes, shrimp, coffee and bananas, and thus poor farmers stopped growing staple foods and grew for us. We helped corporations producing things for us drive 2 billion of the world’s poorest people onto marginal land.
I do not ask you to feel guilty – in fact, guilty is a pale and useless emotion, “I shouldn’t be eating this cookie…oops, ate it, but I really shouldn’t have another…” I have no truck with guilt. But I do ask you to do what you can to ameliorate the suffering of other people. That means cutting back your own food budget if you have extra to spare – living more on basic foods, bought in bulk, without waste, as locally as you can. I do ask you to eschew livestock raised on human foods – supermarket meats and feedlot products if you possibly can. The extra can go to feed others, to soften this blow as much as each of us possibly can. I do ask you to minimize food waste – children really are starving in India, and while you can’t possibly mail your extra sandwich to them, you can buy only what food you need, not wasting any, preserving what might otherwise spoil, so that food prices aren’t driven up. I do ask you to grow what food you can, to join in the project of collective self-provisioning, so that more people can go back to growing food for their families, rather than export. I do ask you to urge your congresscritters (or other national government) to actually make good on the US’s commitments to the increasingly hungry world, and I ask you to do what you can to soften the blow of hunger in your own place.
It isn’t simple, or perfect, and it won’t fix everything. The tide of hunger may not be fully stoppable. But I ask you to try. In practice, there is enough food in the world to provide every single human being with 3500 calories a day, more than they could ever need. It may seem a small thing to eat less and better meat, to preserve your own for winter or the dry season, to buy in bulk – but the actions of thousands, tens of thousands or millions doing just these small things would be vast.
But more, it isn’t just your ability to give to charity or ask your nation to do so that matters – it is the capacity to create a more equitable world, in which our choices do less harm and more good. The reality is that any one of us, walking by the side of the road, and seeing the suffering that is occurring now would stop, and give all we could to ameliorate it. The hungry are in our towns and cities, and by the sides of our roads. They are in other nations, but places we have tied ourselves to in our world. When we know they are there, we must stop.
Sharon
- poverty
- Comments(27)
Thanks, Sharon.
If guilt is not the correct name for the emotional response that leads us to recognize wrong behaviour and take steps to right it, then what is the correct name?
I think the word ‘guilt’ gets bad press. So maybe we shouldn’t use it. But what else names the sensation that drives us to change our behaviour? Everyone who follows your advice here is doing so because they understand that life as usual has huge hidden costs, ones that we are enjoined not to think about (because to do so might lead us to see the injustices we are perpetuating and thus change our behaviour).
I don’t think that change of this nature is possible without the pang of guilt. I agree that circling around and around one’s feelings of guilt is pathological. But guilt provides the spark that spurs us to take stock, review our life, and commit to meaningful changes. Guilt’s kickstart passes through remorse, resolve, reform, and on to (we hope) a renewed sense of our own moral connection to the life of the planet and the lives of all our fellow creatures. But without that initial shock of wrong living, we go nowhere.
Maybe part of the problem — the reason why we all shy away from using the G word — is that in a sense we are guilty of crimes for which we want to plead ignorance of the law. Those of us who enjoy the privileges of the first world and all its comforts are just now starting to have a society-wide conversation about the consequences of our lifestyle. It’s shocking for many people to learn that the things they take for granted, the things they have always been told they deserve, come at the price of human life, possibly all life. We have no good word for the realization that we have been breaking laws whose existence we were blissfully unaware of. And one can argue that no one has the right to be unaware of these laws, but the fact is that guilt for breaking hidden laws strikes us as a low blow.
I’m rambling a bit, but I wish there were an easier way to let people know that once they pass through the first stages of guilt (recognition of one’s complicity in terrible injustices) and on to the resolution to change one’s behaviour, the negative feelings will give way to a sense of real pride (another word with a bad rap) and accomplishment. In other words, guilt sucks, but it doesn’t have to stay with us — so long as we’re ready to get up off our asses and start making real changes.
A good point, David. I have written about this elsewhere, but for my money, the word we want is not guilt, but shame, which is a much harsher and more productive emotion. It is very easy to feel guilty about things and go on doing them anyway. Shame, on the other hand, is very tough to live with.
I should do a post on this again at some point, because it has been a long time. Thanks for the idea!
Sharon
I agree that we need to change now. Its actually heartening to me how many are seeing the need. I just posted on my homeschooling yahoo group for interest in canning classes. The response has been overwhelming. I have had to add 2 extra classes to accomodate people and will continue to do further classes on how and what to can, drying, gardening and seed saving. Admittedly, homeschoolers tend to be ‘alternative’ types anyway, but the interest in these things is amazing!
I will also agree with David that guilt is a major motivator for many. Some can just push it down and move on, while others take a stance. I guess its all in where you’re coming from.
I agree with Sharon that guilt is generally not a very useful emotion. I prefer to focus instead on the responsibility that I have to my fellow human beings and to the entire creation.
No doubt there’s room in the discussion of guilt versus shame as a motivator for half a dozen PhD dissertations and numerous seminars, not to mention conferences. To start out with, I believe that there is a difference between feeling guilty and acknowledging guilt (or even feeling guilt). Also, I really question the use of feeling shame as a motivator to action. In my experience, many people who feel shame often get pushed into seriously debilitating inaction, secrecy, confusion. On the other hand, shame as a verb, as in to shame someone, is can be pretty powerful in the sense of forcing someone by confrontation to acknowledge responsibility for something wrong. Oh boy, now I’m on to right and wrong. Wasn’t the Scarlet Letter all about the shame. Best to stop. Because the issue (again in my opinion) isn’t right versus wrong but to be aware the consequences of our actions and to acknowledge responsibility for the choices we inevitably make.
I just wanted to point out (probably fairly inarticulately) some of the perhaps unapparent crosstalk in the above comments. Anyway, I think the injunction “not to feel guilty” is a productive one.
Susan, I don’t think I agree – I think shame as a verb is something different from one’s personal sense of shame, and equating the two muddies the waters in ways that don’t help. The Scarlet Letter was about shaming – but not about personal shame (well, ok, Dimmesdale rightly felt shame, but do you really think he’d have been better off without it
?) I think the beauty of a sense of shame at one’s own actions is that most people will do almost anything not to feel that – guilt we can live with, shame, we simply can’t. And a path that relieves shame, even if difficult, often looks preferrable.
Sharon
I admit that I find semantics of guilt versus shame interesting, especially when we’re speaking about motivation and change of the scale and necessity that we’re currently facing. But the key here is in the change, and in getting there. I think either could arguably be useful or impractical depending on the situation, but in either case we also need to equip people with the knowledge of what to do. Without it, it’s all to easy to stew in the guilt or hide the source of the shame, which is incredibly unproductive. By providing suggestions and approaches to go with these feelings, as Sharon suggests, there’s an opportunity not only to act, but to feel somewhat effective and to discover that action is a good way to begin moving out of these emotions and to keep moving forward in more productive ways.
Hence the symposium.
I find the personal sense of shame very problematic and troubling but this perhaps arises from what I see in my work. Personal shame is often not a reasoned or reasonable thing and often counterproductive because it is grounded in an individual’s own psychological coding and experiences. That’s also what makes it powerful. So for some, depending on their coding/experiences/ethics/religion/whatever, yes, it works but for others it’s just a dark ugly thing quite different from your ideal (in a loosely platonic sense) shame.
But we may just be disagreeing about word choice. I have no objection to “a path that relieves shame” but I don’t think shame is necessarily a motivating emotion.
Also, I miswrote above, meant to throw the SL reference in with respect to what I wrote about shaming-rightvs.wrong, and point out a weakness in my analysis.
And really my real comment was that “don’t feel guilty” is an important injuction (putting aside the semantics of shame and guilt) because it allows you to examine the underpinnings and find reasons and not get hung up on the emotions and automatic responses.
One of the reasons that I don’t think guilt is productive is a tendency I’ve noticed in myself and also in the general culture to substitute emotion for action. For instance, we watch An Inconvenient Truth and feel tremendous distress, perhaps guilt, about how our lifestyle is affecting our planet. We walk out of the movie theater feeling greatly moved by what we saw and we identify strongly with the need to save the planet. But I think it’s easy for us to think that having gone through those emotions equates taking action. Therefore, the urgent need to act in a way that would reduce our carbon footprint doesn’t happen, because we’ve already done it emotionally. It wasn’t until I understood my own substitution of emotions for real action that I was able to actually become (or at least begin the process of becoming) a responsible citizen environmentally.
David: “If guilt is not the correct name for the emotional response that leads us to recognize wrong behaviour and take steps to right it, then what is the correct name?”
FURY
and no, I’m not kidding.
Lorna said “tendency…to substitute emotion for action.” Excellent point! FEELING bad isn’t productive unless sprus you to DO something. And maybe most people won’t ever do something without first feeling something, but if we stop at feeling, nothing will change.
Go! Do!
The other thing to keep in mind about the future of food is that the Wall Street gang is already planning to profit from food shortages- just as much as they can.
It’s quite easy to find “financial gurus” proclaiming the potential for profits:
http://marcfaberchannel.blogspot.com/2009/05/food-is-new-oil-agricultural.html
Yup, they’re intending to buy up, and hold food, while people starve; so the price will go up. They did it last year.
When the banks finally truly collapse; there will come a moment when it may be possible to truly re-write the rules on Wall Street, the “financial sector” (the parasitic economy); and corporate practices and profits.
Maybe. If that time comes. we need to be prepared to make sure the food system is not left out of the attempt to make how the world works a bit more fair.
Lorna, I agree with you entirely. And Greenpa, yes, that’s right too.
I’ve never understood how little anger there is in the world, actually.
Sharon
I think the difference between guilt and shame is that guilt is an emotion we feel when we recognize that we’ve done something “wrong”, or perhaps contributed in some way to the harm of another. Shame is the feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with our own self, that we are seriously flawed in our very nature. Both feelings have degrees of intensity, but either can lead to change.
You can feel guilt about something for a very long time but if the guilt increases enough, the psychological cost of it may begin to outweigh the rewards received from the action causing the guilt (convenience, cost savings, status, etc.). So I think that guilt can be a useful emotion, if it crosses that threshold.
Well, I think the discussion of semantics interesting, but not really necessary. The important thing is that we feel responsibility for our actions and then ACT. OF course it’s preaching to the choir on this site, I think, because the people who interact here do care and are trying, and certainly feel, if not guilt and/or shame, then certainly remorse for our previous ignorance and lack of compassion for the rest of humanity. And some of us are beginning to realize that this terrible fate that we have inflicted so carelessly upon millions of others is now about to fall upon us, and we’re scared. I have grandchildren that are young, and I grieve for the world that we are leaving them. And if I hadn’t read Depletion and Abundance last year, I would still be living in blissful ignorance about a lot of these issues.
If we could figure out what-all lies behind the behaviour that Lorna identifies (and that all of us are familiar with at first-hand), and then figure out how to crack it, we could be making some real progress. Instead, we bang our heads against our own inertia and — worse, much worse — against the inertia of the society at large.
I hate feeling that “other people are hell”, and sometimes it takes a real effort of will to remember that we’re all complicit, none of us is a saint (except maybe Bono), and we’re all floundering our way out of the moral quagmire that keeps the machinery running.
I’m just glad I no longer have to settle for feeling crummy about things and then going back to normal — not in every area of my life, anyway. For me, hell is the condition of being (or seeming to be) stuck in a life that I cannot meaningfully change. And a lot of people I see seem to be right there in that place.
Another reason not to have to leave home too often in the near future:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/swine-flu-could-infect-up-to-half-the-population-1711552.html
Greenpa, some investment websites/advisors/gurus have been watching food as an investment commodity for several years now. I’ve been seeing it referred to as a “solid future” investment for at least 3-4 years now. It sounded practical and innocent to me at first as people will always need to eat but buying up food to seel to the highest bidder certainly leaves out the poorest and the hungriest. We shouldn’t be using food stuffs for anythingn but going to feed people.
peace to all,
Shamba
Sharon,
Thanks for addressing the hunger issue. Unfortunately, in much of the US the people who need extra food are frequently living in apartments or simply homeless while the people affluent enough to gripe about food prices while remaining fat own all the good truck farm land in the form of “ranchettes.” Usually these plots are simply mowed with a riding tractor but there is the occasional spoiled pleasure pony sitting bored on a pasture. (horse makes a fine broth for Pho if you boil it with lemon grass and star anise)
First requirement for growing food is land access. Also water in the west and southwest.
A good way for urban types to stretch food supplies and dollars is community kitchens. A fat percentage of food that arrives in homes is thrown out as waste. This percentage is much smaller in a community kitchen where portions can be controlled, food is prepared in a planned fashion, leftovers can be immediately put out the next day and staples can be purchased in bulk. The cohousing project my mother lives in prepares meals for less than the price of a large coffee at Starbucks. That could go down if they weren’t quite so fanatical about organic everything.
Two great examples of this are Sikh temple kitchens, or langar, that feed all who come and the community food programs of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
Individualism is the philosophy of the graveyard. No man, woman or child eats by the profits of their labor alone. Each one of us is indebted to the surplus of the past given to us. Share your meals.
Hi to all…
I was just thinking about how gluttonous and wasteful americans are… persons at work were talking yesterday about a cable show called “Man vs. Food” neadless to say I was disgusted…
Great post Sharon.
I think another way of looking at this is the importance of individuals and communities developing their moral sensibilities (it sounds so old-fashioned, but I think there’s a lot to be said for it). I come from a secular ethics perspective and I find that when I am doing the wrong thing and am not doing as much as I could be to do better, the feeling of lack of integrity is a killer. So it’s not quite shame or guilt, but more a sense of living ethically being integral to a feeling of self-acceptance and wholeness.
And I agree with Greenpa, fury is one of the best agents for change I know of.
Sharon,
I don’t think you’ll manage to ‘shame’ enough people to make any sort of tangible difference. What I think may happen is that, if you and others continue harping about this, once the First World is forced to abandon the current food (and consumption in general) paradigm for economic reasons, your vision (or something like it) may fill the void, and make the transition less painful than it would be otherwise. But I simply don’t see the transition being forced primarily by moral considerations.
I think a lot of the people reading here already understand about hunger— either they’ve been hungry, or they know someone who has been hungry—and they are working on it, right now. For people with less intimate knowledge of the condition, the less motivating emotion of guilt may be all that is felt when learning of the hunger problem.
For many of us, though, we have felt the more motivating emotion of anger. St. Augustine (and I am paraphrasing Very Loosely here) said that anger-at-the-way-things-are and courage-to-do-something-about-it were the two beautiful daughters of hope.
I know that the word Hope has been devalued, coming to mean something more along the lines of wishful thinking, and it really is wishful thinking to say, “well, I just hope things don’t get that bad” and then to go back to watching television.
But other people either are already doing what you’ve suggested in terms of personal management of the food supply or are taking early steps in that direction. These people are the truly hopeful, I think, and I am not entirely sure that either guilt or shame is what provided the motivation to take the actions that they have.
Just a thought.
-Amy, NW of Atlanta
I think many of us feel more anger than most of us realize; it’s just that it gets repressed for various reasons. It took me a few years of Zen meditation before I even realized how much anger I felt, that I carried it as a basic emotional tone.
Coming from a Zen perspective, I’m not sure either guilt or shame motivate people to change behavior. Both are ego-driven. The focus is on how terrible I am or how horrible what I’m doing is. Then all the ego defenses start coming up … well, it’s not my fault, “they” made me do it. And you get bogged down in an internal fight among different ego-states that ends up draining any energy you might have had toward making a change for the better. Shaming each other runs the risk of doing it in a mean way that precludes the shamed one from responding positively. Usually what happens is the shamed one broods and then lashes back later on.
Somehow the ego-force needs to be lessened, so we can see and feel all difficulties and problems in the world and how we are or may be a part in creating them. If we can manage to do that without triggering the ego and its push for self-defense, then we can see how to change and actually act to change. What helped me the most was to really get that all the problems have been thousands of years in the making, what Buddhist practitioners call karma, meaning actions and their results. Way down deep I’d had some weird ego-driven fear that somehow I’d failed to do something I was supposed to do, therefore the world is all screwed up and it’s my fault. Whenever I had that thought I became depressed and unable to act. Once I could get my ego out of the way and realize I’m one of 6+ billion now plus all those dead before me, and that the world as it is is the result of actions and choices over many thousands of years, then I could see, without flinching, what my responsibility is and start acting on that. I’m still working to do better and I do realize that because I live in the US, I bear a bigger responsibility for the problems than most of the 6+ billion.
I am not a horrible person, I am in fact very open minded and try to be as aware as I can of the world’s problems, so please do not judge what I am about to say… But there is a growing delima of our planet that is called overpopulation. We no longer live on a planet that can support people having 3,4,5,6 or more children apiece. In fact, the pace at which the global population is doubling is very scary. Yes, starvation is a very troubling problem of our time but not addressing the other aspect of it won’t help either. It is also sad that many won’t see their 40th birthday as you said. But I don’t understand how/when people stopped understanding that there is a natural process of living creatures being born and dying, its sad and tragic, but it is necessary. We are already feeling the effects of senior citizens medically prolonged life i.e. social security (I KNOW that sounds SO heartless, trust me, I don’t want to die young either). In the same light, there are some that shouldn’t even have lived a quarter as long due to some genetic misshap or whatever else that usually happens in the evolutionary process. All I’m saying is there are all sorts of big problems that humanity and its new technology seem to be trying to figure out. Ok, I’m done, and I sincerely apologize if I deeply offended anyone.
I enjoy reading your site’s post and all and i like the threme structure and the visuals but maybe it requires a renovation, its been awhile, who else agrees with me?