knowing how a society gets its food...

[Guest guest]

Fascinating quote from the article below...

 

 

" Anthropologists have found through long experience that knowing the way a

society gets its food enables one to predict fairly accurately how the

people in that society will be found to raise their children, and

conceptualize and approach the sacred, how large their social units will be

and how stratified, and so on. "

 

 

 

 

________________

Growing Security, by Richard Heinberg

http://www.survivingpeakoil.com/article.php?id=growing_security

 

Once one has grasped the implications of the imminent global oil production

peak, it makes sense to try to prepare as much as possible for the event

and its trail of consequences. Given the importance of petroleum for modern

industrial agriculture, as well as for our truck-based food distribution

system, producing more of one's own food would appear to be one of the

first priorities.

 

In this essay I aim to describe very cursorily my wife's and my attempts

to do this, in hopes that our experience will help shorten the learning

curve for others. Along the way, I will also discuss some broader issues

related to food production-from the social and political to the

philosophical.

 

* * *

 

There are lots of good reasons for gardening or becoming more

self-sufficient as regards food-probably enough reasons to fill a small

book. I'll mention just one that appeals to my peculiar mentality.

Anthropologists have found through long experience that knowing the way a

society gets its food enables one to predict fairly accurately how the

people in that society will be found to raise their children, and

conceptualize and approach the sacred, how large their social units will be

and how stratified, and so on. Hunter-gatherers never have kings and

queens; people in irrigation-based pre-industrial agricultural societies

almost always do. Most people in modern industrial societies get their food

(which has been grown with fossil fuels) from supermarkets and restaurants,

and this subtly and unconsciously shapes their entire worldview, sowing in

their souls an imperious aloofness from the natural world around them. And

this, in turn, enables them to turn a blind eye to the utter devastation of

the biosphere on which their own continued existence depends. If we are to

survive, we need to create a new culture to supplant ecocidal

mass-consumerism (the " American Way of Life " ). But ultimately that

project cannot succeed on the basis of slogans and legislation; it must

involve a fundamental change in the way most people get their food.

 

Fine. Local, smaller-scale, less fuel- and chemical-intensive food

production is essential from the perspectives both of personal survivalism

and of societal transformation toward sustainability. So how does one go

about it?

 

It's simple: just grow your own food. Buy some seeds and some garden

tools, plant the former in ground loosened with the latter, apply water,

wait a few weeks, and eat.

 

But of course in reality it's not simple at all. Let's back up a step:

what about buying seeds at the store? That assumes that the seeds have

arrived at the store on fuel-fed trucks, having been produced and marketed

by some giant seed company hundreds of miles distant. This could be a

perilous assumption. Zoom in on any aspect of the home gardening project

(tools? water? land ownership? money with which to pay the rent or

mortgage?) and you'll find similar hidden dependencies. In fact,

circumventing the industrial food system is damned hard. Purists are in for

disappointment and frustration: all is compromise. Whatever disengagement

can be achieved must be won in stages.

 

* * *

[snip]