By Heather Retberg
Heather Retberg is a Maine farmer, and one of the organizers of the Food Sovereignty movement that launched in Maine in 2009 and 2010, and has evolved into a national movement. Eight towns in Maine and an unknown number as far west as California have adopted Food Sovereignty ordinances that sanction private food transactions between farmers and citizens, independent of state and federal regulations. The state of Maine has challenged one of the ordinances in state court, in an effort to un-do all of them. In this guest post, she examines a key overlooked challenge for food rights advocates.
In this era of expanding infringements on our food rights, our hands in the soil are necessary, but not sufficient. We all need to become students of history and pay close attention to language. We need to study Depression era policies and populist movements, American-Revolution-era politics and the U.S. Constitution.
We need to keep our eyes on the regulatory horizon. Study the patterns that emerge and look for the parallel periods in our history and the places and times that have been foundational to our current system.
The language of each time, and of our time, is of primary importance. It defines what we do. The governing agencies will attempt to define us differently than we define ourselves. Based on the language they are successful in instituting, they will determine what we can and cannot do.
Which words will we use to define ourselves? Grassroots? Populist? Libertarian? Constitutionalist? Progressive? Right or left? This is about FOOD and communities. Any and all these words are appropriate. Were going to need all of us to feed all of us.
Or will it be other words: hazardous white substance, potentially hazardous substance, handler, processor, facility, distributor, consumer, end product. Or the words of another era, like bootlegging, dark parking lots, underground, speak-easys, prohibition. Illegal sounding words, almost subversive. Very impersonal, detached verbiage, whatever those potentially hazardous and hazardous white substances may be.
We must need handlers and distributors to get the end product. And what end product comes from such hazardous or potentially hazardous white substances? Dont we use handlers for circus bears and training tigers? Handlers, or pimps, for prostitutes? Its all beginning to sound criminal.
Well, heres another set of words, no context, just words: sustainability, viability, survival, family-scale cottage production, milk, picking, growing, cultivating, cooking, patron, food. What am I talking about now?
A whole different set of images comes to mind. You all know this set of words describes farming, relationships, soil health, growing, cooking and selling food.
Certainly this exercise is transparent to some degree, but the words are clear. Im defining what we do, how we live, how we interact.
For the last three years, Ive been engaged in the urgent and pressing work of understanding who else is defining me, other farmers, and our community, and what impact those definitions bear on my life at Quills End Farm with my family. These definitions also impact the whole renewed system of feeding each other, and the impact on the many farmers and their patrons across our land.
Ive heard with increasing frequency farmers talking about staying quiet, or just staying under the radar, or Ill do it this way until I get caught. I used to smile at this, even laugh. I dont any more. Now it makes me very sad. Because, of course, these ways of speaking about our work do make it sound like drug dealing. Know any other honest profession that is just trying to keep quiet and stay invisible?
Such language is entirely inappropriate to how we should be defining ourselves. Because if we define ourselves in terms of acting inappropriately, then we need to accept the implications of that. If what were doing must remain hidden, off the radar, well, then, we must be doing something wrong.
Think of how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S Department of Agriculture, and most states departments of agriculture define who we are and what we do. We are food processors, handlers and distributors and we are dealing with hazardous and potentially hazardous substances.
The hazardous white substance is what most of us call milk; potentially hazardous substances include meats, lard, cheese.
At worst, this language transforms us into drug dealers and invokes predictable enforcement measures. At best, it means that us farmers, cooks and food-makers have become highly dangerous and the raw materials we produce and work with can only be handled by expert specialists. If this is true, specialization comes at a cost and only a few will be deemed worthy.
Do these agencies have the right to define us? Or do we? Are we then willing to stand up for our true identity?
Wouldn’t that throw a monkey wrench into the works though! Boy would those doods be angry if they had no clue what we were talking about. Hard to take to court, too.
Let the phake phood industry have their techno-words. If they can make up their own language, why can’t we?
Understanding the historical language of the past relative to our current situation is important. Unfortunately words are often used as a means to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends such as to sell an idea, product or win an election.
In deciding on words to define ourselves perhaps we should consider which words best define our society and how or where we fit within that definition.
Ken
What we desperately need going forward is more unity. We have seen how powerful that unity can be when farmers stand up together and communities stand behind us, as we have been blessed to witness more than a dozen times over now as more towns and counties work on passage of the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance. We have also felt, unfortunately, how divisive and damaging fear can be when words are used to divide farmers in our own community.
This is why the LFCSGO was such a wonderful tool to strengthen our local communities. As Ken writes above on the need for society to create definition, whole towns agreed on language to define ourselves and agreed to stand behind it, and to stand up for how we as communities defined ourselves. We posed some essential questions: Who decides what happens in our communities right now? What kind of relationships do we want to have with each other? What rights do we want to encode into law? Our answers to those questions is reflected in the language we used in the ordinances. This was unanimously voted into law at the local level at our town meeting almost two years ago. We spend a good deal of time in healthy debate at town meeting on the subjects of library funding (always passes by a close and contested margin), funding for parking lots and dump fees, preschool education and other important matters to our lives. But, we never all agree on the best way to promote the health, safety and welfare of our town. Except…when it came to local farms and traditional foodways, our bake sales and our food exchanges. That was language we, as a town agreed on and unanimously voted into law. This was a great day for us in Penobscot. The room erupted in applause after the vote.
The next day, our family trudged up our driveway and left “off the radar” behind when, together, we hung the word “milk” on our sign. The town had defined the language under which we could operate.
I’ll add that we should be clear that industrial ag and community food are two completely different economic sectors, and that all attacks on the Food Control Act and everything similar to it should begin with the fact that the “food safety” problems the regime purports to engage are problems of industrial ag, while its measures are practically inappropriate to be applied to the community food sector, and are really meant to do nothing but repress this challenger.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel/first-the-bad-news.html
I was really kind of shocked to read this coming from him.
The way I understand it, his claim that “altering the plant’s DNA in this case to make the crop resistant to pests” is fundamentaly incorrect. GMO plants are not resistant to pests – they are rather resistant to the piles of poisonous pesticides that kill everything else but the GMO plants.
He then uses similar faulty logic and lack of science knowledge to claim that “GM foods require less water, need fewer pesticides and grow where other crops will not survive.” This is not only total bunk, but is actually the opposite of the truth, as many farmers in other continents have found the hard way.
And he finishes by informing us that “in most ways, most of the time, the world slowly but surely gets better. To most of us, that’s good news.”
I wonder what planet he’s living on?
Some GE plants are designed to resist pests, in the form of insects. In fact, I think that’s how the whole GE thing got started and it ballooned out of control from there. Farmers should never have allowed this “testing” to be done in their fields; same with hybridized crops. They never should have agreed to move away from heritage seeds and crops. Too late smart.
I also wondered about his statement “the world slowly but surely gets better”. I’d sure like to live wherever he lives.
I don’t watch TV either, or read system hacks. But everything I’ve heard quoted from Stossel in recent years has been the same pro-corporate drivel. If he’s still claiming to be pro-gun rights, that’s just because he hasn’t yet received a copy of the new directive from HQ – the system now wants to start rolling back those rights.
Where do you get your information about politics and the world around us? I try to read only alternative type news things, and I used to follow aljazeera because they were a lot more truthful and accurate in their reporting than any american outlet, but now they’re coming to america, so I guess depending on them is not gonna happen for too much longer. Do you have some favorite sites you could/would share?
Obozo is surely going to use his wizard of oz/magic wand powers to take away guns, no question about it. We all know he’s going to try it, but I’ll bet it’s quite unsuccessful. I was speaking with my brother a couple of days ago and he said (in words I can use in public) “Obama can sign any piece of paper he likes, but he’ll have to come to my door, personally, to get my gun(s). And I’ll let him have it, too.” There’s a pun in there, of course. That’s sorta how my DH and I feel about our gun rights.
This certainly shows why people should NOT depend on lamestream mainstream news. It’s all as fraudulent as the doods reporting it. So long John Stossel. This just goes to show that if you open your mouth wide enough a boot will fit in there.
http://www.dontwastearizona.org/stossel.html
In the past, I’ve found that the econoblogs like Naked Capitalism tend to have the best take on things, since there most of all one finds a view of Wall Street and corporatism which is at least skeptical, and often truly in opposition. By contrast, even the better political blogs tend to waver and regress to system reformism.
Offhand I’m not sure which sites would be best for following the news (getting the most accurate information without a dose of corporatist Big Lies). Counterpunch is often good. Op-ed News is also pretty good. Democracy Now is of varied quality. Those are a few examples.
So far as I can see there’s no really committed anti-corporate, pro-Community Food sites. Except for this one, Food Freedom, and a handful of others, every site I see supports the Food Control Act, which is today’s #1 litmus test. And I’m sure that in North America there doesn’t yet exist any truly anti-GMO group (i.e., fighting for total abolition).
I follow Food Freedom and Food Freedom News. I am a member at the AJCN and Retraction Watch, as well. Those are general sites, not national news. I also read Dr. Ralph Moss, Dr. Mark Sircus and the blogs from Chris Masterjohn and Dr. Kaayla Daniels, although they don’t post much. I sort of jump all over the place online, because I don’t have much time to be on the computer during the weekdays, as a rule. The other sites I visit are saved into my favorites or else rss feeds, but I’m using my DH’s computer right now (I HATE it) so I don’t have access to any of those titles. I’ll be glad to get my regular computer back if it can be saved. My email was hacked last week, so it’s an iffy situation.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/19/the-fdas-pathetic-food-safety-proposal