Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year. ~ Indian peasant prayer

An ant carrying a wild lettuce seed, a source of food for them that Monsanto seeks to destroy through use of its herbicides.

While Mahatma Gandhi is best remembered for his campaign to end British colonialism a half-century ago, the greater part of his life’s work was devoted to renewing India’s vitality and regenerating its culture from the ground up. He was a tireless champion of what he called swadeshi, or local self-sufficiency.

One of the most prominent of Gandhi’s intellectual heirs is Vandana Shiva, a physicist and philosopher of science by training who has developed a considerable reputation as a champion of sustainability, self-determination, women’s rights, and environmental justice. She has written more than a dozen books, including Monocultures of the Mind, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, and Biopiracy. She is also well-known in India for her grassroots efforts to preserve forests, organize women’s networks, and protect local biodiversity.

Vandana Shiva is the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the 1998 Alfonso Comin award and the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. David Brower, the late environmentalist, once said that Shiva would be his choice for world president, if there were such a thing.

Interview with Vandana Shiva

The Gift of Food

In the words of the sacred texts of India, “The giver of food is the giver of life,” and indeed of everything else, says Vandana Shiva.

One of my favourite images in India is the kolam, a design which a woman makes in front of her house. In the days of Pongal, which is the rice harvest festival in South India, I have seen women get up before dawn to make the most beautiful art work outside their houses, and it is always made with rice. The real reason is to feed the ants, but it is also a beautiful art form that has gone on from mother to daughter, and at festival time everyone tries to make the best kolam as their offering. Thus, feeding the ants and works of art are integrated.

The indica rice variety’s homeland is a tribal area called Chattisgarh in India. It must be about fifteen years ago that I first went there. The people there weave beautiful designs of paddy, which they then hang outside their houses. I thought that this must be related to a particular festival, and I asked, “What festival is it for?” They said, “No, no, this is for the season when the birds cannot get rice grain in the fields.” They were putting rice out for other species, in very beautiful offerings of art work.

Each time I see a supermarket, I see how every community and ecosystem’s capacity to meet its food needs is being undermined, so that a few people in the world can experience food ’surpluses’.

But these are pseudo-surpluses leading to 820 million malnourished people, while many others eat too much and get ill or obese.

We are now working on technologies, based on genetic engineering, which accelerate this violence towards other beings. On my recent trip to Punjab, it suddenly hit me that they no longer have pollinators. Those technologically obsessed people are manipulating crops to put genes from the Bt toxin (the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) into plants, so that the plant releases toxins at every moment and in every cell: in its leaves, its roots, its pollen. These toxins are being eaten by ladybirds and butterflies which then die.

We do not see the web of life that we are rupturing. We can only see the interconnections if we are sensitive to them. And when we are aware of them we immediately recognise what we owe to other beings: to the pollinators, to the farmers who have produced the food, and to the people who have nourished us when we could not nourish ourselves.

Grain giant Cargill controls seventy per cent of the food traded in the world; and they fix the prices. They sell the inputs, they tell the farmer what to grow, they buy cheaply from the farmer, then they sell it at high cost to consumers. In the process they poison every bit of the food chain. Instead of giving, they are thinking of how they can take out that last bit, from ecosystems, other species, the poor, the Third World.

“Our seeds are smart; we have found new technologies that prevent the bees from usurping the pollen.”

Instead, Cargill says that the bees usurp the pollen - because Cargill have defined every piece of pollen as their property. And in a similar way, Monsanto said: “Through the use of Roundup we are preventing weeds from stealing the sunshine.” The entire planet is energised by the life-giving force of the sun, and now Monsanto has basically said that it is Monsanto and the farmers in contract with Monsanto that, alone on the planet, have the right to sunshine - the rest of it is theft.

So what we are getting is a world which is absolutely the opposite to the ‘giving of food’. Instead, it is the taking of food from the food chain and the web of life. Instead of gift we have profit and greed as the highest organising principle.

Resurgence

Most people don’t realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the North American food supply.

The Future of Food, a chilling documentary created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety.

At first, Garcia thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the “terminator” gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

“It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue.” That is, corporate control of the food system and the patenting of life.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the “green revolution” of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide. The chemical companies succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapped patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

Garcia tells the David-versus-Goliath story of Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser. He’s one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company’s Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action — for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation. Labeling might just drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

“Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn’t challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn’t stopped, at some point it will be too late.”

There are seven parts to this film. Watch them all.

The Future of Food

Check out Greenpeace’s handy guide to help you avoid GM ingredients.

The pet food recall brought home to some of us the changes in animal nutrition that have taken place since the mid-20^th century. Rover’s and Fluffy’s table scraps were replaced by scientifically-formulated slop and kibble that aimed to provide optimum, all-life-stages nutrition.

We know that this is a highly profitable way of reusing the waste from the human food industry. Ground up and rendered bits that are not fit for human consumption, including 4-D and euthanized animals, can be reformulated into big bucks chow. Kind of like enriching potato chips with vitamins and preservatives, only a lot worse.

Read Ann Martin’s “Food Pets Die For” to find out why Rover and Fluffy are running up such big vet bills.

Food Pets Die For

Anyway, to the topic at hand, it is no surprise that the agro-food chain presents us humans with more choices to become fat and sick too. Or not.

Here’s a vintage photo from Life Magazine of what the American poster family ate in the 1950’s.

“In this remarkable picture of plenty, Steve Czekalinski, his wife Stephanie and his sons, Stephen and Henry, are surrounded by the food they will have eaten this year - 2 ½ tons of it. The photograph, made for the Du Pont company’s magazine Better Living, is based on statistics on the American diet supplied by the Department of Agriculture.”

The story is here:

Dinner in the 1950s

When Harold Evans was writing his history of the hundred years from 1889 to 1989, The American Century, he sifted through something like thirty thousand photographs, paintings, and cartoons, and chose the Czekalinski family picture.

“I am drawn to Alex Henderson’s carefully posed 1951 descriptive photograph of the Du Pont worker Steve Czekalinski with his wife and two boys. They are framed amid a cornucopia of good food, the 669 bottles of milk, 578 pounds of meat, 131 dozen fresh eggs, 440 pounds of fresh fruit, the coffee, cereal, flour, and so on that the typical American family enjoyed in the booming mid-fifties. It’s a materialistic and commercial image, and some will object to that, but the pursuit of plenty has been an American preoccupation—and the business of America is business, is it not? I admit I hesitated long before nominating the Czekalinski, but it also has something of the American character—it is an honest, unpretentious boast—and it suggests the central story of America in the twentieth century. Here is a man of Polish descent standing proudly and happily with his family, enjoying a prosperity never before known in the history of the world. A photograph that hints at a fulfillment of the American dream is not a bad way of marking the end of the millennium.”

Image of the Century

More recently, CNN ran a pictorial comparison of what people around the world eat in a week and what they spend on their groceries.

Family Dinners Around the World

An interesting study of choices, particularly for those affluent enough to have so many.