A Pagan's Blog

The controversy over pink slime is helping educate Americans to the fact that corporations are as beneficial to agriculture as they are to politics. Tom Laskawy put it pithily: “What pink slime represents is an open admission by the food industry that it is hard-pressed to produce meat that won’t make you sick.”   But the disinfectants needed to make pink slime less than poisonous is only a tiny part of what is wrong with industrial agriculture. Although a highly charged tiny part. Ann Laurie over at Balloon Juice points out that the New York Times is now making it clear that there is something deeply wrong about industrial agriculture, of which pink slime is only a part.   (I like to her rather than the Times because it limits people’s visits whereas Balloon Juice does not.)

I believe the root issue is that Americans need to rethink their relation to food.  Pagans are particularly well suited to lead by both example and word.  To my mind Gary Snyder gets our relationship with food perfectly when he observes in The Practice of the Wild  “What a big potlatch we are all members of!  To acknowledge that each of us at the table will eventually be part of the meal is not just being ‘realistic.’  It is allowing the sacred to enter and accepting the sacramental aspect of our shaky temporal personal being.” (19)

Growing food is or should be an ethical endeavor at every stage.  Farmers should relate in a respectful and at least sustainable way with the land and the plants and animals they harvest from it. They should treat those who work for them in a respectful and decent way. They should be honest with their customers.  These principles are hardly rocket science and only one, treating the land and the plants and animals harvested from it, would be controversial to some decent people.  The other insights are no brainers.

To my mind when we eat it is appropriate to thank not God so much as all the beings we consume, vegetable, animal, and fungal.  But that is another discussion.  Back to growing and marketing food.

An individual farmer has the opportunity and usually the capacity to act in an ethical way. But individual farmers rarely are involved in growing our crops or raising our meat.  Corporations are.  And corporations are intrinsically incapable of acting ethically.  Only to the degree an individual overrides corporate logic can any ethics trump the desire for profit, and if by doing so anyone notices profits are lowered, that person will be out of a job.  If he or she is a CEO, they will be ousted in a take over bid.

Industrial agriculture is to ethical agriculture what a slave plantation is to a workers cooperative.

Here  is a really good article by Tina DuPuy on how the Republicans got themselves into such a mess with America’s more intelligent women.  Left undiscussed is how the extreme pathological masculinity of both their deity and their leaders made that slip so very easy.

For me, all our interactions with nature have an ethical component. None are purely with a insensate object to be used simply as a tool.  For example, I buy organic not because it tastes better – although it can – but because we have to take care of the earth at least to some extent if we want to farm organically, and taking care involves treating something as if you respect it.  And often organic farmers, if they are not corporations, do respect the earth.

That said, it is interesting that the colony collapse disorder that is spreading such havoc in agriculture, and threatening to spread worse still, very possibly would not be happening if farmers farmed organically.

The blog’s point is not that this is the only cause – the problem is complex – but that this is possibly a serious contributing factor, one that would be absent in a ethical farming culture.

UPDATES below

For years the culture warriors have waged a slowly rising campaign against the women and the feminine in all forms other than the pregnant submissive housewife or cold-hearted ideological warriors such as Coulter, Palin, and Bachmann.  One of the few authoritarian right wingers with solid academic credentials, Harvey Mansfield, wrote a book, Manliness that argued if women were properly subordinate “manly” men would behave themselves.  Mostly it proved the Harvard Political Science Department has very low standards. Mansfield’s argument was then elaborated in various ways by other right wing ‘intellectuals,’ but these efforts were wisely ignored by most people other than beltway pundits. (I read Manliness so you don’t have to.  I assure you there is nothing manly about it.)

At a more popular level, ignorant or cynical preachers and people who read Ayn Rand and never grew up attacked the feminine and all women who questioned the right of some to dominate others, the rich to dominate the poor, the strong to dominate the weak.  The ‘religious’ ones seized the title “pro-life” because of their love of zygotes.  Real human beings never were able to rank highly enough in their eyes for their lives to be valued, as could be seen by their support for the death penalty, torture, and war.  But their flattering label stuck, accepted by the dim or the corrupt.

They have had a long and poisonous run, but it may be finally coming to a blessed end, destroyed by its own excesses.  Continue Reading This Post »