Voting Beyond Our Forks
This morning, Michelle Simon’s blog, Appetite for Profit, pointed me in the direction of an article by Christopher Cook over at Common Ground Magazine. He put together a nice little reminder that changing our food system takes more than “voting with your fork”…
That consumers carry some sway over the food they are sold is undeniable. Food corporations’ newfound passion for organics is nothing if not a scramble after consumers’ greenbacks. At least partly due to consumer (and activist groups’) pressure, Nabisco reduced transfats in their Oreo cookies, and Kentucky Fried Chicken will soon be deep-frying its millions of chicken parts in non-hydrogenated cooking oils. Progress, to be sure, but it’s just nibbling at the fringes. Meanwhile, the companies get free PR, a fat-gorging nation’s health concerns are quieted — and the underlying corporate-run food system that creates so many serious health and environmental problems goes unchallenged. Witness the Wal-Mart-led corporate takeover of organics, which is already leading to less-than-sustainable industrial organic farms and a steady diluting of federal standards.
Voting with our forks, while a useful first step, falls distressingly short of the needs and possibilities of this historical moment. From contaminated industrial food, to intensely polluting factory farms, to the millions of pounds of toxic pesticides still showered on our produce and ever-proliferating genetically manipulated crops, our food system is in desperate need of fundamental change. We can’t simply shop our way out of this mess. We need a compelling, coherent alternative that channels today’s excitement about good food far beyond the grocery checkout line, to cast votes for public policies and investments that restructure how food is made, marketed and consumed.
As someone who occasionally toots his own horn about the percentage of his household income squandered at farmers’ markets, this article is a nice reminder that changes still need to be made on the policy side of things– refocusing national agricultural priorites, tweaking the coming Farm Bill and such. I like some of his suggestions. They demand a little more than just changing buying habits. They demand engagement.
