OPENING TO CHAPTER EIGHT

the myth of choice & the taste of democracy

"A power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power over his will."
-ALEXANDER HAMILTON, 1787

At age twenty-six, I had a hunch about food.

I figured that maybe food-essential to life and at the center of human culture-could be the thread I might pull to unravel the complexities of the economic and political order. Since feeding oneself and one's offspring is the first instinct of all living creatures, how could it be that we, the brainiest species, hadn't yet figured out a way for everyone to have enough to eat?

What question could be more basic?

Hamilton had it just right, I intuited. Without power over our food, any notion of freedom or democracy is empty.

That's where I began, and this hunch has taken me far and wide, from my first job in the ghettoes of Philadelphia in 1968 to teaching at a sustainable-farming center in India's Himalayan foothills in 2003-from witnessing the gut-wrenching devastation of hunger to glimpsing real solutions.

The precursor to this book, The Quickening of America in 1994, had no chapter on food: Then I couldn't see enough signs of democracy coming to life in our food economy to warrant it. What a difference today!

Americans are reknitting ties to the earth and rediscovering the love of healthy food. They are re-creating local food economies and reducing energy use by cutting transport distances. Farmers are rethinking blind adherence to the chemical path and embracing ecological practices. With their allies, they are igniting public concern about an agribusiness subsidy system gone terribly awry and bonding together to sell and process their own crops.

At the same time, urban communities are creating their own gardens and linking consumers and farmers. Farm-to-school programs are flourishing, with schools adding their own gardens for hands-on learning. Confronting the obesity epidemic, they're making healthy food an attractive and practical option and restoring mealtime to its place at the center of satisfying social life.

All this adds up to a radical redirection of our food system, with Living Democracy emerging as much more than a metaphor.

It also adds up to common sense.

Yet many Americans would dismiss it all-organic apples and freshly picked kale as common as Cheetos and Coke? Urban neighborhoods increasingly becoming self-provisioning communities?

Nice, yes, but plainly naïve.

After all, aren't Americans choosing the opposite? Aren't we choosing an efficient "modern," delocalized, supersized food system with megafarms, feedlots, and food processors, selling through mega-chain stores filled with processed "food products" that have traveled megadistances?

Since choice is key to almost any definition of democracy and freedom, let's look at this premise with fresh eyes. For the big picture, I'll suggest we step back-well, up. Way up. Imagine we are landing from Mars. (OK, it's a trite device, but it works!) We're surveying this strange little planet called Earth.

We look with wonder at how all the animals live, taking in this amazing dance that sustains life. We see species eat other species but rarely kill their own and never choose to kill themselves. They know exactly what their bodies need to thrive, and they go for that.

But wait. Look at those "human being" creatures. What a strange anomaly they are. They have no natural predators to fear, but they kill each other-more than one hundred million in the past century, most of that toll being civilian deaths in war. Not only that, but these humans are killing themselves-suicides take the lives of almost 60 percent more of them than homicides do. Now look a little deeper. Notice another way they are killing themselves. In addition to suicide, you find the oddest practice: while other species eat what is ideally suited to them, humans are killing themselves with what they eat.

Their predicament seems unique in all animal life. And it must be a recent aberration, or else the species would have vanished long ago.

Food for these creatures seems to be a threat both to those who have too much and those who don't have enough.

On the "not enough" side: over eight hundred million humans experience day-in-and-day-out hunger. Here in the United States, where farmers' biggest headache is oversupply, nearly thirty-five million Americans live in families that are food-insecure-meaning they often don't know where their next meal is coming from.

On the "too much" side: we see an obesity epidemic that's become a disease epidemic. Contributing to cancer, heart disease, Type II diabetes, and other grave diseases, obesity causes well over one hundred thousand additional deaths each year; and it eats up more than one in nine private health care dollars -- now rivaling the cost of tobacco-related illnesses.

For More, Please Click to Buy the Book

America is lost in a gnarled thicket of bought politicos, corporate con men and media hucksters. But we're lucky: Lappé has drawn the map that will get us out alive. Read it and get going.
-Greg Palast
Author, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

 Click here to read more praises
 Click here for press