Words That Define Us—Are We “Under the Radar”, “Food Handlers”… or “Grassroots”, “Sustainable”?
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. We’re 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? Don’t we use handlers for circus bears and training tigers? Handlers, or pimps, for prostitutes? It’s all beginning to sound…criminal.
Well, here’s 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. I’m defining what we do, how we live, how we interact.
For the last three years, I’ve 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 Quill’s 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.
I’ve heard with increasing frequency farmers talking about “staying quiet”, or “just staying under the radar”, or “I’ll do it this way until I get caught”. I used to smile at this, even laugh. I don’t 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 we’re 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?
This site's mission is to provide news and analysis about food rights and raw milk. Increasingly, our access to privately available food is under attack by government and industry forces that seek to impose their choices on us. The Complete Patient seeks to provide up-to-date information and encourage the development of community to maintain traditional food acquisition options.
Great post Heather, thanks for contributing. One of the most obvious (to me anyways) distortions of a simple word has to be "conventional." If you were to go back a few decades, none of what is now commonly called conventional food even existed, so why do we need to call something "organic" when it just means not poisoned, modified, irradiated, or otherwise adulterated. Words do carry enormous amounts of power especially to those who can't read between the lines.
While I was reading this, my thoughts kept straying to a news article I read yesterday about a town which had it's own special language for many years. It's a town named Boonville (I don't remember which State) and the language was called Boontling or something like that. Interesting. It brought to mind Windtalkers, as well. An idea along those lines may be what has to happen to the foods and sustainable farming involved in raising edible, non-tainted crops of all kinds.
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?
I was able to find the article: http://screen.yahoo.com/boontling-lost-american-language-000000145.html
Because of its potential to be adverse and intrusive, there is an increasing aversion to excessive government aid and resulting interference in our lives. Indeed these food ordinances stem from a growing awakening that, “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” Ronald Reagan
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
Big ag is always expressing “concern” about feeding the world. The “How can we feed the world?” question; it’s the wrong question. The real need is about teaching each community feed itself.
The Bovine has a good article. The lead additive to gasoline is as metaphor to GMO.
http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/feeding-the-future-the-example...
The very phrase "Feed the World" is typically used in an Orwellian way. "End hunger" is the right term. Corporate ag has already proven it cannot, by its very nature, end hunger, nor does it have any intention of doing so. Obviously - how can a system which must, by its very nature, impose artificial scarcity upon natural abundance, end hunger? It can only increase it.
We must indeed relearn to feed ourselves, and reorganize our economic and political lives around the foodshed/watershed.
Thanks, OraMoose. I think you bring up another very timely example of a word that has been 'taken' from folks by regulatory agencies. What is simply "real" food has been niche-ified by calling it organic and the taking of this word has created and continues to create a divide among farmers who practice ecological farming methods and those who have the licensed and certified use of the word. This is a shame.
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.
We are simply looking for food that is not misbranded or adulterated. That is the premise behind our food regulation but the state is using them to do just the opposite, by simply redefined the terms, adulteration and misbranding.
We should also keep in mind and use the strategy and term, civil disobedience, since it's looking like a mass disobedience movement is going to be necessary.
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.
What comes to mind is the word disingenuous and $100,000 worth of permits and improvements for a 2 cow operation to legally sell milk in California.
Check this out. John Stossel supports the use of chemicals and GM foods.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/john-stossel/first-the-bad-news.html
I was really kind of shocked to read this coming from him.
D. Just looks who he works for, and that should be all you need to know about his version of truths, proven science and social wisdom.
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?
@ Ora: Stossel usually differs greatly from the usual dolts over at fox, but I was surprised to see this. Someone needs to educate this man to the truths - about GMO's, BPA and all the rest.
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.
He's a paid liar, part of the corporate media's general counterattack against community food. Big Ag and the government see how the people are rejecting trust in the industrial food system and are increasingly turning to this rising new alternative food sector. So there's a general top-down movement to repress Community Food. The Food Control Act is one part of it, the directly repressive part. This media offensive is another part - a series of high-profile Big Lie occasions. Stossel's one example, Jane Brody's recent NYT piece is another, before that Mehmet Oz in Time, and before that the media-touted Stanford hatchet job. This is a coordinated campaign to re-indoctrinate the straying people.
Well, I guess I'll have to take Stossel off my list. I had gotten to think, by reading his colums and watching some of his vids, that he was on the side of the people, but I also thought he didn't work for fox anymore, so I guess I misunderstood. Too bad, because he was starting to convince me about his stance on gun rights and freedoms in other areas of our lives. I don't watch tv, only read his stuff.
He worked on Fox? In that case it's funny that, according to the comments here, he signed off with a pathetic regurgitation of the core of liberal mythology: "in most ways, most of the time, the world slowly but surely gets better." Which, according to liberals, is why the people should never think of direct action and organizing themselves to rule themselves, expelling all elitism.
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.
I'm not sure, I guess, if it was fox or cnn. One of those is who he was/is with, using them as a springboard apparently. He claims to be coming over to the libertarians.
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.
Oh wow. Now THIS is pretty interesting. I did a web search using the words John Stossel is a fraud, and this is what came up. Amazingly, it's about food. Organic food, to be exact. And it sounds like maybe he works/worked for abc. This article is not dated by year, only by month in the body of the context, but I would have to assume it's from last year or maybe the year before.
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
Lately I've been so focused on Community Food and its enemies that I've lost touch with the rest of current events. (Though whenever I check in with a place like Aljazeera I find the same tedious crimes going on.)
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).
Thanks for the suggestions. I have gotten accustomed to seeing tedious headlines. It's because of the fact that our "rulers" don't really want us to know the truth that the headlines are monotone in nature. Also, the press is more focused on what the weather will be doing on inauguration day than the significance of the act itself. Understandable though, because it doesn't mean much anymore. Broken promises mostly. I'll check out some of the sites you mentioned for news. I was following quite a few of the Ron Paul sites (like The Daily Paul, etc) and they had some good news items there from time to time, as well.
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.
Talk about expanding infringement . . . this is the latest from Baylen Linnekin on the fda's "food safety" idea.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/19/the-fdas-pathetic-food-safety-prop...