Someone in our office has a mug that says "I (heart) spreadsheets". I am think I'm pretty safe in saying this is meant sarcastically.
I don't want to slate spreadsheets completely - being a planner and freak for order, I do like using them. It just occurred to me, walking around our office and seeing a couple of people sitting staring at them that they more or less sum up what is wrong with what has become our way of life.
We have become so removed from reality and the real world - trees, soil, wind, grass and sunshine. How can we ever hope to care about the world when we don't interact with it? When we divide up pieces of it into cells (appropriate term) on a spreadsheet, to be divided, added and totalled up.
When we start to see the world through spreadsheets, we may often think we are valuing it - we are giving it importance. The truth is we are stripping it of value. We will never love what we cannot hug, and I have yet to experience a satisfying embrace with a spreadsheet.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
The food industry gets up my nose...
Two things that have made my blood boil from the BBC's "Farming Today" podcast. Both of them are parts of the same theme - the lie that the more we treat food production systems like an assembly line the better off we'll be.
Firstly Paul Conway, vice president of the global grain trader Cargill, says that food security is not the same as food self-sufficiency. Global food trade is apparently "the rational thing to do." Therefore people in countries that grow grain for European cattle should do so. What will they then eat? The cattle imported back from Europe? Oh no, food grown with technology like "precision farming" (the buzz-phrase "precision bombing" craftily recycled - from chemical warfare to agrochemicals) and GE (genetic engineering) - food which apparently only the rich can afford to reject.
Seems to me that in Mr. Conway's world, everybody dances to the tune of the global food industry - and the quality of food, as well as the quality of many people's and animal's lives declines rapidly. As for his view that only the rich can reject GE, I do wish he would look at poorer African countries rejecting food aid on account that it is GE, and the fact that there is a moratorium on GE brinjal in India because the farmers and public protested its approval so strongly.
Secondly, the application for a mega dairy near the small town of Nocton in the UK has been rejected. This is of course great news, so what pissed me off? The farmers (I would hazard a guess they are more business men, and yes I use a gender specific term) that applied for the dairy refer to it as a "high welfare animal establishment". High welfare meaning it is unlikely the cows will ever venture outside, and will eat grain (probably supplied by Cargill). If you have ever seen a free range cow grazing on soybeans or munching a corn cob, please let me know. I'll bet you haven't, because cows eat grass. That is what there stomachs are designed to digest.
This is the food industry's idea to enable us to produce more food - feed plants we can eat to animals which can eat plants we can't.
I'll be sticking my middle finger of both hands up at Mr. Conway and friends the next time I go food shopping by buying the least processed, most local, organic food I possibly can.
Firstly Paul Conway, vice president of the global grain trader Cargill, says that food security is not the same as food self-sufficiency. Global food trade is apparently "the rational thing to do." Therefore people in countries that grow grain for European cattle should do so. What will they then eat? The cattle imported back from Europe? Oh no, food grown with technology like "precision farming" (the buzz-phrase "precision bombing" craftily recycled - from chemical warfare to agrochemicals) and GE (genetic engineering) - food which apparently only the rich can afford to reject.
Seems to me that in Mr. Conway's world, everybody dances to the tune of the global food industry - and the quality of food, as well as the quality of many people's and animal's lives declines rapidly. As for his view that only the rich can reject GE, I do wish he would look at poorer African countries rejecting food aid on account that it is GE, and the fact that there is a moratorium on GE brinjal in India because the farmers and public protested its approval so strongly.
Secondly, the application for a mega dairy near the small town of Nocton in the UK has been rejected. This is of course great news, so what pissed me off? The farmers (I would hazard a guess they are more business men, and yes I use a gender specific term) that applied for the dairy refer to it as a "high welfare animal establishment". High welfare meaning it is unlikely the cows will ever venture outside, and will eat grain (probably supplied by Cargill). If you have ever seen a free range cow grazing on soybeans or munching a corn cob, please let me know. I'll bet you haven't, because cows eat grass. That is what there stomachs are designed to digest.
This is the food industry's idea to enable us to produce more food - feed plants we can eat to animals which can eat plants we can't.
I'll be sticking my middle finger of both hands up at Mr. Conway and friends the next time I go food shopping by buying the least processed, most local, organic food I possibly can.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Cartoon
Here's a great cartoon from Stephanie McMillan, who is great in her work against global ecocide.
You can check out more of her work here: http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/
You can check out more of her work here: http://www.stephaniemcmillan.org/codegreen/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
