From land to mouth
“We walk along the estuary, watching silage being cut in fields along its banks. Small meadows of tall grass being invaded by an army of tractors, trailers, tedders and silage blowers, which ravage a hundred acres of land in ninety minutes. The fields are stripped bare of grass and with it every living thing that existed within them, no time for wildlife to escape or insect life to move on. It feels as though we’re witnessing an Armageddon for a huge area of biodiversity. Like so much of the farmland in this country [UK], this isn’t privately owned land, it belongs to one of the huge corporations, so the sileage isn’t stored in the neighbouring farm buildings, but transported for miles to a vast dairy until beyond Lancaster. For the corporations, biodiversity isn’t part of the equation and certainly can’t be balanced against the desire for higher and higher profits.
On the mudflats a rare white stork searches for food, driven, like so much of our wildlife, to the very edge of existence. I wonder where all the life that these fields supported has gone. Has it even survived the day? But this is the choice we make every time we shop, like the dairy cows that never see grass fields, or the hens that never see daylight, this vast area of land stripped of insect life in minutes is the true cost of cheap food. No matter how many wild flower seeds we sow in our gardens, it’s an equation that can’t be balanced.”
Raynor Winn
This is one of many poignant points Raynor Winn raises in her latest book Landlines, one that none of us really wish to look at, because it is not only distressing to consider how much our food choices are impacting the environment, but how much our reality is now controlled by big corporations, how profit has been put ahead of nature and our collective wellbeing, how patriarchy still reigns in its need to control and influence and how politicians do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. Sure, they might talk the talk, but policy is only driven forward if it’s got a commercial value to it – and we are all of us, on some level, hypnotised by consumerism and enslaved by commercialism.
Going into the supermarkets here in France, after shopping in Guernsey, is for me, overwhelming. There’s too much choice and I find myself asking why we need all this choice, why we have the option to buy fifty different types of yoghurt and what happens to those which don’t get bought, and how many of those bought actually get eaten? I struggle to grasp the vastness of the scale of what’s sold, not just in that one supermarket but in the other three in this small Carnac vicinity let alone throughout France and into Europe and further afield, throughout the world. I cannot comprehend the size of the fields, the quantity of trees, the sheer man hours, chemicals and destruction to produce what we human beings appear to need to exist.
I know how many walnuts a tree can produce as my parents have a beautifully abundant one in their orchard, but I also know how labour intensive it is to lovingly shell the walnuts so that we can eat the nuts. And here in the local Lidl, I see packet upon packet of cut price walnuts, and I wonder where they grew, who cultivates them, the amount of chemicals they have been subjected to and the love, or lack of love which went into the process. I wonder whether the people involved were fairly paid and fairly treated. I consider the additional cost of buying organically and bio-dynamically. Shopping can quickly become a moral dilemma, a tricky experience, weighing up our options, calculating the choices available to us, the environment, our health, and the cost to our bank account.
We’re told we’re living in a ‘cost of living crisis’ and yet I go to somewhere like Lidl and I don’t see that. Food is cheap, ridiculously cheap. Even the organic stuff is cheaper than it would be in Guernsey, which makes it difficult not to fill the car with as much as I can take home. But am I then merely supporting more of the same, more of these huge corporations and their need to maximise shareholder return, what of the smaller cooperatives, the Bio shop down the road, and our own family-run health food shop, Hansa, back at home, who are doing their best to live more consciously, support the environment, the smaller producers, the Earth?
And I wonder, whether we are fed the story that we are living through a ‘cost of living’ crisis to make us orientate to these super stores, feeding more of the same mass agriculture and corporation gain – after all I don’t see governments lowering interest rates to make housing more affordable. If we’re told we’re living in a cost of living crisis we start to believe it whether it’s true or not and all of a sudden the organic and more costly options become less of an option, at least so we tell ourselves. This is the power of government, media, corporations and consumerism for making us believe whatever they want us to believe to feed the bottom line.
I am reminded of the child catcher, a fictional character in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher is employed by the Baron and Baroness Bomburst to snatch and imprison children on the streets of Vulgaria. He lures the children with the promise of sweets, and they, hypnotised by this thought, are easily caught. We too are easily hypnotised by the what is being offered to us, the perceived sweetness and before we know it, we to are caught in the trap and we don’t even realise it, feeding all that is out of balance and reducing our freedom as a consequence.
We have to be so careful in believing what we are told, especially from media who don’t always have our best interests at heart either. We have to be conscious of the way they influences how we think and therefore the choices we make and the impact on the collective – because the one thing we do have in this world is free will to make conscious choices, appreciating that these choices affect the collective. We are the micro of the macro. If we want to see change in the world, we have to be the one to make the changes.
We have to weigh up our options, notice our resistance to change, to doing things differently, the arguments we use, the way we kid ourselves into maintaining the status quo, of justifying to ourselves our choices made not for the greater good, but for our own short term gain. At the end of the day we always have a choice, and we always have ourselves to face.
Later in the day we found ourselves out at Locmariaquer beach, home of Pierres Plates dolmen, a marvellous dolmen not least on account of its rock art but because of its bent corridor. The car park was surprisingly busy, not for the dolmen fortunately, but because it was low tide and this beach, we now realise, is marvellous for cockling and there were many locals making the most of this. We went down to take a look – Elijah is mad about sea life and wanted to have a go at cockling himself – and people were literally foraging for their dinner. On the way back up the steps I noticed sea beet and sea samphire, you could have quite a feast, especially if you picked the blackberries in the carpark too.
On the way back to the campsite, we ended up at La Trinite-sur-Mer and happened to find a spot on a slip way where we could watch the rising tide and the marine life below. Here we had the privilege of witnessing a shore crab trying to eat a mussel, pulling the shell apart with its claws, perched up on the wall. We also saw a little fish attack a crab for the food the crab was carrying, and two crabs fighting over yet more food, and it really highlighted to me that it is all about survival and having enough to eat.
It made me think how disconnected we are from our food source – that we just rock up at a supermarket and hope that it has what we need, without considering where it was sourced and how it came to be there in the first place, the amount of effort involved. I know how difficult it is to produce enough vegetables to feed a family, my veggie growing this year would have had us starving if we had had to survive on it. I also know how tricky it is to catch fish. And as for killing animals, no thanks, I just couldn’t do it.
All of this of course, before even considering whether it’s adding to our vitality or taking away from it. I am amazed what passes as ‘food’ these days. My children were talking the other day about energy drinks, assuming they must be OK because they are sold in supermarkets. Their joyous innocence means that they cannot comprehend how something can be sold, which might harm them – that a corporations profits are more important than their health and wellbeing, that everything has a price, including their immunity and vitality – after all Big Pharma has to thrive off something (call me cynical!).
I was reading that food security will be the next crisis, that producing enough food to feed us al is becoming an increasing issue. And I suppose where I get to with all this, is whether we need to be eating as much food as we do? As an organism can we survive on less? With obesity levels rising, one can only assume that as a society we are eating too much, or too much of the wrong foods perhaps. Food is a commodity that’s the problem, it’s sold not simply for our survival but to make money and we buy into it, easily influenced by the new trends.
I’ve got a whole heap more I could say about this, but will share instead some thought provoking commentary from Robert Lawlor in his brilliant book The New Male Sexuality, where he talks about consumerism in the context of sexual attitudes and self-identity:
“In the 1960s, the American economy changed from being predominantly a production economy to being predominantly a consumption society…Just prior to the 1960s, the industrial process began to turn out a vast excess of goods. To keep the economy growing, it became necessary to remove the old ethic of saving money, conserving and maintaining materials and equipment, and associated frugality of postponing gratification. Advertising, armed with society’s new liberalism concerning sexuality, moved into high gear, creating endless needs and desires in general teaching people to consume…The new ethic became spend, consume, allow no desire to go unsatisfied, either material or sexual. With the credit card society now established, a rapid consumption of both goods and sex ensued. Little attention was paid to the exhaustion of natural resources or the stress on the social, spiritual, and ecological fabric of life caused by this constantly expanding economy”.
“At this time the media lured women away from their biological and natural roles as mothers and wives and, under the banner of liberation, pulled great numbers into factories and offices. This commercial manipulation is well described in Bruce Holbrook’s The Stone Monkey and is traced by him to the 1950s, when numerous sociological studies commissioned by government agencies in Washington suggested methods to restimulate the faltering, consumer-based society. Several of these studies, in particular those by sociologist and social planner Vance Packard, noted that women spent money much more easily and utilised consumer credit systems more readily than did men, who were more likely to save…
…Social planners suggested that a resurgence of consumerism would result from women having independent money derived from employment. Coincidentally, the beginnings of a feminist viewpoint that stressed the association between “female liberation” and females being employed began to appear. This association may not have been a deliberate manipulation but rather a result of the concurrent relaxation of sexual and consumer inhibitions. However, the result has been, in the last thirty years, an enormous influx of women into the job market and the breakdown of traditional female roles in the family. Consequently, as predicted, the 1960s and 1970s have seen an enormous upsurge in credit spending and an enormous decline in percentage of savings by families. The manipulation of sexual roles provided the desired stimulation of consumerism”.
I really recommend both the books quoted from, they’re thought provoking in their own way and that’s never a bad thing. At the end of the day it’s always about balance and harmony and appreciating that we’re all doing our best with our level of awareness in any one moment and not giving ourselves - or others - a hard time, ha, in the process!
I’m off to harvest my one and only yellow courgette of the summer, we will eat it slowly!
Love Emma x
