If you were disappointed with the November election, vote again with your holiday meal. Regardless of whether meat or plant-based protein is the centerpiece of your holiday dinner, your choice can proclaim your values and fight injustice.
Lyndon Hartz pulls back leaves from a Romanesco broccoli growing in the field on his farm north of Peoria.
Despite the calendar and icy snow flurries, organic farmer Lyndon Hartz pulls off plastic covering to reveal his broccoli shoots growing inside a hoop house. He’s working on late-season crops to sell at the final two market days, 3 to 6 p.m. Dec. 4 and 18 at Unity Point Health Methodist Atrium Building, 900 Main St.
Kimberly Hartz shakes off carrots she just dug from the soil inside one of the Hartz hoop houses.
When your holiday turkey or roast comes from a large agro-industrial corporation, you are supporting a corporate economy that entrenches income inequality and exploits environmental resources. That should be an illegal use of public resources for private profit. When your meat comes from a local, small–scale, sustainable farm, you are supporting the local economy with spending that multiplies throughout the area rather than going to remote corporate headquarters and executive bonuses.
Your choice has global impact. Worldwide, more than 200 million children suffer from acute and chronic malnutrition, 800 million suffer from undernourishment and 500 million adults are obese.
At one time, poverty and malnutrition were associated with thinness. Today, with the spread of highly processed, chemically laden, corporate food, obesity and poverty go hand-in-hand.
No, American farmers don’t need to rely on chemicals and GMOs to increase yields “to feed the world.” The world should not be made dependent on America for food. We should be helping farmers worldwide become sustainable. Sustainable farming is efficient and produces high yields. Food aid delivery systems are fraught with waste, politics and inefficiencies. American farm commodities should not be displacing native farmers in countries throughout the world.
Corporations are buying up land worldwide and displacing small, native farmers. Native farmers possess generational knowledge that’s lost when they’re kicked off their family land. That leads to food insecurity, lack of economic diversity and declining seed stocks. GMO seeds are one corporate strategy to dominate world food.
Food is a basic human right. It’s also used as a tool of war, domination, suppression and corporate profit. Children in the Gaza Strip have lived their entire lives on starvation diets linked to permanent neurological and physical impairment.
Many children living in the United States have lived their entire lives consuming cheap, highly processed food laden with transfats.
Dr. Walter Willet, Harvard University School of Public Health, said transfat is a toxin regardless of the amount consumed. There is no safe level of consumption. Yet the federal government caved to corporate pressure and allows food with less than 0.5 gram of transfat per serving to be labeled “zero transfat.” A serving can be five potato chips, but eat 10 chips or eat pretzels and chips with 0.5 grams per serving, and the limit is exceeded. The zero transfat label, in other words, is meaningless and the federal government allows children to eat toxic food for the benefit of corporate profit.
Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, my friend.” In that case, should corporations be prosecuted for selling toxic food?
The federal government has set standards that allow drinking water to contain levels of atrazine, a weed killer. Yet we know children and developing fetuses are at increased risk from exposure to this endocrine disrupting chemical.
Local, sustainable, small-scale farms don’t use atrazine and don’t sell food with transfat. They don’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress.
Lobbying Congress pays off. The food stamp program once covered only commodity items, but corporations wanted some of that money and lobbied Congress to include very profitable processed foods like snack foods, cereal products, soda and candy. Now, the food stamp program makes big profits for corporations. Nine WalMart stores in Massachusetts took in $33 million in food stamp revenues in one year. The food stamp program feeds millions children a year with food containing toxins.
The Second International Conference on Nutrition held in Rome last month called on governments to implement public policies that recognize food as an expression of values, cultures, social relations and people’s self-determination and sovereignty over their land and natural resources.
The food on your holiday table can be a language communicating your values, traditions and commitments. Use food to reinforce your vote in the election booth. Use food to celebrate and strengthen democracy … and to enjoy the holidays.
Clare Howard