where food comes from

Margaret Merrill (mmerrill@leo.vsla.edu)
Tue, 12 Sep 95 16:26:59 EDT

Well, I guess I will have to throw my two cents worth into this
discussion as well. Should have done it earlier, but have been
swamped. In 1957 we moved from West Virginia to California.
My parents bought a piece of land on the Palos Verdes Peninsula
in an area which allowed people to have animals, ie livestock,
excluding pigs :). Having six children, a family cow, chickens,
turkeys, sheep, a steer or two, horses, and fruit trees soon
followed. All this was crammed on something less than two
acres, although we never felt crammed or crowded in any way.
It wasn't too long before the school system wanted to bring a
busload of children up to see the "farm" and the "animals."
For some reason we were considered so unique that twice the
newspaper wrote an article on the family -- although we didn't
see that we were all that unusual. But the children whom the
schools brought to visit apparently had never seen farm animals
before. My mother who had to show everyone around was
invariably asked, when the cow was pointed out as the source of
the milk we drank, which faucet gave chocolate milk, which one
gave orange juice, etc. It made us wonder just what these
children had been learning at home and in school. Perhaps
urbanization does insulate us too much. If our primary
experience is that food comes from the grocery store, then
perhaps our subconscious assumptions about the origin of food
get distorted in a very real way -- a way that affects our
behavior more than our logic. I suspect that most adults if
asked "what is beef?" would, if they thought about it say the
"flesh of a cow." However, if you phrased it "where do we get
beef?" you might very well get "the grocery store" as an
answer. What I think this discussion is leading toward is a
comment on one facet of the modern worldview -- those
subconscious assumptions about the nature of things which shape
our behaviour and choices in life without our ever realizing
that they are doing so. The chapter on education in
Schumaker's Small is Beautiful ought to be required reading
from high school on. We live in an increasingly urbanized,
computerized, and technological world. When I communicate with
you via email am I communicating with a living breathing
individual? Not really. Stripped down to its basic act, I am
putting marks on a CRT screen and sending them to destinations
unknown. What does this have to do with what people believe
about the origins of their food? A good deal I suspect. Food
comes for all practical purposes ready to use, just like the
machines we use, the clothes we wear -- pick it up and you are
ready to go. The question of where it originates, how it got
to us, who made it, etc., simply doesn't arise. It isn't a
necessary question to the operation of the machine, the jacket,
the steak we eat. Somehow I don't think that it is a question
of alienation (which implies a deliberate rejection) as much as
it is a question of a wrong (from sus. ag.'s point of view)
worldview (weltanschauung -- which sounds much more impressive
:)). What we do about this, how we change it is certainly open
to substantial debate. But I suspect that asking the right
questions is part of the answer.

Thanks for raising the question in the first place and best
wishes always,

Margaret

-- 
Margaret Merrill
Jefferson Madison Regional Library
201 E. Market St.
Charlottesville, VA  22902-5287
mmerrill@leo.vsla.edu