[Community_garden] Food Movement Activist Philosopher Grace Lee Boggs: "Another Food System Is Possible"

[James Godsil]

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/GraceLeeBoggs/HomePage

In the early 1980s when Detroit was a devastated "bombed-out"  city, Grace
and her husband Jimmy Boggs advanced the concept of self and community
self-sufficiency through organic city farms and gardens, and inspired a
vision of Detroit's empty lots and unemployed factory workers as the natural
and human resources for creating, step by step, garden by garden,
neighborhood artisinal shop and artist studios, one by one… a new
permaculture civilization!

In her interview with Bill Moyers, Grace told the nation that Milwaukee's
Will Allen's Growing Power city farm and community garden projects are
prime, real-world examples of her compelling visions of "cities of hope."

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06152007/profile2.html

Grace is 92 and still going strong. She won a PH.D. in philosophy from Bryn
Mawr in 1938, partnered with C.L.R. James in a highly signficant
"anti-communist" left tendency in the 1940s, married renowned Detroit auto
worker/philosopher Jimmy Boggs in the 1950s, was a major leader in the
labor, civil rights, peace, black power, Asian American women's and
environmental movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and, since the 1980s, has
been a major planetary actor of the permaculture movement.

http://www.boggscenter.org/glbbio.shtml

LIVING FOR CHANGE
Another Food System  Is Possible
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, June 8-14, 2008

The food riots erupting all over the world challenge us to rethink our whole
approach to food.   Just as we can't solve  soaring gas prices by a gas-tax
holiday, we can't solve the mounting hunger crisis just  by sending aid to
Third World countries.

Jesse Jackson has pointed out the shortcomings of emergency aid: "If we
flood areas with free food aid, it will lower prices in the region and drive
local farmers out of business. We need, even in emergency aid, to be seeking
to purchase as much food as possible from farmers in the region, providing
an incentive for farming. We need development plans that emphasize local
food production and distribution, the food equivalent of decentralized
energy independence."

Today's hunger crisis is rooted in the industrialized food system which over
the last few decades has destroyed local food production and forced nations
like Kenya,  which only 25 years ago was self-sufficient in food, to import
80% of its food  because so much Kenya land is  used by global corporations
to grow luxuries like cut flowers for export,.

This system  has driven millions of local farmers off the land and into
unemployment and poverty in the slums now surrounding many of the world's
cities.   The people who know the land best are being separated from it:
their farms enclosed into gigantic outdoor factories that produce only for
export. Hundreds of millions of people now must depend on food  grown
thousands of miles away because their homeland agriculture has been
transformed to meet the needs of agribusiness.

In the last decade thousands of farmers in southern India have committed
suicide as farming is delinked from the earth, the soil,  biodiversity,and
the climate, and linked to global corporations and global markets, and the
generosity of the earth is replaced by the greed of corporations.

At the same time this corporate food system has led to a decline in food
quality and an increase in ill-health,  a  decline in mineral and vitamin
content and an increase in  bacterial contamination;  high ground water
nitrate levels because industrial-size farms raise too many animals
producing too much manure on too little land,; the emergence of H5N1 (avian
flu) because of  intensive poultry production, and epidemic levels of
obesity and diabetes because too many of us eat highly processed food, often
consisting of  artificial ingredients.

How do we restore health and joy to food?  As I pondered this question,  I
came across an article  by Winona LaDuke in the Summer issue of YES
Magazine.  LaDuke is  an internationally respected Native American,
Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe),  and environmental activist who after graduating
from Harvard with a degree in native economic development,  packed her bags
and moved to White Earth, her  ancestral home.

LaDuke also believes we have to relocalize our economies,. By that she means
carrying on our economic activities in a way that respects the sacredness of
place. For example.   she and her son gather wild rice by canoeing in the
lake,  using sticks to knock the rice into the canoe, bringing the rice in
and letting it dry, parching it over a fire,  dancing on it to get the hulls
off,  and then winnowing it in a basket.  After the harvest they have a big
feast, dance and tell stories.

The same ceremonial/spiritual  approach is employed in growing food or in
producing power by a  turbine or windmill.

LaDuke is not proposing that we give up all imports and exports.  But in
sharing  the place–respecting and sacred ways in which   Native Americans
 approach the challenge  of feeding ourselves, she helps us understand how
much our industrial approach to this question has not only made our food
less nutritious but  robbed it of joy and community.

As our food becomes increasingly unhealthy and costly,  I can imagine
families and neighbors coming together regularly to gather, prepare and
enjoy our food,  and out of this experience,  deciding  to  create a
healthier, safer, more sustainable food system   that is also kind to
farmers, livestock and the Earth we depend on.

Send an e-mail to Boggs at milwaukeerenaissance.com if you would like to
receive Grace's weekly newsletters.
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