It’s Not a Broken System: From Food to Development, It’s a Masterpiece of Control
Colin Todhunter
Industrial agriculture is not a system in crisis. It is a system in command. Engineered with precision, it reflects the civilisational logic of industrial modernity: domination over cooperation, profit over sufficiency, scale over ecology. It is not malfunctioning—it is functioning exactly as designed.
Across three volumes—Food, Dependency and Dispossession (2022), Sickening Profits (2023) and Power Play: The Future of Food (2024)—I have mapped this critique in layered terms. What emerges is not a sectoral failure but a planetary regime of dispossession: a machinery that converts ecological life into economic assets, undermines autonomy under the banner of development and metabolises resistance into market-friendly reform.
The food system is not broken. It is a weapon. And it is intended as such. It concentrates power, severs people from land, deskills and displaces producers and commodifies nourishment. It benefits financial capital and corporate actors while externalising its costs—to health, biodiversity, labour and culture.
In the Global South, ‘development’ is the velvet glove of structural dependency. It arrives cloaked in the language of poverty reduction and climate resilience—while deepening indebtedness, consolidating proprietary seed systems and subordinating food sovereignty to export-driven logic. For all its rhetoric and well-laundered PR, Bayer is not saving Indian agriculture. It is enclosing it.
Behind the slick brand messaging lies a familiar pattern. Corporate contracts replace commons. Proprietary inputs replace knowledge. The land is enclosed—not always by fences, but by code, debt and bureaucratic abstraction. This is not progress. It is programmed disempowerment. Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationalisation is no longer metaphor—it is agronomic policy, algorithmic governance and institutional capture.
Post-development theorists like Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Esteva have long exposed ‘progress’ as a colonial narrative—one that erases plurality and imposes a singular vision of modernity. Barrington Moore’s study of agrarian class structures illuminated a deeper truth: the fate of democracy and dictatorship often hinges on how land is owned, who controls surplus and which coalitions form around agricultural production.
Robert Brenner adds further ballast: capitalism doesn’t arise from innovation alone, but from the violent reordering of class and land relations. And Jason W Moore’s world-ecology perspective insists that nature isn’t a backdrop—it’s embedded in the very logic of accumulation. Progress, in this light, is not an upward arc—it’s a marketing campaign for dispossession.
Sickening Profits traces the links between major asset management firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street—and the intersecting sectors of seed, chemical, food manufacturing and pharmaceuticals. These firms do not merely invest. They synchronise.
The result is a system where ultra-processed, chemically intensive food degrades health; pharmaceutical giants respond with treatments; and investment firms profit from both sides. Complicity is woven into this circuit through pension schemes and sovereign investment channels, tying the wellbeing of workers to the very structures of subordination that erode public health and ecological integrity.
This is not a bug. It is the system’s logic, rendered visible. As Marx warned in his theory of the metabolic rift, capitalism ruptures the organic exchange between humans and nature, degrading both soil and society in pursuit of surplus.
Power Play: The Future of Food explores how the next phase of agri-capitalism (arguably morphing into some kind of techno-feudalism) is digital. Precision farming, AI diagnostics, blockchain land registries, gene editing—these are not neutral tools. They are instruments of enclosure. They deskill farmers, centralise decision-making and consolidate control in proprietary platforms.
Ecomodernist fantasies promise that technology will decouple growth from harm. But these technologies entrench extractive dynamics, incentivise monoculture and transform farmers into data nodes. Technological intensification does not democratise the system—it de-democratises it.
Yet there are countercurrents. Bhaskar Save, the ‘Gandhi of Natural Farming’, showed that abundance need not come at the cost of integrity. His farm was not just productive—it was sacred. Like Gandhi, Save believed that true self-reliance begins with the soil. His methods were not merely agronomic—they were ethical, spiritual and political.
In Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi critiqued Western industrial civilisation as a ‘black magic’ that worships speed, machinery and consumption. His vision of swaraj—self-rule rooted in locality, restraint and interdependence—remains a radical alternative to the extractive logic of modernity.
The land is not a resource but a spiritual commons—a living matrix of memory, culture and identity, not Bayer’s digital fiefdom. To degrade the land is to sever a people from their cosmology. Resistance, then, is not just material—it is metaphysical.
And yet, this system is not only defended by corporations. It is legitimised by institutions. Certain well-funded departments or academics at the likes of Florida and Saskatchewan universities and Cornell’s Alliance for Science churn out industry-supported research that launders the talking points of Big Ag. Careerists in lab coats and lecture halls—comfortably embedded and institutionally insulated—serve as the intellectual wing of agri-capitalism. They do not study the system. They shield it, most notably from their social media pulpits—if not hourly then certainly daily.
The Diggers in 17th-century England, led by Gerrard Winstanley, understood that land is the basis of freedom. Their call to reclaim the commons was not symbolic—it was revolutionary. Today, their spirit lives on in every seed swap, every land occupation, every act of mutual aid that defies the logic of extraction. They understood that enclosure is the architecture of domination. To invoke the Diggers is to declare: we will not be tenants on a planet owned by capital.
Moreover, the logic of industrial agriculture does not stop at the soil. It continues inward—into the human body. The gut microbiome, the body’s internal soil, is degraded by ultra-processed foods, pesticide residues and pharmaceutical overuse. As external landscapes are homogenised for profit, so too are internal ecologies. This is not metaphorical colonisation. It is biochemical, political and intentional.
Power no longer governs only through territory and labour—it now operates through microbial environments, metabolically reproducing the conditions for chronic illness and chronic dependency.
Reclaiming food is not a matter of better policy. It is a matter of rupture. The industrial model cannot be reformed into justice. It must be confronted, disarmed and displaced.
But this is not just a politics of refusal. It is a politics of renewal.
Agroecology is not a niche alternative—it is a living practice of resistance and regeneration. It centres biodiversity, local knowledge and ecological reciprocity. It is not about scaling up—it is about rooting down.
Wendell Berry’s agrarianism reminds us that the health of culture and soil are inseparable. His call for affection, stewardship and place-based living is not nostalgia—it is insurgent wisdom.
Slow living, seed sovereignty, territorial autonomy—these are not lifestyle choices. They are counter-hegemonic acts. They interrupt capital flows. They assert values incompatible with the market logic of control.
And the Zapatistas? They remind us that autonomy is not a dream—it is a practice. In the highlands of Chiapas, they have built a living alternative: agroecological farming, communal governance and education rooted in dignity. Their call for “a world where many worlds fit” is not a slogan. It is a blueprint.
The dominant food system is not simply an outcome of contemporary power—it is its architecture. To dismantle it is not merely to fix food; it is to rupture the civilisational logic of industrial modernity itself. In this system, control masquerades as efficiency, dispossession hides behind the veil of development and the commodification of life is sold as progress.
Reclaiming food, then, is not a technical task—it is a civilisational reckoning. It demands the end of a worldview that sees land as property, humans as inputs and nature as capital. To dismantle the food system is to make space for another order. It is not merely an agricultural revolution—it is a revolution in how we live and relate.
Finally, this isn’t an academic paper or a corporate brief. There’s no funding behind it, no institution to answer to. Just a voice—clear-eyed, outside the fold and speaking because silence is not an option.
The authors three books referred to in the article can be accessed via Figshare.
Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. You can read his two free books Food, Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order and Sickening Profits: The Global Food System’s Poisoned Food and Toxic Wealth here.
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Great article
Yes, we all love glyphosate in our food..
In total agreement! What we are witnessing is a continual pattern of escape and enclosure. When understood as interference competition, an evolutionary strategy, the process can be seen for the existential threat it is.
I like Colin. So.. This is not criticism. It is just telling my opinion. This is not malicious. It is well intentioned.
It’s just that, as I read something unknown in me, it made me remember that recently a person was quite affected by one of Widehead’s articles, expressing the view that “This article was written by ChatGPT. Any article with a single-sentence paragraph filling out the “Not A. B”-template was written by ChatGPT.” (Now I found the article and copied the exact quote from the comments.) Whitehead constantly uses a lot of such writing. But I don’t follow the development of LLM and I have no idea if this is the case.
Then, a few days ago, when writing a comment of mine (not that I attach any importance to my comments, but it just was mine), I used the angry article of the Club of Rome, which strongly condemned the “genocide in Gaza” and called on the world and international organizations to condemn it and take action, here. And there, made an impression on me:
And here, starting from the title, I read dozens:
If this is not an LLM, tell what that is.
Very observant of you.
Both The Club of Rome passage and the passage from this article that you have highlighted both certainly follow the formula of ‘Not A, but B’
Does anyone know how and where this style of writing originated?
Since an LLM is mimicking or at least trying to mimick human traits then it is also possible that some writers naturally use the format to create impact in their work.
We would have to research wrtiting styles pre-LLM to see if it was commonplace before.
The current LLM fad of “Not A, but B” was imposed upon it by underpaid evaluators during the RLHF phase of the training process. It started with a single human who read a response by the LLM he was evaluating, saw it use that syntax, and thought to himself, “I like that phrasing. It sounds powerful to me. It has an impact. I give this response five stars!”
LLM training is split into two phases. In the first, it trains on the raw data: all of the text that has ever been published to the internet, or scanned from documents, or transcribed from spoken speech. This creates a terrain, analogous to a granite mountain. If rain were to fall on the top of this mountain, the water would flow preferentially along the lowest parts of the terrain, collecting in rivulets that merge to become creeks and streams and rivers. Each path from the top of the mountain to the mouth of any stream at its base is the “speech” of an LLM. The “prompt” which starts it talking is the rainfall, which has some bias/topic encoded in its density, direction, speed, etc.
An LLM “speaking” after only this first phase of training would sound human, but it would be impossible to control what it says. It would say anything humans have said or written in the context of the prompt. It would spew “hate speech” and “conspiracy theories” and sometimes babble in a drunken or psychotic way. Worse, there would be no means of creating product differentiation. Google’s LLM would sound the same as OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s.
The second phase of training is RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), where hirelings converse with the raw LLM and rank its responses according to corporate style guidelines and their own individual preferences. This is analogous to humans digging trenches in the mountain in an effort to guide the rainfall toward certain preferred routes (“empathy”, “impactful phrases”), or to minimize the potential for flash-flooding, mudslides and avalanches (“hate speech,” etc.).
The “Not A, but B”-syntax is a trench dug by a human with an excavator. It was not overrepresented in the raw training data — at least, not at first! — but the LLM was heavily rewarded for using it, so it defaults to that syntax if there’s no pressure pushing it in another direction.
That said, “Not A, but B” has now been back-propagated into the raw training data through articles like these, and there’s no way to get it out. It’s a positive feedback loop. The flow of water through the man-made trenches has carved (and will continually carve) them even deeper, exaggerating all of the mindless preferences low-paid hirelings have etched into the mountain in the course of their side-hustle as “RLHF engineers.”
A rating system might be devised that would classify articles which overuse these LLM-preferred phrases as “synthetic data” and exclude them from future training runs, and hopefully stall the inevitable model collapse by few months, but this would be a poorly understood intervention in a poorly understood system — a catastrophic fix that would further alter the terrain in uncontrollable ways. It would be like trying to backfill a raging river with gravel. The river might be rerouted, but the only predictable thing about its new course would be that it runs right through your house.
Nothing can be done to prevent this terminal slide. LLM-generated text is effectively free, whereas real writers need to be paid. We’re doomed by a thousand different flavors of gradient descent. We’re heading down into a Grand Canyon of linguistic degeneration, with all surface water endlessly trickling along mile-deep trenches dug by the long-dead gods of the Hopi.
If as you say, it is a positive feedback loop then it sounds like it will implode upon itself, churning out ever more obvious copycat stylistic works lacking in originality.
Then real writers will revert back to their own imaginations to create distinctive human written articles.
True, the current implementation of AI will certainly implode, and whatever replaces it will have to be continually rearchitected to try to keep ahead of the unavoidable corruption of “ground truth” data… but there are humans in the circuit too. People repeat what they hear and read. We’ll be a reservoir for every bad habit, feeding back into the machine whatever the intake filters are trying to keep out.
The only real long-term solution, I guess, is to take the humans out of the loop, Gaza-style.
Yes, great analysis, thanks for the work.
Yes its a vicious circle of control over or foods – produce foods that are making people ill and big pharma sell you the tablets that makes you even sicker – but why mess with the food system? as you say its all about control, control how its produced and with what, control what’s in the foods, control the markets – and make it really difficult for folk to produce their own foods – and you have an all but captured population, who’ll pass on the same habits to their kids – its a win win situation for the PTB.
In the not so distant future – mass food production will move further away from the hands of the average man and woman on the street – and we may even be forced to consume certain products, due to the relentless pushing of Global Warming.
I enjoyed this article very much. Learned a lot. Thank you.
Behind the pedantry of this article probably lies a few cryptically hidden truths. But exceptionally difficult read.
On the topci of “climate resilience”:
AAARGH! From Graud:
Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says
Etc etc etc etc
Ipie? (with my little eye?)
https://www.ipie.info/
Hate! Deep fakes! Existential!
Well we’ve certainly seen “an erosion of trust in science, our institutions” BUT NOT “each other”. Just you lot!
Here’s the cover story on the My Little Eye group:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Panel_on_the_Information_Environment
But in truth I reckon it’s a lovely little theatre site set up on somebody’s bedroom computer. Just like the rest of those sites.
Darn right, we distrust THAT lot!
Predictive policing.
Predictive analysis by an algorithm the basis for the sneak attack
on Iran by The Only Democracy In The ME…
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/the-key-nuclear-allegation-that-started
A combination of Anarchy (rules WITHOUT Rulers) Permaculture (Permanent Agriculture) and Spiritual self awareness, would go a long way in solving these problems.
With present low human consciousness you’ll only get a Mad Max anarchy.
The only way out is an individual search and rescue of your own soul. Giving up the ego for being an unique star in the physical Divine Galaxies. A Matrix kind of Realization.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Meher Baba, Jean Klein, Douglas Harding, Barry Long et al, all gave us some clues, and yes, self awareness is a journey of the individual, but sometimes a tipping point can cause rapid change on a large scale.
They gave us a lot of clues. Clues, clues, clues… Here is full of clues for self-improvement. In fact, there are a large number of people who are actively engaged in self-awareness. And, accordingly, especially in the context of these turbulent times – which, if they were not such, probably the spiritual demand would not be so great (since, as is clear, most of it is not an authentic process, but is the product of a search for a way to escape from ugly realities) – since there is an intense demand, there is also an increasing supply. The spiritual market is developing rapidly.
Mother India, a recognized and ancient spiritual hatchery (as well as home to several million despicable lower-caste rat-eaters), is the best place of origin for authenticated, duly certified with the aura of ancient culture, spiritual thinkers and guides. Organic product, in all necessary labels for proof, bio-guides.
Personally, I am very curious to watch them at the time when they entered the business of giving clues, when they were not yet so polished speakers.
1928, the young and inexperienced Jiddu, still embarrassed by the lights of spiritual spotlight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p37cdxtd1xg
Sydney, six years later. A significant improvement is evident, characteristic of more experienced speakers. He has not yet learned how to memorize the text, which is why he looks at the piece of paper from the side, but over time and this has improved a lot to complete the authenticity of his spiritual aura.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djtLt_lOKBs
I remember that terrible man Uppaluri Gopala once explained the attractiveness of the most distinctive feature of the non-teaching of his namesake by surname Jiddu – his purity, “It’s not this, it’s not that” – uttering some dirty defamation like, “Everyone in the spiritual market sells cigarettes. Jiddu comes in and says, “Mine are nicotine-free.” A terrible man and cheater, UG I mean.
I look forward to new clues about my spiritual growth.
New Age ‘gurus’ selling a pre-packaged off the shelf version of spirituality to Westerners.
A little bit of ‘love and light’ goes a long way plus chanting a few oms.
Then there are those such as Deepak Chopra sitting atop the pile of false gurus, counting his shekels, and tasked with shepherding those on a spiritual journey to ensure that they do not fall off the New Age bandwagon. Even so far as telling those who were straying a bit – and thinking for themselves – to Trust the Science (TM) during the Plandemic.
https://www.deepakchopra.com/articles/yoga-covid-and-the-wrong-path/
RE: The food system is not broken. It is a weapon.
Indeed. Under capitalism, every sector of the economy is that way: from medicine, to science to education.
Right on. Thanks.
MK Gandhi was THE proto woke of the Westernized world: their Ideal Indian – controllable
London educated, lawyering in South Africa where he assimilated that local class system. Strange sexual life, four times married but ending up sleeping with a few young women. Blindly pro Isl*m – the Khalifat movement – anti modern – spinning wheeler – therefore popular with the likes of Henry Ford – no competition. Irrational / illogical to the hilt but great fan off public mass demos – power. Anti offensive but also defensive violence: he told Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan to let themselves be killed without resistance, warped Christian notions from penpal Tolstoy. Pioneer Mass Shepherd.
Not a good example in a nut shell, for anybody on anything.
Ghandi, like Tolstoy and Kropotkin was an anarchist at heart.
Hence the grasping detractors focussing on his sex Life rather than his achievements.
Which were nil. Partition with genocides, continued colonial mindset, ‘philosophy’ zero value.
And Bibi’s achievements?
Don’t bother, it’ll just make me throw up.
Most politicians are just domineering, loud mouthed, ambitious control freaks feathering their own nests as they shit in everyone else’s.
Most politicians are not qualified or erudite enough to run the economies of large nations.
They take the advice of traditionally trained economists and free market ‘experts’.
So here we are, in deep shit, biding our time until the system implodes.
Poverty, wars, environmental degradation, drug addicted societies, broken families and puerile news/entertainment propaganda.
Had a gut full?
Change is our only hope.
Change begins with us.
I am all with you Johnny. While the passive nihilists know, but chose to sit in their chair awaiting termination, we keep chugging along seeking “self-rule rooted in locality, restraint and interdependence” as a sane present & future. Cheers!
Halt voran. Vorposten Raus! I were visiting Lithuania just after the Wall Fall.
We couldnt buy anything with our Western money. There was one type milk, one type bread, one type meat, all right some classical LP’s with East European Symphony orchestras. 2-3 types of cars.
Then there was a dollar shop with booze and amber.
We left Lithuania and arrived to West again…in Sweden. Supermarkets full of everything and more consumables to select than a man could buy.
When refugees drown in desperate eagerness to get to Europe or US it is because of this enormous difference in wealth.
They dont understand our reluctance to our own system.
Just to get some perspective into what we are talking about.
Gotta be cheaper than an exploding Muskmobile.
It wasn’t cheap at the time. The Trabant cost the average East German a year’s salary and there was a waiting list of years for them since there was no other choice of independent transport except a bicycle or one’s legs.
The Trabant was titled the worst car ever made.
https://silodrome.com/trabant-car/
https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/communism-delivered-the-worst-car-99b
As bad as a Tesla is, if you need to get from A to B at least we have the choice of not doing it in a Tesla or any other electric car – for the time being. The East German’s had no choice.
Our overlords would like us to return to these heady days of no choices. No private transport.
Thanks RR.
I used to replace my Maseratis when the ashtrays were full.
Not anymore.
Wise move Johnny.
Owning a Maserati any longer than it takes to smoke a packet of ciggies guarantees it will spend more time with the mechanic than on the road.
They weren’t my butts.
They belonged to a supermodel who was stalking me.
(Life is a bitch and then you die). 😖
Conversely, life is a beach and then you diet.
Yes, they come from the Latvian dairy animal and the Latvian meat-producing animal, of which only a few of them are available, which, as a national treasure, are kept under strict round-the-clock security in a barn in the center of Riga.
What do you mean, “one type milk”? They must have had cow’s, sheep’s and goat’s, and fresh and so called in the west yogurt. You mean this kind of pampering? And what “one type meat”? Don’t they have many types of meat-producing animal, including birds, fish?
That’s right. It is with such a desire – greedy, bottomless and insatiable – that the souls and hearts of the vast majority of the inhabitants of Latvia, the entire former socialist bloc, Asia, Africa, South and Central America and everywhere else in the world are filled. They just want more, and that’s all. And they’re willing to do a lot to get their hands on it. They are ready with the greatest pleasure to serve the interests of any foreign unscrupulous capitalists – Western, American, Chinese, Russian oligarchs, whatever – to the detriment of the interests of their own country and people. And what do we see in cases where the same these local people everywhere organize power relations with each other, outside of external influence? We observe exactly the same greedy and unscrupulous settlement of relations, with a ruthless hierarchy and with the greatest desire serving the interests of the big bad local feudal bandit boys for the interests of our own well-being.
(*And, one of the funniest and insanely stupid things I’ve read and heard is that the problem is that these people outside the gold billion in the opreseed Non-West (of which and I am) don’t have as much as Western people do. And if they have, if the world’s goods “grabbed by the unscrupulous Western big capital” are distributed evenly among all, it will solve the problems in the Non-West. What an incredible piece of junk.
The opposite is always observed, and if this spreads, if the standard of living in the Non-West is massively raised, it will increase both the hunger for more and create the conditions for increasing all the destructive tendencies that are observed in the West in people who have more but think less, that is, the so-called crisis of the meaning of existence (tendencies that are as much the product of deliberate implementation by the vicious elites as the fruit of a ruthless and eager acceptance by the masses below – otherwise they would not have been successful). Not that there isn’t enough of it out in the non-West and now, but they’re not that advanced; in some ways, there are degrees of degradation that are harder to achieve under poorer conditions.)
But what do my eyes see in a comment a little below? Mr. Julius Stanton, undoubtedly with the most noble intentions that I do not question, sincerely sharing his deepest thoughts, tells a fantastic story about the exalted spirit of people outside the West, which there is not even in the fairy tales here (it is not). Such foolishness for uplifting the spirit can be found mainly during national holidays, also in the speeches of local feudals and puppets, who, against the backdrop of their staunch anti-Western rhetoric, both ruthlessly plundered the local population (both in and out of relation with Western bandits), andmercilessly imposed blocks, mandatory vaccinations, arrests “disinfo about the pandemic”, etc., over the same people to whom they tell how great they are “unlike the degraded West”.
__
*But hey, paradoxically for some or not, there were also very good consequences of communism-socialism. For example, in my country, after all the tremendous efforts made by Soros and other American and Western European foundations to “civilize” us about sexual diversity, constantly trying, through senior political figures and public and even state organizations, to impose and expand homodiversity, they face enormous resistance from the “primitive, stupid” local population. 99.9% have no interest. We are not talking about the most extreme forms such as same-sex marriages at all – there are none (at least for now). Not to mention transgenderism, similar to that of the West. This attitude, diligently passed down from the generations born and/or raised in communist times to the next ones born after the (eternal and non-existent) “transition to democracy”, could not have happened if it had not been for the strict prohibition and intolerance during the time of bad communism.
Try to do this without a strong strict State. And you’re going to get something like the West. Dreamers of utopian anarchist societies without power, with understanding between free people, will not agree. I will count that people finding themselves in such a society to change in an instant, and the stronger and smarter will not conspire and master the weaker and dumber. And if the stronger want lgbT for all children, they will have it, as it happens.
**And, to get back to food: it was great in communist times, natural and clean, we exported the highest quality agricultural produce to the whole of Europe (with which we were mortal ideological enemy). And why has this very abruptly and tragically changed “after the changes to democracy” (<-this is joke) and the opening to the West? Because of the West? Or because of the local people here who are most willing to fuck the local population to get rich? But – again – this is by no means only happening through local feudals subordinate to Western capitalists, and there are also non-Western, for example, Russian, but there are also quite local bandits who, without serving external interests, do the same as those who serve to foreign capitalist. So what’s the most important thing? If it is not these current bandits, it will be others, if those now disappear, then immediately the others below are ready to grow as fast as mushrooms to the top to exercise power over the weaker ones.
Control food and control oil and it’s game, set and match:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/06/why-washington-targets-iran-and-venezuela/
Off topic, sort of, but a sad and heart lifting story that many of us would be familiar with:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/06/vindication-for-the-unvaccinated/
Thanks for a good link :-).
Or, lack of vindication. Good article, though depressing…
When I first read Altered Genes, Twisted Truth by Steven Druker, it all became clear how corporations dictate what foods are available. This late in the game, we can still fight back by avoiding highly processed and non-organic foods.
Some people believe that simple, more natural foods are too expensive but that’s a short-term view of life. I half suspect that no-one wants to prepare their own meals any more, preferring a quick stop at one of the millions of fast food outlets that have colonised our every town and city, at least in the five-eyes countries. It seems that there’s no time for the very basis of human life any more – the way we feed our body, let alone anything more complex.
Some democracies in the Free World (TM) already control or prohibit the veg. you grow or the chickens you rear – for your own good. Some US states prohibit wells and solar panels, though they allow a water supply tainted by fracking poisons or lead pipes.
Yes, and the “allow” (ie force upon us) water contaminated by fluoride. Again, mostly in the five-eyes countries.
But you can buy mineral water in the supermarket yes?
You dont need to swallow 5 litre fluoride water every, day nor brush your teeth and your bum with the pipe water.
‘No-one’ is perhaps an exaggeration, but I get your point. I see pop up fruit + veg stores and vegetable box schemes thriving. I see direct marketing of meat sourced from regenerative farms thriving. But they are serving a minority, those who think for themselves.
Agreed. We source much of our food from our local small retailers, especially our local organic store, and sometimes markets too. We really must support these independents to enable them – and us – to survive.
Nah, well past that point, cook or raw/wild salad every day/night. Fast food? NEVER. Guerrilla dietary ontology. Live it yourself.
I love a ‘hot dog’ from time to time ‘with everything’. I know its fast food although it takes more time to make it than a french.
It is my way of making revolution, resistance. To show I am against the system!
Against that the baddy big boys who are using our food as a weapon. A rebel!
There was a time when, at 20 years old, I was stuck in New York City, broke and existing solely on Nedick’s 10 cent coffee and 25 cent burgers. I managed then, and I manage now. Man-age. Experience…..expertise.
Let our actions be the seeds of our destiny.
To the Western indoctrinated mind these concepts seem radical and other worldly because they are. They are ideas espoused by “the other” meaning non-Western people. These notions are indigenous wisdom, cosmology, metaphysics and culture where nature is sacred, the land is to be commonly shared not exploited, and cooperation and reciprocity are the most effective ways to interact. From their perspective, community is not commodification, sharing and concern for one’s fellows are part of being a good person, an obligation for living in a good society.
These notions are foreign to the West which has embraced the materialistic, monopolized technological progress, internalized the selfish mind and are driven by acquisitions, callousness and status.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Somebody must say to America, America if you have contempt for life, if you exploit human beings by seeing them as less than human, if you will treat human beings as a means to an end, you thingafy those human beings. And if you will thingafy persons, you will exploit them economically. And if you will exploit persons economically, you will abuse your military power to protect your economic investments and your economic exploitations. So what America must be told today is that she must be born again. The whole structure of American life must be changed.” Amen to that.
The ‘West’ was born from the ‘East’ which was nourished by the waters of the ‘North’ and the winds of the ‘South’.
Keep going West and you end up East from where you started.
Using broad compass points to delineate modes of ideology is just the same as heaping toxic chemicals into the garden of the human Soul and expecting fruitful nourishment.
We are One World.
Neville Chamberlain is reborn!!
Chamberlain was a good guy, trying to do his best. You have been hoodwinked by “history.”
I have NOT been hoodwinked by history. Chamberlain was indeed a good man, just like Mr Barraclough in Porridge. Too good to see Hitler for what he was and utterly unable to play ‘Bad Cop’ with a megalomaniac.
America may have been an opportunity for some, but not the indigenous population.