GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - Toward food sovereignty: Reclaiming autonomous food systems [pdf]

phorbin · 04-06-2010, 09:41 PM posted to rec.gardens.edible

In article ,
says...

Working through unsent postings

What the hell does the unrelenting stream of obsolete 19th-Century
"leveller" collectivist socio-economic propaganda in the ng have to do
with actual gardening, anyway? Isn't there a forum in which the
world-changers can get together to natter at each other about their
refined and superior sensibilities?

....addressing your points in reverse order and Answering you *in kind*
and only half humourously because you put it this way, and speaking for
myself...

Why no. I won't shut up to spare your unrefined and degenerate
sensibilities.---As I feel it necessary I will speak up here on this
issue.

If you don't like it you have the ability to killfile. That is the only
censorship available to you and that I will accept.

One can't help wondering how much real good such "institutes"
that'd presume to tell the world what it "needs" could do in that same
world if they used their resources and efforts to actually DO SOMETHING
that might make some poor *******'s life a little less miserable or a
little more "sustainable" instead of promulgating yet another
"multimedia" propaganda broadsheet that accomplishes absolutely nothing
except to make a cadre of intellectual twits, mistaking "thinking"
writing and talking for actually _doing_, feel a little less guilty
about its lifestyle. I do not believe for one instant that a single
child will go to bed with a fuller tummy tonight, a year from now, or
five years from now as even an indirect result of the "efforts" of this
"Institute" or of a thousand others like it.

I don't disagree with the feeling behind this. It shows you're thinking
but it also shows you're off the beam by half a parsec.

On the ground, in my conservative Canadian city there's a whole lot of
talking going on that frustrates the doers endlessly.

Essentially we want to expand gardening into as much of the grassy
monoculture wastelands as possible and feed as many people as possible
as much as possible as inexpensively as possible; preferably as
participants, not recipients. ...but we're dealing with a monolithic
aesthetic of bureaucratic urbanized industrialized ignorance which seems
to need tons of paper to begin to justify feeding people, teaching
people to feed themselves, connecting people with the food they eat and
showing in a practical way what it takes for produce to appear on the
table.

The essence of your point is ok but doesn't account for the way things
work in political/bureaucratic culture. Having an
institution/organization behind you even if it is just a few committed
people working out of their homes is a tool to leverage against
political stupidity, inertia and capriciousness.

If you are alone in a campaign, you are ignored as being irrelevant. If
you are a spokesperson for a group of people, you are deemed at least
probably credible.