Today, Americans spend almost 20 cents of every dollar managing disease–diabetes, allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity–and only 10 cents of every dollar on food.

The jury is still out on what exactly may be causing all of these epidemics, but genetics don’t change that quickly, the environment does. And increasing evidence points to the role that diet is playing in the onset of disease.

In a perfect world, we’d all be growing our own organic vegetable garden, but most of us don’t yet live in that world. With picky eaters, limited time and a limited budget, we are trying to do the best we can with what we’ve got and are frustrated by the price discrepancy between conventional food and “organic” food at the grocery store.

But have you ever wondered why organic food costs more?

Organic food costs more than its conventional counterparts because our taxpayer dollars are not used to support organic farms to the same extent that our dollars are used to support conventional farms. Under our current system, it is more profitable for farmers to grow crops laced with chemicals than organic ones because they will receive larger government handouts from the USDA farm subsidy program, more marketing assistance and stronger crop insurance programs.

If farmers do choose to grow organic crops, it costs them more because not only do they not receive the same level of financial handouts from the government, but they are also charged a fee to prove that their crops are safe. On top of that, they are then charged a fee to label their crops as “organic.” As a result, organic farmers have a higher cost structure–with added fees and expenditures required to bring their products to market–while our taxpayer dollars are used to subsidize the crops with the chemicals.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to use our taxpayer dollars to subsidize the crops without chemicals given the increasing evidence pointing to the impact that these environmental insults are having on our health? What if our most powerful weapon in the war on health care is a farm subsidy?

Health care reform could begin at the USDA, with an equal allocation of our taxpayer dollars between organic and conventional farming. The USDA could continue health care reform by providing equivalent marketing assistance and crop insurance programs and by eliminating the organic certification fee farmers are required to pay in order to label their crops as “USDA Organic.”

If we invite the USDA to be part of health care reform, they could level the economic playing field for the farmers, enabling more farms to grow crops free of chemicals, synthetic and genetically engineered ingredients, which would, in turn, increase the supply of these crops in the marketplace–and as any good economist knows, would drive down costs. Organic food would be more affordable to more of us.

Safe food is a social justice issue that our taxpayer dollars could be used to support. Perhaps it’s time to invite the USDA into the health care debate and address the current system under which our taxpayer dollars are being used to externalize the costs of these chemicals onto the health of our families. With the USDA at the table, health care reform could begin on the farm.

We need healthcare. Many of us cannot afford it. Farming is physical labor with physical risks and with great demands on performance over time. As a nation served by many workers, some unionized, some wearing uniforms, we recognize the importance of retaining skilled practitioners with benefits. Our firefighters, coast guards and electricians are all provided with benefits, and healthcare. Why not farmers? Our enlisted soldiers and their families are provided with coverage for their service. Why not our farmers?

The reclaiming of our local economy will hopefully, in the next decade, be characterized by greater institutional regionalism. This means schools and hospitals buying food from local farms, this means deep partnerships of commerce within residential districts and within agricultural districts. In order to succeed at this level of engagement, the farmers will negotiate the hurdles of liability, red tape and logistics of rescaling. We’ll be operating forklifts and mid-sized delivery vans; we’ll be scaling up production. We will spend a lot of time resizing, retrofitting and rethinking systems of food production and distribution, in real time, and at real physical risk to ourselves. This is important work. We cannot lose the hardworking members of the team to illness and injury. We cannot lose any fingers or toes. We cannot afford for our farmers to be distracted by financial worry associated with the birth of
a child or the infection of a blister. We need to provide health coverage for farmers, young and old, owners and workers, for the longevity of the sector and of the nation.

Lobbying for these issues is crucial. Are you interested in joining our National Young Farmers Coalition and working with partners to figure out possible solutions to the affordable health care situation? Please join the Greenhorns mailing list so that we can keep you in the loop. And read more about what’s happening on the ground for young farmers in our newsletter, the Greenhorns Circular.

Gawande goes on to explain that agriculture was, like health care, a ridiculously expensive and yet crucial sector in the early 1900s, when “more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food…and farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American work-force.” The author credits former “agricultural explorer” Seaman Knapp, hired by the USDA in 1903, with getting farmers to farm differently through efforts that started with a pilot program. Knapp’s work began in Texas, where he encouraged a single farmer to test out a list of simple innovations, including “deeper plowing and better soil preparation, the use of only the best seed, the liberal application of fertilizer, and thorough cultivation to remove weeds and aerate the soil around the plants.” The success of this initial program led other farmers to follow Knapp’s guidance, leading to similar “demonstration farms” across the country and to the establishment of the USDA Cooperative Extension Service, employing seven thousand extension agents nationwide by 1930. Other USDA pilot programs led to comparative-effectiveness research, investment in providing farmers with weather forecasts, seasonal statistics, and tremendously helpful information broadcasting. Gawande claims that the “hodgepodge” of pilot programs led to ultimately successful change, in that agricultural productivity increased dramatically, food prices fell by over fifty per cent, and farming came to employ only twenty per cent of the workforce by 1930. “Today,” he goes on, “food accounts for just eight per cent of household income and two per cent of the labor force. It is produced on no more land than was devoted to it a century ago, and with far greater variety and abundance than ever before in history.”

Testing, Testing makes several worthwhile, take-home points. The author characterizes the reformation of the health care system (like the transformation of the agricultural system) as a problem which is not “amenable to a technical solution,” or a “one-time fix,” but rather one that requires a process of change. He recognizes farming and medicine as both involving “hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country.” And he encourages his readers to resist their cynical reaction to the government, writing that his solution is one in which the government “has a crucial role to play,” to guide the system, rather than running it. He rather shockingly fails to mention, however, the failure of the agricultural transformation that is his model for modern day health care reform.

The failure of the 20th century agricultural transformation is made manifest in the one product that (appropriately enough) both farming and health care would ideally generate: human health.

Over the past century, food prices have indeed gone down, agricultural production has indeed gone up, and America has, on paper, been relieved of devoting to agriculture the significant force of labor formerly required by farming. This was all considered a success for several decades, until obesity, diabetes, early sexual maturity, and E. coli food poisoning (along with dozens of other health problems) were recently recognized as the effects of industrial agriculture. The modern American diet – of highly processed foods made with high fructose corn syrup, meat from animals injected with antibiotics and hormones, and genetically modified foods not quite approved for human consumption – is one of the main causes of our deteriorating health. Not to mention that industrial agriculture has irreparably damaged our nation’s environmental health, has dangerously demolished biodiversity, and still employs a fantastically under-paid, under-represented workforce of undocumented immigrants.

Gawande perhaps deserves the benefit of the doubt, for his article is optimistic, and encourages the American people to see more in the new health care bill than 2,074 pages that do not “even meet the basic goal that [we] had in mind: to lower costs.” But his comparison begs for the recognition of what went wrong in the transformation of agriculture, because of a lack of holistic thinking, of preventative solutions, of respect for resources. This time around, unless we are careful, the price drop and the productivity increase will still not provide the one thing we all want more than a smaller bill. It will not provide us with health.

Cross-posted from Thoughts on the Table

Whole Foods and Starbucks are backing a “compromise” to strip the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) of a key provision. The so-called “card-check” provision would require employers to recognize its employees’ union once a majority has signed union authorization cards. Currently, employers often refuse to recognize new unions even if all their employees have signed up. New contracts often take years to negotiate, meanwhile workers are frequently subject to harassment and sometimes fired. The card-check provision is so central to this legislation, it has been called “the card-check bill.”

Food industry giants from WalMart, to meatpacking titans Smithfield, and Hormel, to McDonalds have sent out an army of lobbyists to fight the pro-union bill. WalMart has spent $10.5 million in federal PAC spending since 2000, plus contributions to other corporate front groups lobbying against the bill.

However, unlike out-and-out opponents of the legislation, Starbucks and Whole Foods have built labor friendly images by supporting fair-trade and offering better wages than some other chains, despite being aggressively anti-union. Now it appears the retailers are cashing in on that image to modify the EFCA and remain, as Mackey says, “100% union-free.”

The hypocrisy is not lost on Whole Foods’ employees – one states, people need “to know just how false their [Whole Foods’] ‘socially responsible’ image is, especially with regards to their own workers.”

This summer Whole Foods employees are voting on their new health benefits package – the “choices” amount to a significant cut from the previous years’ packages. Reflecting employee discontent, a recent press release alludes to the need for unions to confront these cuts, saying that without “a method for organized, collective action workers can expect this promise from their employer, ‘Whole Food Market reserves the right to change, revise or eliminate any of the policies and/or benefits at any time.’”

Though reporters have discussed the EFCA compromise as if it is a done-deal, AFL-CIO union leader Candace Lund reminds us, “reports of the death of card-check have been prematurely exaggerated . . . We don’t have a compromise, just an article [making reference to the New York Times story].”

Lund’s support of the “card-check” provision is just one way unions are seeking better conditions for workers. Within the food system, organized labor has played a significant role in job quality. Research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research indicates that unionized workers in the retail food industry make 31 percent more than their non-union counterparts. The premium is even higher for part-timers (33 percent), non-supervisory workers (45 percent), and cashiers (52 percent). Union members are also more than twice as likely get part or all of their health insurance premiums paid through their job.

Yet, unionization rates have fallen from their post World War II peak of 35%, to 26% in 1975 and today only 12% of all workers and 8% of private sector workers are unionized. This drop in union representation has come with a significant drop in wages. For example, supermarket workers’ real average earnings fell by 31% between 1978 and 1996.

Similarly, wages in the meatpacking sector have declined in real terms by 45% since the 1980′s. While pay got worse, line speeds almost doubled. Turnover rates and injuries began to mount. Patterns are similar in the packaging and processing sectors. Along with the devaluing of processing and packing labor has come countless food safety scares in everything from cookie dough to hamburger to salad greens.

The fact that food industry giants have come out in force against Employee Free Choice is indicative of something larger. Falling wages and health care coverage are trends that are recurring throughout the food system and public policy underwrites the decline – through selective enforcement of labor and anti-trust laws, but also through state welfare programs. As the food industry has become increasingly concentrated over the past two decades – cost-cutting measures have disproportionately shifted to workers whose poverty line wages are often supplemented by Medicaid, food stamps, child nutrition programs, direct government payments, and other government services.

The total estimated cost of state and federal payouts for Burger King employees alone is over $273 million a year. Multiply $273 million over all major fast food and low-wage retail food outlets, and the government is shelling out billions of dollars a year to subsidize the industry’s bottom line. According to research done by the AFL-CIO, in the company’s home state of Arkansas, Wal-Mart employees are the largest group of Medicaid recipients from any one company, accounting for 40% of the total state Medicaid budget.

One way to reverse this trend would be to make food sector jobs good jobs – by making it easier for workers who want to form a union to do so. This is why an intact Employee Free Choice Act (with majority sign-up) is crucial.

Whole Food’s John Mackey is no fool – while he may have galvanized supporters of health care reform by speaking up, on the issue that will eat into his company’s profit margin, he remains silently, yet powerfully active.

A version of this was published at Common Dreams

My awakening to the connection between agriculture, social justice, and health came during a semester abroad in South Africa. There, during a stint in a public hospital in a small city surrounded by rural territories, I watched as HIV-positive mothers waited for hours each month—some having traveled two days in packed vans—to receive a free box of nutrient-dense foods from the government. Those mothers were, without exception, Black and poor. Few of them had access to land as their families did before apartheid, and thus their ability to provide good food for themselves and their families had been systematically stripped from them. Today, with the AIDS epidemic spreading like wildfire across the country, the poor’s labor force—and thus earned income—has fallen sharply, making it difficult to afford food at market. As malnutrition and acute hunger have become more common among poor populations in South Africa, HIV and tuberculosis spread faster and faster, as both diseases are easily passed to those with compromised immune systems from inadequate nutrition.

What does South Africa’s social and medical plight have anything do with with healthcare in America? We’re a first world country, after all. Indeed, and although our labor force may not be dwindling from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis as South Africa’s is, we have our own epidemics to deal with, foremost among them obesity and all the diseases it brings with it such as Type II diabetes and severe heart problems. America’s children are strung out on high fructose corn syrup—concealed in nearly every food in our supermarkets—and thus cannot concentrate in school or develop properly, making it difficult for them to succeed academically and, subsequently, in the job market. According to study after study (or firsthand experience from spending an hour in any public emergency room), the groups most affected by diet-related health problems are the poor and non-white.

Eva Salber, one of the pioneers of the community health movement once wrote, “diseases resulting from societal inequities can’t be cured by medical care alone—no matter its excellence.” One of the most blaring inequities in our society today lies beyond lack of access to medical treatment in the inaccessibility of the means by which to prevent ill-health in the first place: good food.

The effects of our broken food system affect all of us, even the small percentage of Americans who choose—and can afford—to eat a healthy, safe diet. Treating chronic diseases is a major drain on our healthcare system an tax dollars, as is true in South Africa, and even equitable and accessible medical care for all will not provide a silver bullet fix to our population’s deteriorating health. If we are ever to enact lasting change on our health as a population, we all need healthy food to be accessible and affordable. Not the kind of healthy food that announces itself as such with a flashy label on a vacuum-packed wrapper, but the kind that comes from an ecologically and economically sound agricultural system, one that produces vegetables, fruits, grains, and animal products, not simply commodities to be processed into food products. We — individually and collectively — need real food to attain health.

America has watched, somewhat wide-eyed and dumbfounded, as a modern “back to the land” movement has emerged. Wealthy white college students, the ones have traditionally vied for summer internships in law, medicine, and finance — are increasingly swapping suits for dirty jeans and a spot on a farm crew for the summer. The number of farmers markets has exploded. And even among the most under-served communities in the country, the number of community gardens, community supported agriculture (CSA) operations, and community kitchens are growing faster than summer zucchini. But we can’t allow the movement towards systematic change in our food system to stop there. Without policy in place to support a new generation of farmers who have economic incentives to grow food for consumption rather than producing commodity crops (i.e. soy beans, corn, and wheat) for the corporate processing industry, and until we can make procuring farmland in rural areas and green space in densely populated communities less cost prohibitive, we will never be able to produce the amount of healthy food we need to support a healthy population.

We can argue until we’re blue in the face about the merits of publicly- versus privately-funded healthcare. We can ration medical services or not. The quality versus quantity debate as it relates to medical care can rage on for years. And we can calculate the potential cost of every permutation we come up with. But unless we begin to address root causes of ill health in this country — hunger, poverty, social injustice, and an agricultural system that feeds corporate greed rather than the citizens of this country — the costly burden on our health and thus our medical system will never diminish. President Obama and members of Congress, take a hint from the First Lady and her wildly popular garden and invite the farmers to the table. Our nation’s health depends on it.

In no-till systems, farmers plant directly into fields without plowing. One of the main reasons farmers plow is to control weeds. In a practice that has become known among critics as “chemical no-till,” farmers idle the the plow and rely on chemical herbicides for weed control.

…As a source of carbon sequestration, chemical no-till is a highly questionable practice. In a 2006 peer-reviewed paper [PDF] called “Tillage and soil carbon sequestration” what do we really know?,” a group of soil scientists led by John M. Baker of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service took a hard look at conventional no-till. They report: “Long-term, continuous gas exchange measurements have also been unable to detect C gain due to reduced tillage.” Translation: No-till doesn’t seem to sequester carbon. Their conclusion: “Though there are other good reasons to use conservation tillage, evidence that it promotes C sequestration is not compelling.” The report compelled climate expert and frequent Grist contributor Joe Romm to declare that no-till farming “does not save carbon and is not a carbon offset.”

So the USDA itself thinks the practice’s emissions impact is bogus. In fact, there’s even evidence that chemical no-till leads to increased carbon emissions through nitrous oxide outgassing from the synthetically fertilized fields. And who’s taking the lead in all this? Why our good friends at Monsanto, of course!

Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” seeds–genetically modified to withstand lashings of Monsanto’s herbicide glyphosate–have greatly facilitated chemical no-till in the Midwest: farmers can spray their fields with Roundup as needed, without affecting the crops. According to the Center for Food Safety [PDF], glyphosate use jumped 15-fold between between 1994 (when GMOs were first released) and 2005, generating a windfall in Roundup sales for Monsanto. Monsanto now clears more than $1 billion per year in profits from Roundup alone.

Monsanto has even created a new carbon-trading entity to take advantage of this glyphosate-fueled scheme. These guys don’t fool around.

The unfortunate thing is that there is a no-till technique out there whose carbon sequestration benefits have solid science behind it — the Rodale Institute’s “organic no-till” regime, which I wrote about some time ago with regards to saving bees. So, there’s hope right?

Nope. Because this is Congress we’re talking about. To paraphrase Frank Herbert (and apologies to all you Dune fans out there), “He who controls the committee, controls the universe.” And, the man you love to hate — House Ag Committee Chair Rep. Collin Peterson, is in charge of ag offsets hearings. Guess how many sustainable ag experts or farmers are testifying? Would you believe “zero”?

This is shades of the recent and under-reported harassment of single-payer advocates during recent health care reform hearings. Not only were they not invited, but when a group of nurses attended hearings wearing t-shirts advocating their single-payer positions, they were arrested and thrown in jail. No, I’m not making this up.

If Congress doesn’t hear the facts that apparently means they don’t exist. So much for the return of science to Washington, DC. When the truth hurts, it’s best to ignore it. And barring that, arrest it.

In an interview with Joe Klein of Time Magazine today, Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged the brilliant letter to the next president by Michael Pollan and said that agriculture is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, is a national security risk, and is built on cheap oil:

“I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael
Pollan about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is
built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is
contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And
in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to
national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices
or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are
partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because
they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease,
obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in
healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think
about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true
on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy
in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security
and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when
I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to
just stabilize the immediate economic situation.”

Photo: megpi

Raj Patel is the author of the book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. He will be speaking on August 29th at Slow Food Nation’s Food for Thought. You can read more about his work on his website.

This is Part 2 of this interview. The first portion can be found here.

Paula: How did the advent of the supermarkets change the way people think about food?

Raj: It was a slow process. The reason supermarkets emerged was because in 1917 you were in a situation, much like the one we have today, where there were sudden food price rises, and retailers were looking for a way to shift food cheaply, and to reduce the price of selling food so they could pass those savings onto the consumer and get more of the market. The way that was most successful was precisely through the supermarket, a way of presenting food and goods to people without having an intermediary.

Paula: So this supermarket idea is what made cheap food the standard?

Raj: I think the idea of the supermarket was to bring Fordism to food production. And what that means is that if you standardize everything about a way a place looks, functions and the way that the components pass through it and in that process food becomes another component that gets trucked through a warehouse and processed. The fact is that most tomatoes are now picked green, because they can stand the rigor of the transportation when they are unripe, and then they’re ripened with ethylene gas. That’s a really unnatural way of eating. And it’s precisely that taste of the sort of watery supermarket tomato that makes us remember fondly the homegrown version. That process of the power of supermarkets shaping the food we then get to select from is a fine example of how this sort of modern life that is geared around convenience is geared around fast food, which has its origins in industrial capitalism and the application of industrial capitalism for food is destroying the quality of our food and is harming us.

Paula: And you say its paradoxically eliminating our ability to choose.

Raj: Well that’s it because we are taught that if you go to the supermarket, and you have hundreds of varieties of cereal or coffee for example, selecting between them is free choice. But it’s not. All it is offering is a broader palate of constrained choices, and thus a constrained outcome. The word choice is what we apply to that afterwards, but in fact we are being denatured [and] we are being made to forget that there are broader choices, that there are sort of strange local fruits and vegetables that require a little bit of hunting down and a little bit of familiarity with food and with cooking, but which are fresher, better for you, and cheaper. But those choices are not on offer in the supermarket because they are not profitable.

Paula: Does that mean that you don’t think that supermarkets could work as part of a sustainable food system?

Raj: Supermarkets work because they fit into a life that demands fast food, food that is convenient, and that is pre-cooked. The produce section in the supermarket is one of the least profitable; supermarkets are kind of in the business of making us buy other stuff. That’s why the milk section is always in the back, even in Whole Foods. That’s the very telling illustration of the fact that supermarkets are not in the business of being friendly. They’re in the business of shifting products. The kinds of social relations that are involved in a supermarket are not the kinds you need for a sustainable system, and by that I mean knowing your producer. If you look at the Slow Food founding documents, they are a declaration of independence from the fast-paced world of capitalism in which food is just another thing that you need to get through the day rather than a moment of sensuousness and pleasure. And the founding ideas behind Slow Food look fairly anti-capitalist, and I think perhaps that’s not a bad idea, because the reason we need supermarkets is because we are working so hard for such little money and for such little joy. We need to reorganize our social system in order that everyone can eat properly. Supermarkets become superfluous in that more sustainable system, because actually we do have time to engage with our food more, and we do have time to go to the farmer’s markets, and we do have income to do that.

Paula: You suggest that, “poor diets are a symptom of systematic lack of control over our spaces and our lives.” What do you mean?

Raj: Certainly in the U.S. and the UK and in Spain you have a situation where working class people are more likely to be overweight. Now that translates into a lot of scorn, particularly in the Unites States, being heaped onto people of color for being fat. I think that sort of prejudice masks the fact that for working Americans, [there is] very little choice about how to eat. Just as an experiment, I went around the East Bay looking for ways to spend a week’s worth of food stamps, about $21 per person, and the only way to make the food stamps stretch as far as they could was by buying crap. I then went to the farmer’s market in the Ferry Building here, and tried to see what I could get for $21. I got a loaf of bread, some cheese, half a dozen eggs and a few tomatoes. There’s no way you can live on that for a week. Too often poverty gets written out of the equation when we think of both obesity and hunger. But the reason people go hungry today is not because there’s not enough food, it’s because people are poor. And the reason that we have obesity is because the choices that are available to many working people are very poor food choices. And that means that those low cost foods have a very high cost in the long term. At the end of the day poverty means that you are unable to control your environment the way rich people can.

Paula: Are there ways that we can start to change how people feed themselves, the choices they have?

Raj: I think that we need some deeper political change around redistribution. There was a time where you could say redistribution and not be howled at as a communist. I think its important to reclaim the idea that redistribution is an integral part of a healthy food system. Because you can’t have such a food system when people can’t afford the food.

Paula: Specifically when you say redistribution what do you mean?

Raj: Redistribution is not just about cash in pocket, but creating other kinds of freedoms to be able to access food. Increasing social programs, reducing the tax burden on poor people, increasing it on rich people, and investing in broad social programs like healthcare. One of the reasons Americans are working so hard is that they need healthcare, and everywhere else in the civilized world kind of takes it for granted, and that’s why a healthcare system would reduce the need for things like supermarkets because people would be working less. Food is medicine. The Hippocratic idea, that food is a way of keeping our bodies healthy and at the moment we are poisoning ourselves, which is why life expectancy is declining in the United States for the poorest people, particularly women. The reason that governments in Europe are taking the obesity epidemic far more seriously than in the United States is because in Europe when the population becomes obese, it’s the government healthcare system that has to pick up the tab. And that’s why [the European] governments are very into preventative measures, which in the United States would be seen as unconstitutional. Things like banning advertising food to children would be seen here as an infringement on companies rights of free speech, where as in the UK the government has no problem with that. They say if we don’t do this, half of British kids will be obese by 2050 and we will have to pay the cost, so you don’t get to advertise near our schools.

Paula: You’ve said that we are not going to change the situation by shopping.

Raj: Don’t get me wrong, I buy fair trade if there is an option. Because do you want hostile trade? I don’t want that, no one wants that. But it is a very American delusion to think that we can together change the world by shopping. Here we are kind of encouraged to think that way because we’ve been so denatured as people that the only way we can think of ourselves is as consumers. But we’re not consumers, we are human beings. And being a human being is a much richer, and more engaged and fulfilling idea of what and who we are than merely people who shop. And I think part of the transformation is realizing that we are richer and bigger, and more beautiful and fantastic and more able to change our world than our supermarkets would like to make us believe. We can change it through engaging with other people, we can change it by growing our own food and sharing that food, there’s a range of things that we can do, but there’s so much that we can be doing that isn’t about shopping and that you can’t get off the shelf. And I think that’s all for the good.

Photo by lyzadanger