(ABOVE) OUR FUTURE: Public School Children sing their school's green anthem with fists raised
Food. Like air, sun and water, it's an essential ingredient for life.
Right now I know at least a dozen people who are either reading Michael Pollen's In Defense of Food or the Omnivore's Dilemma. Well, some of them are listening to it on CD in their cars.
Many of these folks thought Michelle Obama's organic food garden on the White House grounds was a sign of hope in this country's experience of junk food poison and obesity. Then Obama hired his top Department of Agriculture folk from the Agri-Chemical-Industrial complex. So Big Ag continues to run the country's food policies.
Jean-Paul Jaud's documentary, now out on DVD, released in the US as "Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution" is a brilliant addition to discussions on capitalist food policy and alternatives.
Much like the United States, France's agriculture is dominated by pesticide-driven farming. French big business' farming techniques use 76,000 tons of chemical pesticides on grains, fruits and vegetables each year. Pollutants that we breath, drink and ingest. France is the world's 3rd biggest user of chemical fertilizer.
In the last 25 years France has suffered a 93% increase in cases of cancer among men. This cannot be entirely blamed on agricultural pesticides. However, in small farming communities, workers and children's cancer rates appear to be dramatically higher than for their urban counterparts.
One such farming community is the town of Barjac, in southern France. The town recently re-elected Edouard Chaulet for Mayor, by a margin of 70%. He is a contraversial figure. He is one of many Communist Party Mayors in France. That is not what makes him contraversial. The Mayor and town council declared three years ago that, given the area's high incidence of childhood cancer, all food in the town school would be organic. That it would also give contracts to local farmers that are organic or switched to organic farming. Soon, neighboring schools joined the program and the local private school's lunches, as well as meals-on-wheels for the elderly, come from the public school's kitchens.
What made the greatest impression on me during the documentary, aside from the human tragedy of rural parents' stories of their children's cancer, was the functioning of the school. It reminded me of the 2002 documentary To Be and To Have (Etre et Avoir), another film that captures alternatives that exist within the French public school system. I would be happy for my 1st grader to go to either of these schools. Like organic farming itself, the school canteen is more labor intensive than conventional, but with hundreds of millions unemployed worldwide, what better time to have more people working?
In the Barjac school: kids learn the basics. But they also learn gardening and are food educated. And why not? Is this not an important part of socializing children into adults. Kitchen staff prepare the organic lunches, and then walk around helping to encourage the kids to eat a more varied diet. The food is served on tables where kids dish out the helpings. Once in a while the school chef comes into class to ask what kids like and don't of lunches served. It's a huge leap from treating kids like little pawns that are being prepared for their robotic office or Walmart jobs.
The actual French title of the documentary is Nos Enfants Nous Accuseront, or, Our Children Will Blame Us. It's about understanding the present, challenging the past and creating a new future.
Mayor Chaulet argues that every public school and public hospital in France should serve organic-only meals, providing organic farms with their first mass market. This would allow organic farms to break out of the confines of the market, which has made organic food unaffordable to working people. Subsidies to Big Agriculture must be ended, the movie argues also: why should we pay chemical companies to poison us?
During the documentary, a local farmer walks the camera down the border between his organic farm of 30-years and his neighbor's conventional chemical-driven farm. He takes a shovel to the conventional farm soil: it is hard and clay-like. He then walks ten feet to his own farm and digs in, the soil is like potting soil: it crumbles, it's porous with several worms in it. It is living: the worms help it breath air and drink rainwater.
The level of the conventional farm soil is also 15-inches below his. It has eroded away. In another 30-years it will hit bedrock. It has become so chemical-dependant that you couldn't grow anything on it without chemicals now. It reminded me of the addiction to money that drives the ruling class of the world. Capitalism is utterly unsustainable.
The industrialized world now faces, for the first time since the birth of capitalism, a falling life expectancy: we are being poisoned slowly. All that is needed to turn things around is the political will and power to end capitalism's domination. That will be done, because humanity has no other choice.
1 comment:
The beauty is that you don't have to have a lot of land to make a difference: The soil on the 'landscaping patch' where we compost the 'waste' of our pet food company, Onesta Organics, became alive after a few months of depositing our (organic) bio 'waste'. The untreated patch in front of neighboring building remains dead.
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