Editorial
An alternative vision for Carrs/Safeway
The American supermarket is a marvel. A superabundance of neatly packaged food products line the shelves, and shopping carts are wheeled down the wide, clean aisles, loaded high. In some nations this would be a miracle. But here an old man is filled with sadness and hopelessness about the loss of quality, which he remembers with nostalgia.
The explanation is not immediately obvious. There is a subtle flavor in every bite we eat, a foreboding sense that something is terribly wrong.
The key to understanding supermarkets (or anything at all) is to trace their causes back to the source. On average food we buy at local stores travels 3,000 miles, and it often comes from poor countries which do not have the same protection for workers or the environment that we have in the U.S. In any case, the food usually bland, highly processed food grown in industrial farms.
We can only guess where or how our food was made. We can’t even know if the food is genetically modified (it is illegal for communities to require that this information be disclosed to consumers).
Understanding these tangible causes is one thing. But we can follow the influences even further back, to the vision which lies at the heart of the process. We need to know why the food was grown and sold: who cared for it, and what they cared about.
It is the care with which a product is made that imparts the subtle flavor that makes it what it is. The value of a product is the depth of care and how it serves life. This is the inner nature of the food we buy.
When there is no care, the sadness spreads. Even a processed, chemically-saturated, genetically modified slice of American cheese can sustain life. But food made with care can inspire joy, if it is part of a worldwide process that is really life-giving: a chain of farmers, fertilizers, land, transportation, packaging and commerce that is founded in love. That may not be the world we live in now. But it is the true meaning of Carrs/Safeway and what it is called to become (and what we call for it to become).
Why are we are ballooning up like blowfish? It is the body’s expression of our culture’s choice to raise standard of living over quality of life. The underlying paradigm is a global industrial system in which a mechanical way of thinking regiments life. The industrial food system is founded on the use of force: the power of technology, money, and exploitation of resources and labor.
For most of us the response will not be a return to pre-technological society (though small, local farms have a special role to play and should be supported). But the same technology that conquers space and devours farms could be integrated with thoughtfulness for land, animals, and people.
It is a law of the land that we will reap what we sow. If the inputs are mechanical or brutal, our life will be the same. But if they are just, reflective, and gentle, our harvest will be abundant.
Industrial agribusiness is powerful. But a vision is mightier than the sword. All we need do is clarify and strengthen our vision of food, and, in one very fertile growing season, that world will burst into being.
(For more ideas on how to judge the meaning of food see pages 9 & 10)
“Being in the declining years of my life (age 70), I want to take this opportunity to vent my feelings as to the decline of almost every aspect of our existence. Meat is full of hormones and steroids, tastes like paper pulp. Vegetables, unless grown in the Mat-Su area, taste like library paste....Sausages and wieners are full of mechanically separated chicken (skins, veins, gristle). Breakfast cereals cost five times as much as dried dog food with one-tenth the food value....I feel sorry for our young people, who no doubt will see the results of this.” Letter to Anchorage Daily News, September, 2005