#F27
Today was a big day for big food.
Judge Naomi Buchwald ruled that farmers could not sue seed giant Monsanto for the threat of transgenic seed contamination. At the same time, people from all over the world gathered to protest the consolidation of our food system. This growing movement represents a sea change in people’s relationship with food, our most intimate commodity. From guerilla gardens to home-cooked feasts for strangers to today’s seed exchange at the New York Stock Exchange (poster above), people are finding creative ways to connect to food and to each other.
Creative expression is a critical part of this - and many - grassroots revolutions. It can make something distant feel close.
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“The system isn’t working for the 1%, either. If you were a CEO, you would be making the same choices they do. The institutions have their own logic. Life is pretty bleak at the top, too. And all of the baubles of the rich, they’re kind of this phony compensation for the loss of what’s really important: the loss of community, the loss of connection, the loss of intimacy, the loss of meaning.
Everyone wants to live a life of meaning…Joint consumption doesn’t create intimacy. Only joint creativity and gifts create intimacy and connection.
You have such gifts.”
Charles Eisenstein, author of Sacred Economics, featured on OccupyLove
MIC CHECK
In 1964, philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously proclaimed, “The medium is the message.” This now-ubiquitous statement, known as the McLuhan Equation, is regularly taken out of context. It is assumed that “the medium” is exclusively related to mass communications, and “the message” is information or content.
Not so.
There is no truer expression of the McLuhan Equation than the human microphone put into practice at Occupy Wall Street. The action is a simple call and response, an amplification of a a single voice through a crowd without the use of speakers or microphones (disallowed at Zuccotti Park and other public meeting spaces). The human mic transforms every listener into an active participant - an embodiment of the message. According to McLuhan, “the message” is the change that a new innovation brings to the public sphere, “the medium” is the extension of self, and the relationship between the two - the socio-cultural change the medium engenders - is the point of interest.
I participated in the People’s Assembly organized by OccupyFood Justice in support of the seed organizations, farmers and food NGOs that filed suit against Monsanto for transgenic crop contamination. Before speaking, I was absolutely terrified of the people’s microphone. I was worried I would not be able to get my message across and that I would feel silly waiting for responses or hearing my words repeated back to me.
Not so.
The space in between - where meaning was created - was palpable. The slow chorus transformed words into messages and listening into engagement. The words I spoke were no longer mine, because every person who spoke them did so in their own voice, with their own emphasis and intonation. Perhaps they struggled with some of the words as they said them (as I did with some of the other speakers) or maybe they felt their conviction grow stronger as they spoke truths that resonated (which I also experienced). Regardless, speaking the words changed our relationship to them. We were, at once, responding to and embodying individual voices and something deeper and collective. In that moment, the words - and all that they held - belonged to all of us.
The Truth as We Want It To Be
Political philosopher Antonio Gramsci said in his prison notebooks, “Each man participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is to bring into being new modes of thought.” In other words, we have the power to maintain or transform the way we see the world.
Gramsci was a Marxist who believed that control of the wealthy within the capitalist system was maintained not only by political and economic might, but also ideologically by fostering a one percent culture that the bourgeois made the norm for the 99 percent. The Occupy movements we are in the midst of are what Gramsci would call attempts to overthrow the cultural hegemony and reclaim world views that more accurately reflect our truths and values.
