eco-heroes

the cover story of this week's riverfront times, the st. louis free weekly i picked up while i was there over the holidays: longtime missouri hog farmer russ freeman has gone back to the old healthy way of doing things and organized a thriving co-op around it.

meanwhile, former weapons engineer jim merkel lives in vermont on $5,000 a year and explains how his program of radical simplicity works.

the true price of real food

"Nobody considers what the true price of real food is," writes Jamey Lionette in "We Are What We Eat," an article posted at alternet.org that is also an excerpt from Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed edited by noted food activist Vandana Shiva (South End Press 2007). Lionette runs a neighborhood cafe and market, so his perspective is from the front lines of food activism -- and it's not a rosy picture that he paints. It's a plea for sustainable food that is also partly a history of cheap food in this country, partly an indictment of big agribusiness that extends equally to niche-market chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joes whose mass-produced organics assuage liberal guilt and yet perpetuate neolib economics, partly an obituary to the small farm, and partly a big finger of blame pointed at every one of us. It's inspiring, frustrating, maddening, and every bit correct: food is the definitive real, tangible example of alienated labor, spectacular consumption, big agribusiness biopower, American exceptionalism and individualism. It's spot on with statements of fact, point-blank like "Eating can no longer be an individual act," or more long-ranging like

Our planet's fertile land has decayed, been poisoned, and been transformed into factories while we have been too busy and out of touch with our food to notice. The people who know how to use the land to produce food have lost their place on the land, and we did not notice because we no longer know who produces our food.

He concludes, "We have to ask ourselves what we want, food or our current economic system. We need to realize that our system itself is not sustainable and has failed."