The following is the concluding half of a two-part article. The first part appeared in the previous issue of SftP, May/June 1979 issue.
Tag - food
Remember the environmental movement? It actually began quite early with the publication of Silent Spring, in which Rachel Carson publicized the dramatic ecological consequences of the use and misuse of pesticides. But it did not gain any significant momentum until we realized that not only sparrows and condors were...
Early in August, I accompanied a reporter to Northampton, Massachusetts to do a story on a community canning center. The Center consists of a one room extension of the Northampton Hall of records, a huge canning kit with accessories and three staff members. We decided to film the story line around the process of...
We gave this course because MIT has no regular course in plant biology, because we had some new teaching ideas, and because we wanted to discuss technological and political aspects of the world food crisis. Since we are at an elite institution and we were teaching under informal circumstances we had various advantages...
Rising food prices affect the poor disproportionately because they must spend a larger portion of their income on food than do higher-income families. Rising food prices also hurt the poor in another way: poor families in the United States are much more likely than higher-income families to have an inadequate diet...
The nineteen sixties meant, for many people, the birth of an understanding of our society which went beyond the conventional political attitudes to the perception of a pervasive pattern of injustice, greed and exploitation. Attempts to effect change on the basis of a moral appeal failed, leaving many of the...
Two-thirds of the world's population is malnourished and many people are starving this year. It is commonly assumed that a country does not produce enough food only if it cannot. If it were possible, the food would obviously be raised. Three reasons are generally given for widespread hunger: (a) A country's farmers...
Many people feel that the solution to our food problems is to put the Del Montes in moth balls and bring back the Mom and Pop stores and family farms. We think the problem is much deeper. Because the Golden Rule in our economy is Seek Profits, new Del Montes would eventually spring up to replace the old. But we would...
Science and scientists have been described as instruments of development. Indeed they are. But they can also be used as instruments of underdevelopment and of neocolonial exploitation. The problems of increasing the production of food in underdeveloped countries have been laid in the lap of Science and Technology. But...
This year I have been growing vegetables in my backyard, and when I can, baking my own bread. While a sense of back-to-the-earth may be a part of my motivations, my vegetable garden is also, in a way, my personal protest against capitalism. I have come to realize that foods are corporate products, not grown to feed...