Could Our Problems Today Stem From a Very Fundamental Shift?
G'Day Folks,
Its been quite chilly on the farm of late, we had ice on the windshield Friday morning before we set off to finish the week's home deliveries. This means the veg will be tasting much sweeter as it increases the sugar levels in its sap to prevent it freezing. So hopefully this week you get to taste our newest Cauliflower variety called “Song Cauliflower”!
Our resident food lover and incredible cook Lochie, who lives and works with us on the Sohip farm, tried this new veg out last week and said “ It's the perfect roasting Cauliflower! The long sweet florets allow heat to surround almost every part turning each section golden and beautifully crisp”. To find our more, be sure to check out the recipe using this delicious new veg on our new Recipes Blog.
Ok, now I was sort of struggling to think about what to share with you all this week, not because I don't have a million things I want to share, but because I don't want to overwhelm you all with a constant stream of doom and gloom surrounding farming and health. Look, there are a lot of really troubling things going on in our food system and when we pull back the curtain and take a deeper look, you start to realise every single problem comes back to a single point. That single point is how we see ourselves and how we see nature. So rather than focusing upon the symptoms, let's take a deeper look….
Our ancestors have been around for about six million years, the modern form of humans evolved about 200,000 years ago. For the majority of our time on earth we have been hunters and gatherers, but roughly 10,000 years ago, something happened and we started to farm. This new way of life created fundamental shifts in the way we see ourselves, the way we see nature and the way we see each other.
Shortly after we began to farm we found crops that could be stored for long periods of time, such as corn and wheat. We started to construct vessels to store the grain and these vessels grew larger and larger every year, around 9500 yrs ago we built our first granaries which were discovered in the Jordan Valley. These technological revolutions clearly changed us from nomadic tribes that followed the herds and the seasons in search of food, to sedentary tribes that eventually became villages and cities.
I am coming to believe, almost all of our problems today stem from this very fundamental shift. A nomadic tribe seeing nature as their mother that provides all they need to live life, so long as they respect the balance of intricately linked and complex webs of life vs a farmer and eventually emperor who believes they have conquered nature and can bend her to suit their own demands. A nomad that believes nature's bounty cannot be owned because it cannot be stored so it must be shared, to the modern human belief that everything must be divided by ownership. How it is divided is still the cause of most wars and is a problem yet to be solved.
Now let me weave in a story. An Aboriginal man is trying to return a Coke bottle to the Gods because it is wreaking havoc in his tribe. Someone had thrown a Coke bottle out of an aeroplane and it dropped into his tribal lands. One of the kids finds it and suddenly everyone wants it. After a bit, the kids are starting to hit each other in the head with the Coke bottle. He decides, as tribe leader, that he is going to give this crazy thing back to the gods. He goes on a walkabout in an attempt to return the Coke bottle to the Gods at the end of the world. After a long journey he is hungry, and as he is walking through an area near a town he sees a goat. He throws his spear at the Goat and kills it, but it is someone else's goat - a fact that escapes his understanding.
As a result, the people bring the cops and they arrest the guy and put him in jail. Then he has to go before the magistrate and wonders, “Why did they put me in here? I am going to share the goat I killed with everyone, because that is what I always do.” When he goes before the magistrate, he is smiling and the magistrate responds with a grim frown, and the tribe leader thinks, “ I do not get it”. In his worldview, he was going to share the kill, of course. Why would he not share? But what he does not understand is what he thinks he is sharing; somebody else thinks they already own.
And now I'll finish with a line by an American Indian named Chief Seattle (above), who wrote a letter to the president of the United States in 1854 after receiving word that the government was going to purchase their land. "The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?
Thank YOU for joining us on this epic journey & supporting Your local farmer!