Whose Values Do You Uphold?

Whose Values Do You Uphold?

When you walk down the supermarket aisle and choose one avocado, cereal, or coffee over another, it must be noted that your purchases are never neutral. The produce you buy at a farmer’s market, the sandwich from the bodega, the restaurants you patronize, the deli, the fast food you consume, or the snacks you pick up at a convenience store all have an impact on the larger food system of which you are a part.

What we purchase and consume is not isolated from cultural influence, economics, or politics. Our choices are strongly shaped by our surroundings, by what is made available to us, and by the society we live in. Even when we think we are making our own choices, larger forces play a role in shaping the options before us and influencing how we consume them. More importantly, our choices then reinforce certain types of production and values over others. Each purchase is a vote. The problem is that if we mistakenly believe we are remaining neutral, we may not realize that by failing to consciously choose our values, someone else is effectively choosing them for us.

The Value of Convenience

Convenience has been pushed so heavily for the past fifty years that it seems like it has always been part of the package. For many of us, the less we have to chop our own vegetables, cook our own meals, preserve our own food, or spend time in the kitchen, the better. Food that is cheap, fast, abundant, always available, and prepared for us has become so normalized that we rarely stop to question what has been sacrificed to make it so. Low prices, speed, and convenience have become a kind of built-in value system. But are these actually our values, or are they values that have been handed to us by the food industry? If we are not making these choices for ourselves, someone else is making them for us.

Do we know where our milk comes from? Do we know where our meat is slaughtered? We are so removed from the life and sacrifices made for our food, and perhaps that is how we want it. Waste is also something we rarely have to think about in countries of abundance. But if we were more intimately connected to the sacrifice involved in producing our food, would we consume it so casually? Would we waste it so easily?

What Are We Supporting?

Have you ever stepped back and thought about what imprint your actions have on the world around you? Have you ever considered that your food purchase actually supports something and weakens something else? As soon as you spend your money on a food product, you are supporting some kind of production system. Do you consider or care about what agricultural practices are being used? How animals are treated? What labor practices are involved? What environmental practices are being supported? You may not be interested in knowing, but your purchase has a ripple effect on all of these things. You are, in fact, an active participant in the effects of that action.

And perhaps the most relevant question today, when we have access to the Walmarts, Amazons, and McDonald’s, is what, with your privilege, are you willing to overlook in exchange for convenience or price?

The Industrial Food System

The industrialization of our food is a troubling thing. So is the way we have become disconnected from producing it. Over time, fewer families maintain chickens, grow vegetables, preserve food, or have the basic knowledge that once allowed people to feed themselves. We have exchanged much of our ancestral wisdom and connection to the land for ten subscriptions to streaming services.

I can’t help but think of the Dead Kennedys’ Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death. The title plays on the famous, “Give me liberty, or give me death,” and the quip is a nice sharp jab at American consumerism. Just how much of our independence, knowledge, and health are we willing to give up in exchange for not having to do things ourselves? And if it is taken away, do we even know how to survive on our own?

When you look at the cheap McDonald’s hamburger in your hand, can you trace it back to its origins? The workers who made it, transportation and distribution, processing, the slaughterhouse, animal welfare, hormones, feed production, the fertilizers, the monocrop corn and soy that dominate huge tracts of farmland, the herbicides and pesticides used, the patented Monsanto seed, the farmer that was sued out of production. You and the hamburger are the end point of an enormous system. And once you begin tracing that system backward, you start to think more deeply about that system. But privilege allows us to ignore it. It isn’t convenient to carry this burden on our shoulders every time we want to eat. But if we continue to allow our purchases to speak for us, we may eventually find ourselves with very little say at all.

Who Owns the Seed?

It is interesting to step back and see what has happened to our food ecosystem now that agriculture has become increasingly centered around feeding an industrial machine rather than cultivating healthy food for communities. With the consolidation of farmland, fewer small farmers are able to compete with industrial-scale operations while large companies exert increasing influence over seeds, feed, livestock, processing, and distribution.

Monsanto is infamous for developing genetically modified crops with patented traits and restricting how farmers can use and replant those seeds. In Bowman v. Monsanto, the Supreme Court ruled in the corporation’s favor that a farmer could not reproduce Monsanto’s “patented” seed by planting and harvesting it without permission. Monsanto also pursued numerous lawsuits against small farmers over its patented seeds, with some farmers ultimately going bankrupt. And how much of our food system depends on these crops? Genetically engineered soybeans and corn, along with their many byproducts, are now deeply embedded in American agriculture and appear in countless prepared and processed foods, from chips and frozen pizzas to prepared meals and countless other products. So sadly, with our purchases, we may inadvertently be supporting the continued consolidation of agriculture at the expense of small farmer communities, their livelihoods, and biodiversity.