Reply #35: I see

[William Z. Foster]

I understand your point of view much better now, and you make some good points.

There was a time, and it still exists in agriculture to some extent, where better individual choices were encouraged within a context of public assistance and support. That system worked very well, and still exists although it is under horrendous pressure right now from the corporations who want their hands on the food supply and want unfettered access to rural land.

Let's look at one example where the personal choice model works against providing more and better choices for everyone.

You say "perhaps you can buy local, in-season produce, rather than grapes in the dead of winter, which must have been trucked thousands of miles to get to your plate. Perhaps we can eat a little less meat, and a little more greens."

Here we have ideal conditions and soil and weather for growing cherries - proximity to the lake, sandy soil, rolling hills, long photo periods at peak ripening time, wide temperature variations over 24 hour cycles, sufficient chill hours in the winter. All of this is ideal for deciduous fruit. There are several hundred small family growers. Tomatoes, cukes, sweet corn, and melons do not do so well here. 150 miles south of here, there is an area where conditions are perfect for growing tomatoes, cukes, sweet corn, and melons - deep soil, warmer, more humid, wetter. There are several dozen small family growers there. So the farmers here through the season run their trucks full of fruit down to those farmers, load up with tomatoes and such and head back. The roadside stands and fruit markets in each location now have a wider range of superior produce fresh daily. Perfect. But "buy local" foodie activists in both locations are critical, and are shutting out or boycotting the growers who are doing that because "it isn't local."

In season is always a good idea, but there are exceptions. Dried fruit, concentrates and canned fruits are all good traditional ways to keep fruit in people's diets year 'round. Bringing apples up from New Zealand in the spring, very efficiently by the boatloads, and from a fair trading partner with equivalent environmental, safety, labor and good farm practices standards is not a bad thing. In the Fall, we send fruit the other way. You have to think in terms of tons per gallon of fuel, and fruit can be moved across the ocean by ship very efficiently. More efficiently - on a ton-gallon basis - then hundreds of people driving their personal cars every week to a CSA to pick up a small bag of veggies, for example.

Meat is subsidized by the government (nothing wrong with subsidizing the eaters, in my view, which is what that amounts to) fruits and vegetables are not. A change there would lead to more fruit and vegetable consumption. So would increased funding to the USDA for educational and public outreach programs. Those are public programs, and we should be advocating those rather than nagging people about their personal choices - if we want results rather than to just feel good and feel superior or something.

But the biggest thing we could do to overhaul our food system would be to get Wall Street out of it all together. Promoting organic, for example, helps corporations, which gives Wall Street more clout, which gives Wall Street more control over the food system, which leads to less food, higher prices, and lower quality. As organic became successful, corporations found ways to fool the public and buy inferior produce from overseas through a dummy holding company, and then sell it through hidden connection under what appear to be independent brand names. The organic demand is giving Wall Street - the corporations - a way to get around the health and safety inspections and regulations and to fool a gullible public. How did the public become vulnerable to this? By the promotion of "organic" as some "good choice." Corporations will always exploit and corrupt any "personal choice" movement.

What you are describing here, is the problem and not the solution:

When 70 percent of public states in response to a poll that they support expanded offshore oil drilling, are they not not responsible in part for the environmental disasters that follow?

If we cannot take individual responsibility for the choices that are within our discretion to make, how can we expect politicians to go against public opinion and millions in oil industry campaign contributions, and implement wise policies?

You are right, that is all unworkable and impossible. "Take individual responsibility for the choices" will not change that. So we have to rethink it.

Here are some choices that are within our discretion to make:

- Stop looking to partisan electoral politics as the end all be all of politics.

- Start advocating for a robust national food policy, rather than yammering about personal foodie choices.

- Organize outside of the partisan political process to overthrow the total domination and control over our lives that corporations now have.

- At all times, fight for public solutions to social problems, not privatized or individual solutions.

- Reject the "shop our way to progressive change" mentality and see consumerism as the problem, not the solution.

Let's take personal responsibility for those. Let's take personal responsibility for all of the people, and fight for better things for all of them, rather than arguing for each of us individually trying to find better choices within an unjust and unworkable system.

We are never going to get politicians or corporations to "do the right thing." We do not have the power to make them, and they must be forced. We get power only by banding together in common cause. Personal choice, personal responsibility, consumerism and privatization all work against that.