Biology at Its Best: The Good Food Movement

Cornucopia’s Take: Enjoy this editorial from ACRES USA, reprinted with permission. Fred Walters expounds on how the food movement stands apart from other social movements and ideologies.

View from the Country
ACRES USA
by Fred Walters

The good news is the excitement, vitality and innovation found within the food movement is here to stay. That is for certain.

Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., writing in a brilliant essay in the online publication Independent Science News (www.independent sciencenews.org), recently recited the many reasons the food movement won’t be disappearing anytime soon. While most social movements have a few traits in common, the food movement stands apart, quite different from them all.

He points out that unlike most ideology-based movements, the food movement is a leaderless movement, a grassroots move­ment, international, low-budget, and a movement of many values.

The prime reason the food movement is here to stay, according to Latham, is that unlike other systems of thought, the food movement philosophy is based on a biological understanding of the world.

Rather than a mere ideology, the food movement is based on pure biology and, Latham holds, “is therefore in a position to supply what our society lacks: mechanisms to align human needs with the needs of ecosystems and habitats.”

And the food movement further recognizes that our planet’s problems and societies’ problems are really the same prob­lems. He doesn’t state it, but we hold the food movement offers similar solutions for individuals and their health woes, farm-level financial success, and rural economic health. And that’s why this is a vital, exciting and gratifying field of endeavor.

Meanwhile, visit any of the many industrial ag- or fad-driven eco-conferences and you’ll find a new generation of tech­nology fetishists. While some true innovators are on these conferences’ agendas, the overall gist is that humankind will save itself through technology, not through returning to more natural ways, to the truth of biology. Genetic engineer­ing, laboratory-created fake meat and other Frankenstein-like solutions are oft celebrated at these events.

What these technologists who are seeking to falsify nature forget is that everything is connected to everything. Doubling down on the very reductionist thinking that created our modern problems is not going to invent us back out of the chasm. The answer lies in pure, clean biology. And that’s the view from the country.

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