So, I'm reading The Modernization of the Chinese Salt Administration by S.A.M. Adshead--obscure right? Not so irrelevant really, salt is basic to all human life. Who controls salt, controls life. Always has been always will be. Salt and human life are inextricably tangled together. The word salary, in fact, is connected to salt.
Adshead writes about the Chinese salt administration of the early 20th Century as an example of what happens when a society shifts from a traditional to a modern society.
Traditional societies have these characteristics according to Adshead:
Absence of machinery or reliance on human or animal power;
Economy of scarcity where food, health and property scarcity must be accepted;
Social inequality and social immobility; and
Political participation is limited to a self perpetuating elite
Modern Society is quite different and it has these elements:
Use of powered machinery and new sources of power;
High level of consumer spending;
Elimination of famine and fatal epidemic;
Social equality based on personal achievement rather than inherited position; and
Mass politics be they democratic or totalitarian
So, with this food and ag thing, if people (ordinary people) cannot own the means of production of food then what kind of society will we have. At their most basic level, the means of production of most food and farm items are pretty simple: farmland, water, air, herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers animals and seeds.
But, farmland now is so expensive if it is not inherited it cannot be readily acquired by most,. Many Americans struggle daily with the issues of simply not enough money for food, shelter or health care. Social inequality and social immobility based on economic assets are at their highest point in decades, and politics is a nearly perfect mechanism for promoting the interests of a self perpetuating elite. And, if that weren't enough, planting the wrong seed is an invitation to a long and expensive lawsuit.
So what's a food system to do? Stay tuned for the second post that has the ideas for a post modern food and ag system that preserves the "good" things of the modern world. Local organic, sustainable food does not have all the solutions but it's definitely got some of them.
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