Guerrilla Food Wars

I read in "Restaurants & Institutions," a culinary trade magazine, that 52% of US consumers, aged 25-34, would "prefer to use convenience foods instead of cooking from scratch," "even when time is not a problem."
This disturbed the hell out of me: over half of UStians my age would rather not cook for themselves or their loved ones if offered a plastic-wrapped alternative.
How fucked up is that?
Do people remember how to cook?
How to sustain themselves without the help of corporations who lean toward profit rather than nutrition?
Do their tongues even know the difference between real and mass-produced food anymore?
To the last question, I present this observation:

To combat the oppressive heat and emotional simmering of the kitchen where I am employed, I started making ginger syrup for homemade ginger ale. Fresh ginger + sugar + water, cooked down to a thick, strong syrup, then mixed with soda water and a squeeze of fresh lime; it's absolutely refreshing. On my favorite prep cook's suggestion, I mixed the syrup with Seagram's ginger ale (loaded with high fructose corn syrup and artificial flavor) instead of soda, and was told by most of my coworkers that these new drinks were even better than the original, unadulterated product. My tongue being what it is, I wholeheartedly disagree with them, but that's a little to the side of the point. The point is that most of the cooks in this fine-dining establishment, cooks whose palates are daily exposed to high-quality ingredients, to better quality methods of preparation (food mills vs. giant mixers, hand-chopped vs. food processor, etc.) still craved the chemically enhanced taste of factory-produced soft drinks. We're not talking people who don't know better. We're not talking about folks with no other frame of reference than fast food. We're talking about fucking professionals whose job it is to know true flavor when they find it.
And, y'know,
...they didn't.

Inga Muscio offers this illustrative example in "Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil":

"An old woman in Mexico was given a tortilla-making machine. It was explained to her how it works, and how much easier her life would be if she used it, and how much more convenient it is than forming tortillas by hand. She wanted nothing to do with this machine, and the person who gave it to her tried to patiently explain that she was being ignorant.
"The old woman sighed deeply.
"She patiently explained that her life, love, thoughts and memories all go into each tortilla she makes. It is this that nourishes her family, and the tortilla is merely a vehicle through which this nourishment is absorbed into the bodies of those she loves and feeds. A tortilla machine made no sense to her because it would separate her from the act of making tortillas, which was the whole fucken point of making tortillas.
"So who, exactly, is the ignorant one in this story?
"...You are what you eat, and when our entire culture eats mass-produced, machine-made food that is rarely, if ever, touched by caring human hands, it is no wonder that there is little compassion and respect for our food, our world, and one another."

Yeah.
What she said.

Why is this trend as ubiquitous as it is?
Better yet, what the hell can we do to stand in the face of it?
To threaten it?
To turn it back?

This isn't just the US.
Not by any imaginative means.
Cradled within the NAFTA contracts is a (UStian) law that destroys and prohibits collective, indigenous farms (ejidos) in favor of US-style agribusiness. Whole communities are now unable, by law, to feed themselves, their families and communities, in the ways that best nourish them. Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement refers to this as "a death certificate for the Indian peoples of Mexico."

The new Iraqi constitution, also handed to them by the US, prohibits Iraqis from using seeds that they have saved from previous harvests, demanding instead that they purchase their seeds from companies like Monsanto, companies that have trademarked seeds bred by generations of Iraqi farmers. Stealing people's livelihood and selling it back to them for exorbitant profits, at the expense of entire, ancient, tried & true means of survival. This is not only colonization, 21st century style; it is part of the New Slavery.

Along with rape, I believe that fucking with people's foodways is about the most destructive, invasive, soul-killing method of imperialism practiced on this planet. It is absolute physical and psychic murder, drawn out over generations, that will result in wide-ranging cultural genocide. And the thing is, we UStians, the ones who are exporting this shit all over the world, were the real test subjects for this brand of indoctrination. We didn't always eat the crap we currently tell ourselves is food. We didn't always eat like this. At the ripe age of 32, I am one of the only people of my generation I have ever met who was raised on home-baked breads, home-grown vegetables and fruits, and self-slaughtered animals. I am one of the few people I know who has a pretty damned good idea where my food comes from. I know what real food tastes like, although my taste buds generally suffer in this regard, living as far from any real farms as I now do. Too damned many UStians have never had this culinary luxury.

Maybe we are no longer able to see how our food choices impact our lives and the lives of our progeny, the lives of the animals and plants with whom we share our great blue-green home. Perhaps we are unable to see how our dietary proclivities affect our minds and elusive spirits as well as our bodies. We don't receive proper nutrition from boxes, regardless what those boxes advertise on their exteriors (low fat! low cholesterol! high in nutrients and vitamins!). Our bodies do not absorb chemically manufactured vitamins as easily as when they are naturally occurring in our food. For example, we are obviously better able to use the Vitamin C found in fresh oranges than we are in orange-flavored chewable vitamin-pills; so why do we, as a nation, so often choose the latter over the former? Are we so goddamned lazy that peeling a fragrant, dribbling-down-our-elbows, pop-juicy orange is too much trouble for us to handle in the middle of our workday? Are we so hopelessly inured to our truly meaningless, wage-slavery jobs that we cannot take an extra couple of minutes to care for ourselves the way our employers never will?

Have we forgotten, collectively, how joyous eating can be?
Have we forgotten that joy is necessary to our evolution and survival?

This is an opportunity for guerrilla warfare on a domestic scale if ever I've seen one. With agribusiness not only flooding our grocery stores, but also whittling our food choices (both in product and production) down to a Lesser of Evils decision, growing our own food, or paying our neighbors for their willingness to grow real food for us, is tantamount to sedition. I believe it is a choice that will bring heavier penalties from the corporate-government as time goes on; a choice that may one day require us to pay with our lives and/or livelihoods, much as it now does in places like Mexico and Iraq. If we're not brave enough to stand up to our government and its corporate henchmen (or is it our corporations and their government henchmen?) over basic things like healthcare for all people, equal and adequate pay for equal work, or the ridiculous breach between monetarily rich and poor peoples, then maybe, maybe we can find it within ourselves to at least stand up for dinner. Quit making excuses, start scrubbing our brains and palates clean of the pap we've been fed by people who don't give a shit about us, and do a little something that
might
mean
everything.

Find the space. I've grown tomatoes and herbs in buckets in my bedroom when I didn't have gardening space. There are tiny strips of dirt in every urban area, just begging to be brought to life. Herbs and vegetables, especially all kinds of lettuces and greens, will grow in the tiniest of spaces, with the tiniest bit of care.

Make the time. How cool would it be to just push back a little dirt with your fingers and plant some seeds leftover and dried out from that awesome tomato you had on your sandwich last week? Or that cool-looking cucumber you saw in someone's trash? How hard is it to do this in a little weed-patch on your way to work or school, somewhere you pass every day? How good would it feel to actually care for something that will in turn care for you?

Find the space, find the time, find the heart still beating in your chest---
y'know, the one that still cares?
The one that isn't totally jaded and Over It?

It feels So.
Fucking.
GOOD!
to bring your own food to life!
It feels even better to be able to grow enough to share with a friend, whether that friend is human or animal. And fer chrissakes, preparing food for ourselves doesn't necessarily mean dragging out a bunch of pots and pans, dirtying plates and forks and counter tops; it can be as simple as plucking berries from a vine or fruit from a tree. I am faaar more satisfied with simple snacks of found-food than I am with anything taken out of ecocidal plastic and reheated in a cancer-causing microwave. Done and done. It is high time...hell, it's long past time that we extend an effective middle finger at the forces that try to stiflingly rule us. They're not gonna listen to us, no matter how loudly we shout or how pointed our protest-sign slogans. We've gotta do something meaningful. Take back what no one has ever had any right to take from us. We have got to relearn what food IS and how it is us, from seed to waste.

52% of a population is a scary statistic.
That's a lotta people done been brainwashed into thinkin they can't care for themselves,
or that caring for themselves is best left to someone else.
To this brainwashing, I say,
"Pffft!"
We're smarter than that, damn it!
Way smarter.
And we deserve better.
We all do.
The whole crazy mess of us.

Now, how best to disseminate that knowledge through a vast population of people too nervous to hear the truth of their own bodies....