In watching Winona LaDuke’s Ted Talk this evening, I found myself smiling and nodding at every passing point that I agreed with. I felt a connection with the insights of LaDuke because I found a great deal of similarities between her talk and the themes from my posts over the last couple of weeks. She calls for a deeper connection with the food that we eat. She tells the audience that food has meaning, culture, history, and cultivates special relationships between many different groups of people. I loved how LaDuke focused on simplicity in her talk. She focused on getting back to the basics, in which we start with one seed and let that one seed multiply into a multitude of seeds, which leads to greater agrobiological diversity.
I learned a great deal about how homogenous the food is that we are eating today. There is a decreasing amount of genetic diversity present in our food today. Today, “seven corporations control almost all of our seeds.” If we don’t start to take back our food, then the ramifications will be increased food-borne illnesses, disease, and diabetes, which is already starting to impact so many young children’s lives in this country.
LaDuke touched on climate change, which is most often overlooked when talking about our food even though it is perhaps the most important factor in the demise of crops across this country. Climate change is affecting our crops so drastically that we are losing so many crops every year to these extreme temperatures that are created through climate change. The death of crops leads to a drop in genetic diversity, which leads to a rising sense of food insecurity in this country.
The bottom line in my opinion is that food has history, and a story just like a human being. It is meant to be cherished not harmed. If there is a continued pattern of genetic engineering of food, and not a return to local, home grown organic food, then there will be a continued pattern of a lack of food diversity and crop failure, which will continue to lead to food disparity, health problems, and food insecurity that is steadily rising in this country.
I felt the same way while watching LaDuke’s talk. Throughout the summer, one of the main questions we’ve kept asking ourselves is how can we (as a society) be more connected to our food. Getting “connected” to food has multiple meanings for many different groups of people. For that reason, the process of trying to pinpoint what this kind of connection might look like for us or the next generation is challenging. Out of all of the authors and speakers we’ve heard from during this course, in my opinion, LaDuke was the first to actually explain what connecting to our food means in practice. It means taking the wisdom of sustainable techniques from our ancestors, recognizing that we are faced with the devastating effects of climate change, and fighting to maintain biodiversity in our agricultural system at the level of the seed.
It’s quite terrifying that our seeds are owned by just a few corporations and that our current agricultural system consists of more takers than givers. We are not sufficiently respecting our natural resources and are out of touch with our role in nature. These issues among others are what have created the current challenges we face with regard to food and health. I agree that food has history. Now, I think it’s a matter of unpacking that history and learning from it so that we engage in more sustainable agricultural practices.