Why shouldn't food be free?

Welll, it's not actually the majority who have to make that decision, it's the tiny minority who control the world's resources. But that sort of passing the buck, whilst valid, doesn't achieve anything.

It's a whole big industrialisation thing. Humankind has got so immensely efficient over the past hundred years, it is seriously time for a bit of freedom, which I don't think would detract from the efficiency at all... improve it if anything.

If I had to live in a city every day - which I do - I would jump at the chance to get out on a farm and do some real work for a few months a year. I would certainly do it for food - I could drive a truck full of stuff that's needed in your direction (maybe on the farm, maybe past it) and when I'd finished working I could drive another truck (cos someone would have driven off with mine when I arrived), full of grain (and beef and honey) back to my city, via a mill to exchange my grain for flour. It's so simple.

Employers don't like you taking three months a year to do something else but that's just more fuckeries.

 

Having said that, I don't think IceT missed any point. It would have been nice if she had asked how i plan on getting there - to this wonderful world where people help each other.

 

Food shouldnt be free cause if it was free then no one would have to work for it and no body would want to work to make the food if they were just going to give it away.

 

lol.... alright Andy, I'll bite.

How do you plan on getting there?

And in 5 years, if you still want to come and work on a farm for a couple months, I am sure we could find a spot for you during the spring-summer-fall. I'll be back in Canada by then, and have been thinking about what the hell I am going to do with 1800 acres of land!

 

Andy, have you ever read any Daniel Quinn? The Ishmael series if good, I think it would be up your alley.

 

csa isn't about just randomly giving things away. it's about actively participating in the production and distribution of foods, supporting both farmers and communities at the same time. the food isn't free - you earn it by supporting the farm, and helping to produce it yourself. but you don't "buy" the food - you support the farm in exchange for a share of the harvest, sharing in the risks and benefits, getting more in a good year and less when the harvest is poor. it is active participation in the process of growing and distributing food. personal responsibility: food doesn't come from a can or a store.

you probably haven't heard of me yet because i am currently semi-homeless in woodstock and going through grief right now, so when i do post i pretty much stick to my friends' personal forums.

 

Wow That's quite an offer. I immediately worry about making an idiot of myself, having been a city boy all my life and not really having a clue about farms, but I'm so up for that!
My parents are New Zealanders and I rate NZ & Canada as the top 2 english speaking countries (just from reputations - I've worked in NZ but never even been to Canada, heard good things tho). Add to that that I speak French and dig the Canadian accent and I'm there Is Sasquatchewan near the French-speaking bit? Would there be space for my wife and son (he'll be coming up for six)? Wow.

Anyway, how?

Dammit that's a hard question. I'll start by restating the efficiency of modern human kind. We've been able to look after ourselves and each other since before we knew how to farm at all. With the machinery and organisation we have these days, how can life be harder in terms of obligations than it was then? When I digested this question I excreted two fairly self-evident answers.

First would be the increase in diversity. Before we had only the most basic of occupations - hunter, tool-maker, maybe healer/mystic, not much else. Nowadays of course we have countless proffessions leaving fewer available people to provide the necessities. But this, I thought, must be a result of increased efficiency, it would not grow without spare people, if you see what I mean. It's a good thing though, diversity, not a problem that needs solving.

So we move on to the other reason, which is the apparent necessity in modern society of keeping track of precisely how much each person has contributed and taken from society. In short - money. There are two main reasons money is a problem which needs solving.
The worst, imo, is the tendancy of money to gravitate to high concentrations of itself - ie, the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.
The other, which would clearly be a problem even if you were one of these peeps who thinks the rich deserve what they have, is the time and effort money consumes. Commodity traders, bankers, accountants, debt-collectors, theives, frauds, conmen, shop assistants, security guards, landlords, the whole insurance industry all waste their working lives achieving nothing for society. They work for money, not people. Everyone spends a certain amount of time looking after money.
Aside from that there's the general discontinuity in modern life between how much a person contributes to society and how much money they have. In direct contradiction of the reason for money's existance, it's often the most self-centred, corrupt, greedy and amoral people who end up on top, rich, ruling over the lives of those 'below' them. The reward of money is meant to encourage people towards their goals, instead their goal is often simply to make money. To think up to this point and not beyond it is becoming a frighteningly apparent trait in young people I talk to.

That went on a bit longer than I had planned

So, the question of how to phase money out with as little disruption as possible is, imo, one and the same as how to get people to work for each other.
Food and accomodation, which is all we need, take up such a small amount of the population's time (on average, I mean, not individual, your dad and uncle's frantic timetable accepted). I find it hard to believe that anyone, except a very few hopeless cases, could live their life as a net loss if everyone is given options, simplicity being essential.
So I invented a tool to let people know where they could go that was most useful, whether they want to use a skill they possess, learn a skill they would find useful and rewarding or get a spare commodity to where it is wanted, or any combination of these. It's simply a website where each member registers their personal details, the skills they want and offer and the goods they want and offer. The member is plotted on a map...

Oh god, I'm getting brain fade. Must sleep. I will continue on this next time. Feel free to ask anything.

 

Well.. there is a little town called Mt. Zion that is about 45 minutes away from the farm.. it's a french community. But other than that, Saskatchewan is far, far away from the french speaking areas.

Here... check out www.porcupineplain.com . It's the town around which the farm is based. In fact from the aerial photo you can just make out the house my Grandpa built! lol. One side of my family all live in the area, and in 5 years we (hubby and I and maybe kids) will be in the area too... so there will all sorts of places for you and your family to stay if you want to give farming a try.

 

Did you know that they are working on meat that can be created in a lab using tissue engineering. It's real meat, and supposedly it can be grown on an industrial scale

http://www.gizmag.com/go/4439/

 

I figured they might be (synthesising meat). Seems like a pretty good use for technology to me. What I would love would be wild animals and hunting being the standard method to get your meat. But that's just me (well, not just me, but it's one of the things that make me me).
As for Daniel Quinn, I think I have heard something about a telepathic gorilla b4 but I might just be thinking of 'The Man With Two Brains'. Looks good tho, I will check it out.

Ice T, when I saw that photo of Porcupine plain my heart rose slowly in my chest. I don't know why, I think it was the fertility of the land around the town, and the size of the town - it's tiny I really wanna come visit.

It's a bit late to carry on with the how but you can work it out. It'll enable people to work with each other for each other. Like if someone in a company has an idea and he needs people from other branches of the company to carry it out, he needs to convince his boss and then his boss, if he agrees, will assign those people. This way he goes direct to the people, he can find who he needs and if at first they don't believe in his idea, go to someone else (or try and talk them round or both). Individual Autonomy. Anarchy.

 

With a world population like the one we have today we could no longer be hunter-gatherers without going through a period of terrible human suffering that killed off masses of the population. It wouldn't be long before we exhausted our food supply. Our society of agriculture and industrialism has gone down a path that will not allow us to turn back, not without great loss of human life. We have become completely dependant on it. Most have no real survival technique, they only know how to survive in the society we have created.

I think that those self-supporting communities are great - and quite a success for a long time for humans - and I am sure the people that live that way now are very happy, but I don't think it is a solution for humanity. If it isn't something the rest of society can join in then it is only a temporary fix for a small amount of people. I want to see the big fix, and focus my effort on that (whatever it may be, I am not a smart enough person to figure out!). Of course no one says you can't do that from a place like Porcupine Plain! I just know that everyone can't go somewhere like that, so I will happily stay away so others with more faith in tha path have room.

Small tribal communities was something that worked for us very well in the past, humans lived like that much longer than the way we are living today, but we have left that way of life and cannot go back. Unless, like I mentioned before, some great disaster came and whiped out massive populations of humans, or we are willing to let masses of humans suffer in order to change the way our society operates. There are just too many of us.

I, personally, am not welcoming either. I have high hopes in the human mind allowing technology to bail us out of all this. But I don't doubt that if we do bail ourselves out that we may just as easily bail ourselves into an evin shitter situation. Eh, who knows, we are crazy creatures...

(BTW You had it right about Quinn, he's the guy with the telepathic gorilla.)

 

foods not free because producing it costs money, and that money has to come from somewhere. If you want free food, the only ways you're going to get it are from the welfare soup-lines or from your own garden.

 

Well, I'm not talking about returning to hunter-gatherers, more like hunter-farmers. Grow crops, hunt animals.

MagicBus, nothing costs money. Things cost time, effort, skills and materials and these are represented by money. Do you understand that? IceT was just saying it takes two people (three at harvest time), albeit working very hard, to run a 3600 acre wheat farm. Do you have any idea how many people that farm feeds?

 

What do you think the whole capitalist system is geared towards if it's not getting everyone jobs? If you had freedom to work when you wanted without basically selling your soul (like when you get a job for example), I'm sure unemployment would be a lot lower, and if there are some who simply don't want to work I don't see why we shouldn't let them. They'll pay the price for not working when they become fat, stupid, boring and unfulfilled.

I firmly believe that eating is a fundamental human right.

I don't see how you can be an anarchist/communist and still believe in the necessity for money at all. What are you one of these libertarian anarcho-capitalists? Survival of the best paid, yay.

 

my food is mostly free. there is plenty of good food in the bins of supermarkets and smaller shops in the uk (reduces waste aswell as getting food) and if you're in need there are often groups either religious like the krishnas and sally army or political/social like one of brightons unemployed worker centres which gets given the reject bread from a local bread factory which it then gives to anyone who comes in. there is plenty of natural food apart from that too, i've been picking a lot of blackberries recently and it seems like a good year for apples, people seem to waste even the food they are growing (perhaps by accident?) in their own gardens. unfortunately i only know the kinds of mushrooms that will make me trip so i dont trust my self on that one yet. i'd love to grow my own food but my housing situation is too precarious to allow it. i shouldnt moan but sort out the alotment i've talked about with one mate so so often.
and of course there's shoplifting; the archbishop of canterbury reckons its alright if its from a supermarket! sorry vegans veggies but you can also hunt one of the most satisfying meals i've ever had was a rabbit i caught myself and theres roadkill (here in the uk you cant legally pick it up if you hit it) last summer a load of us who were squatting a nightclub had a huge feast of venison found dead but still warm in the road.

 

I can probably point to a bit in the manifesto where it says a bloody revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary. Look where that got communist countries.
I think the main problem, philosophically, with the manifesto is the whole victim/oppressor them/us mentality. I don't think it should be a decapitation motion, but an absorbtion, a melting. A freeing of the blockages.

Rabbit sounds nice when you're hungry

 

First, sorry this is going to be a long post.

Random Andy, you have the right idea. First, the whole system of paying farmers to let land go fallow is foolish, considering that they constantly need to keep clearing land elsewhere to grow crops on poor soil (like in the Amazon). It's just a scheme to keep food prices high. The subsidies also mean we're paying twice for the food; and there are all kinds of other hidden costs (the cost of oil and the wars we fight to secure it...oil used for fertilizer and tractors and food transport...just one example). The system is pretty dumb all around.

The thing is, we'd have to totally restructure how we live to change it. Like Ice Tea is saying, we can't have people living all in a city over here, and all the food grown over there, and expect the distant city people to help out, it's too far away, and they don't have the skills. We'd have to shift away from our urbanization trend and go back to small town living, which I'm in favor of, though it'd be hard given how many people there are now. However, with the Peak Oil Crisis in the making, farming is going to change. We make fertilizer and pesticide out of oil; plant, reap, and transport food with oil driven machines...when oil is scarce, this will change. I believe localism will return, as a matter of course.

I want to say, though, relatively unskilled people COULD help on the farm, but things would be different. If you have a bunch of people coming to help, you don't need that million dollar combine (with all the associated costs: fuel, maintenence, insurance), you could have people out there with sickles. Or simpler harvesting machines, I'm pretty ignorant about farming technology, but surely we could come up with something that someone with minimal training could use. Many hands make light work. The colloseum was built by hand, we say we couldn't do it today without our machines, but we could, if we'd just put enough bodies on it. Farming is much simpler than building a colloseum, or it could be. You obviously need the guy with the know-how (where, when to plant, etc), but he could direct the actual labor using regular people. If the hinterland wasn't so far from the city, you could have the large fields all planted in a weekend or a week, without having to have everyone be full time farmers. The lawyer and the teacher could come out on the weekend, the whole community would pitch in and it could be done quick.

Anyways, food can be free. The amount of food you can grow in just a few square feet of properly managed soil can feed a person for a year. Most suburban dwellers like myself have many many square feet in their yards. I could probably support my whole street, if I turned my whole yard into a huge garden and practiced this method ("square foot gardening"...check out a book of the same name by Mel Bartholomew) Of course, I can't grow coffee, or sugar, or meat (I don't eat meat anyways tho), or enough corn or wheat, so true farmers would still be required. But they could focus on these things, rather than growing tomatoes or lettuce or whatever.

The only trouble is making it worthwhile for the farmer to grow his food: if we aren't using money, why would he want to farm for other people? Even if they are helping, where is his benefit? One assumes he'd probably also be growing in his own garden. So we'd have to shift to a barter system, where he grows food for the community, and he gets his dental and medical care, and electricity, etc. But what about more long distance trade? Surely the dentist in India to whom he ships his grain is not going to "ship" his dental skills to the farmer. That's a hell of a house call... Unless we are all local-oriented (localism), we'll need money.

 

That is precisely the mental block that I am challenging. The fact that we have to keep track of how much we've contributed (through money, barter, whatever). I think it's blatantly unnecessary. That's what the website I designed is for. I mentioned how it would help the right skills get together but it would equally work towards getting things from where they are produced (where there would obviously be a surplus) to where they are needed. For every journey you make, for whatever reason, you could check the website, see what's in surplus where you are and needed where you're going, then take that product with you. Even if you're not going all the way, as long as you're taking it in the right direction it's good, right?

 

Frexample, presumably there would be loads of people heading towards the farm in order to pick up food for their locale. Presumably, other things would be produced where they come from. If the farmer needs something produced there, they would bring these things with them and give them to the farmer in exchange for loads of food. If the farmer didn't need anything at that time, he would be able to simply give things away.

You would want to advertise things you had in surplus, because that would be what brings people (carrying whatever you needed, including their own willing labour) to you.