Monday, April 13, 2009

Plan to Remove What I Hate

Reader Responses to "Ten Things I Hate"

By John Taylor; 2009 April 13, Jalal 05, 166 BE

In a recent rant called "Ten Things I Hate" (http://badiblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/10-hated-things.html) I wrote the following paragraph, which provoked the two reader responses that I will deal with today.

"What are we doing buying our own food anyway? Why not have the same coops that house us take care of our diet too? Our capitalist system insists that we be consumers, that we make a thousand decisions a day, bribed by ten thousand advertisements a day, but there is no real need for any of that. I would eat better, eat less, eat more environmentally friendly if my neighbourhood kitchen bought food straight from my neighbourhood farmer and served me just the amount of food I need, chosen by a professional dietician. It is crazy to accept the way things are when we could do so much better, so easily, if we would only think."

Long-time reader Jean pointed out that there is a cooperative, ecological community organized around a similar model to what I suggested near Albany, New York. The link to the "eco-village" is: http://www.ecovillage.ithaca.ny.us/. I had heard of it before but this website persuaded me that I must visit this intriguing place and take the tour someday soon. It is within fairly easy driving distance for us so such an excursion is not wholly out of the question, even for a reluctant traveller like myself.

The second response came from Mark, who wrote:

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Bravo John!
I've never seen this side of you before. Even as you feel uneasy as a Baha'i embracing your 'hate-writing', I am a little uneasy to say, I think I like it.
I wanted to start some discussion about hate item four. I have often thought about the merits of buying local and what it would be like if we only bought local for food. However, I feel like there must be some sort of middle ground to be had in this regard. Importing food provides us with great opportunities for variety in our diets, in some cases, access to food with potent health benefits that would otherwise be unavailable. That being said, I agree with your point about over-consuming, over-advertising, etc.
What are your thoughts on balancing buying local with access to foreign foods in moderation?

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I agree that there has to be a balance between local and outside foods. There also has to be a balance between variety and sticking to staples. Nor should the whole choice be left to our personal taste. I live in horror at what my children choose to eat, and there is little I can do about it.

What is most important is the principle of subsidiarity, that decisions be made as close as possible to those affected by the decision, and that, in this case, as many staples as possible be grown as close as possible to where they are consumed. Lettuce, for example, is cultivated inside kitchen windows in Antarctica, the harshest environment in the world, so there is no reason that greens and herbs should not be grown right by neighborhood kitchens everywhere.

This obvious arrangement is what the invisible hand of economic justice would dictate anyway, if the system were not distorted by subsidies coming from the corruption of the democratic system. We pour billions artificially propping up an inherently inefficient transport system that is burning carbon like there is no tomorrow. We know that meat eating is terrible for the environment, but we do not even try to promote a vegetarian diet. We ignore basics and then must deal with a thousand ills resulting from a lifestyle based on feeding the beast, corporations, rather than people. For example, a recent study found that over a quarter of American babies are now obese before their second birthday. If that is not frightening, what is not?

At the same time subsidiarity must be balanced by universality. We need to take the universal aspects of housing out of the hands of those who presently dominate it, especially those who make building codes. A world building code should be in force designed to allow an entire family to move anywhere in the world. Instead of owning a specific home, a family should own a unit share in a neighborhood, a share that can be transferred to any other neighborhood. This is part of the basic democratic principle of the right to roam, a right that presently ends at national borders.

In order to apply such balanced principles, we will need to rid ourselves of the filth of narrowed, blinkered interest, starting with our own selfishness. Another reader, Joe, sent this quote from the UHJ which points to the deeper, underlying solution to such problems.
"Humanity's crying need will not be met by a single struggle among competing ambitions or by protest against one or another of the countless wrongs afflicting a desperate age. It calls, rather, for a fundamental change of consciousness -- the time has come when each human being on earth must learn to accept responsibility for the welfare of the entire human family." (Universal House of Justice)

Over the past year I have been spending the lion's share of my limited time on Jan Amos Comenius -- in the face of a certain amount of reader dissatisfaction, I must say -- because I find he has already discussed in detail the solution to just such problems as "Ten Things I Hate" mentioned, filling today's headlines. So often I find my own supposedly original ideas for solving the problems of the world already dealt with in his Panorthosia.

For example, I have been suggesting for several years that the formation of a world government go along with a recycling, decade-long plan that would involve every major human need. Yet here again, the seed of this idea was anticipated by Comenius in the passage I included in yesterday's Badi Blog posting where he wrote:

"The world council should meet at ten-yearly intervals, first, somewhere in Europe, then in Asia, Africa, and America in turn, and every nation should send one or two members from each of its colleges, that is to say, philosophers, churchmen, and politicians accompanied by clerks." (Ch. 25, para 10, p. 142-144)

Sticking to the subject of food choice, the great advantage of having an epicyclical ten year world plan would be that food choices would be constantly reassessed in the light of a specrum of universal principles. Each year we would concentrate on a new principle, from investigation of reality to the last one, universal peace. A given problem would be solved locally but constantly examined in its universal aspects throughout each planning decade. For example, farmers, doctors, teachers and dieticians would put their heads together to see that traditional diets are promoted. Unfortunately, at present they are not as attractive to the palate as the commercial monstrosity that usurping older diets around the world, thanks to gobs of animal fat and a trillion dollar advertising campaign. The task of these experts is to do a variety of things to replace this ersatz diet with real food. Anything they try would be refined and revised every year in the light of experience and the new principle in question.

One thing that is affecting me right now is my daughter's braces. These are costing her grandfather some six thousand dollars over a couple of years. Yet it is a well known fact, based on dietary studies made with aboriginal peoples around the world, that teeth grow in well when traditional diets are reintroduced (not to mention an end to diabetes and a thousand other chronic illnesses). If my daughter had a traditional diet from birth her teeth would have grown in straight and cavity-free. On a broad scale this represents a major savings, especially since traditional diets are in most ways cheaper and more eco-friendly to begin with.

So, with world diet planning there would be no need to subsidize the changeover itself. It pays for itself many times over. We just have to stop the corruption that is subsidizing the diet that is slowly killing us. Given that argument, it makes sense to either outlaw the flood of fast food advertising completely, or at the very least start taxing its suppliers as fair exchange for what their product is really costing society.

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John Taylor

email: badijet@gmail.com
blog: http://badiblog.blogspot.com/

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