March Against Monsanto: Saturday’s Fight for Food Freedom Spreads to 36 Countries

[marmar]

March Against Monsanto: Saturday’s Fight for Food Freedom Spreads to 36 Countries
This weekend, people in 250 cities on 6 continents will march against meddling in the global food supply by Monsanto—the company that brought us Agent Orange, Dioxin, PCBs, and the bovine growth hormone.

by Ken Butigan
posted May 23, 2013


This article originally appeared in Waging Nonviolence.


One of the great metaphors of justice and peace is the feast: the abundant banquet where all are welcome, where none is excluded, and where our interconnectedness moves from a vague concept to a concrete reality. When we eat together we literally become one body.

This was the powerful challenge and opportunity of the civil rights movement’s lunch counter sit-ins in the 1960s—or the banquet in San Francisco, Calif., that some of us created in the mid-1990s, where nearly a thousand homeless and non-homeless people broke a city-wide law by feasting together with linen table cloths, china dishware, goblets, cut flowers, and succulent courses. We shared a meal with the hungry in a public space that was most prohibited: Civic Center Park, in front of City Hall.

Just as the sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South dramatically sparked the long-term process of shaking the table until all could sit at it, so the San Francisco banquet—organized by Religious Witness with Homeless People—jarringly revealed both the injustice of the city’s attack on the homeless and a counter-image of how we actually should be: living together, being together, and — perhaps most importantly—eating together.

In both cases—and in many other movements struggling for justice and peace—food is at the heart of the matter: its availability, its access, and with whom we will share it. But, increasingly, the social conflict over food has been compounded by the question of what food is, how it is produced, and who controls the supply. These questions, while ancient, have taken on a dramatically new form with the synergy of radically new bio-technologies, a relatively small number of corporations producing most of the food we eat, and pliant political cultures. Supported by the U.S. government, this synergy is making genetically modified food the default in the United States and elsewhere and locking in control over how food is grown, distributed and consumed. ......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/this-weekend-march-against-monsanto