“Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality” L.R. Knost.
When you think about what you need, most people in the developed world go to materialistic-consumer needs and not even think about the basic material needs. We must have food, water, air, and shelter to survive. You could throw in clothing, especially in colder climates, and health care as well. After all, in the developed world, those basic needs for the most part seem taken care of.
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Then there are the basic psychological needs 1. Certainty – The need for safety, security, comfort, order, consistency, control
2. Variety – The need for uncertainty, diversity, challenge, change, surprise, adventure. 3. Significance – The need for meaning, validation, feeling needed, honored, wanted, special. 4. Love and Connection – The need for connection, communication, intimacy and shared love with others. We each have a need to love and be loved by others. We each have a need to belong. 5. Growth – The need for physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development. 6. Contribution – The need to give, care, protect beyond ourselves, to serve others and the good of all.
There are two basics in the developed world we need to look at closely – Food and Energy – again, as I often say, I have talked about this before. We in the developed world with our global food transport system take our food for granted. I find it interesting how we can ship food vast distances when there is a profit motive involved but not when food is to be ‘donated’ to the hungry and starving billion people on the planet. It is also interesting how many people are so divorced from food except at the point of ingestion. i.e., eating. I have said this elsewhere in this blog, but what would we all do if the food trucks didn’t supply the grocery stores every night. I think we would get very involved, and very quickly come to realize just how fickle our food systems really are. Many sustainability minded people are managing their own gardens or allotments, yet, even there I see disconnects with the broader picture of food production.
I came across a great comment in a post by a person originally from North Africa. I can’t find the original author although this long quote has been reposted many times. It was in response to a statement made by a person from the developed world, “If most people had to kill their own food, most people would be vegetarians.”
I have the full quote here. “I suppose that *sounds* right, but it’s probably not true. The history of man is that we hunted for meat and killed it ourselves for 2 million years. This is what we did. It is written in the grooves on mammoth bones, spear points, and campfires the world over. It is why we domesticated chickens, sheep, goats, camels, horses, cows, ducks, geese, pigs, and pigeons. We raised our own meat and killed it too. It was sold alive in the market until 150 years ago, as there was no refrigeration. You wanted chicken for dinner? You killed it in the back yard. I grew up in North Africa where sheep were led home on a rope, and Méchoui is what followed.
There is no trick or art in killing, and it is not shocking after you have done it and lived with it. This was the “daily normal” for almost all of human history.”
Think about how uniquely modern our food system is, with its supermarkets and packaged food supplies. Until the 1920s, a lot of food simply came in plain bags or cans when purchased from a store. Meat came from freshly killed and carved up from a butcher, or even your own back-yard if you had animals.
The North African writer continues: “It is only the arrogance of modern lazy times when ripe fruit is delivered in winter, and sugar and nuts come in a bag, that we have embraced foreign foods such as potatoes and tofu, almonds, and pumpkins, papaya and pineapple. There is nothing wrong with vegetarianism, and quite a lot good, but eating meat is not immoral, and killing things is not shocking. Are the hawk and the fox immoral and unnatural? Is flying in grapes from Chile, almonds from California, and apples from Oregon morally superior to local eggs, chicken, and grass-raised beef? Is hand-harvested food picked by impoverished peasants in Mexico, Colombia, Kenya, and China morally superior to the machine-planted and harvested corn that feeds our cows and chickens?
I don’t think so. If you feel otherwise, I’m more than OK with that, but I’ve come to see a lot of misery in a coffee cup and a lot of exploitation in a banana. Killing a chicken? It’s not shocking to me.”
I am not trying to be moralistic here, merely to point out the realities of what the food system used to be compared to what we in the developed world have come to expect as ‘normal.’ I know my parents both grew up in rural areas where food was always local and seasonal. Indeed, even though I grew up in a large town in England, I still recall when I was young how the Saturday markets when my parents went ‘shopping’ for the week’s food, and which were full of fresh foods and meats. There were grocery stores but they usually some corner street shop and certainly were not the mega-supermarkets we see in the developed world today. Being closer to the food production system does give you an appreciation of what it takes to get the food to market. People who live in large cities tend to be isolated from this and so not understand the fickleness possibilities.
In a relatively recent post, I talked about Detroit (see link) and our need to prepare for a food transition. This city in the USA is a stark reminder of what happens when urban decay hits what was once a thriving city center. Detroit is recovering, but it did so after the greater area surrounding it largely ignored it for years.
I am not an apocalypse predictor because what is coming is obvious to anyone that is willing simply to see. The climate is changing, major resources are reaching their peaks, and in many cases have gone way past their peaks. The world is getting angrier and less tolerant. Ecological systems are not collapsing as so many doomsayers keep predicting, BUT they are changing. In many areas, quite drastically.
It doesn’t take a great psychic to see the writing on the wall. Big changes are coming in all areas of life. We can have a great future in which we thrive, but to be complacent and pretend that technology is our savior is naïve. We had a great run with this current hedonistic material-consumer lifestyle – or at least 20% in the developed world did, but reality is a bitch. We need to begin healing this great separation from nature and thinking that we can control the natural processes of the planet. Our solution to a great future is to start adapting and stop thinking we can continue to dominate and force the world to bend to our will. As one of my professors in graduate school was fond of saying. Nature controls the rules of the game, not us. We have to learn to play her game and stop thinking we are the only players in the game.
To Be Continued ……..
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