Hope's Edge_ The Next Diet for a Small Planet - Frances Moore Lappe [63]
Similarly, although the low price of grain is one reason why so much goes to feed livestock, more expensive grain would not be the answer. Would it reduce the mining of our resources? Alone, no. If grain were more expensive, the push to produce it would be even greater, to take advantage of the higher price.
The disturbing discovery is that there is no single change that could alter the self-destructive path we are on. Many things will have to change. But this does not mean that we can wait until they can all happen at once! Eating less grain-fed meat is not the answer in itself, but if this step means that more and more of us will be asking why the current American diet developed and what can we do to alter the forces behind it, then we are on our way.
The first step is uncovering the right questions.
As long as we focus single-mindedly on increasing production and then on finding ways to dispose of it—through livestock, exports, or gasohol—we can neatly avoid asking the most critical social questions. As our nation was being built, we did not learn how to ask these questions. The continent’s vast natural resources, the delusion of “Manifest Destiny” which led Americans to seize most of the United States from its native inhabitants and Mexico, the cheap labor offered by slavery—all these allowed Americans to evade critical questions of justice, resource efficiency, and sustainability in our agriculture. After 200 years we face the consequences: the production system which has provided such abundance for most Americans is now beginning to threaten our food security.
It turned out to be easier to develop new seeds, new machines, and new ways to use grain than to deal with issues of power: how decisions are made and for whose benefit, taking into account not only the immediate return but the long-term impact of these decisions. Our national blindness to the issues of power—how to share it fairly and effectively—has been aided by myths deeply rooted in our national consciousness. So we must begin by looking inside ourselves.
First, a belief that paralyzes many people is the notion that human beings are motivated solely by selfish interests. As a result, democratic economic planning, based on cooperative decision-making instead of a battle of vested interests, is viewed as impossible. And people are bound to doubt any movement or organization claiming to be based on cooperative principles, because if human nature is inherently selfish, people will not cooperate willingly. Claims of cooperation must be masks for coercion.
But look at your own life and the historical record; human beings are much more complex than this. Sure, we all have self-interests. The species would not have survived without them! But most people also want their lives to have meaning beyond themselves. And this is one right denied so many Americans—-the “right to feel useful.”
So the question is not how to extinguish individual self-interest in the interests of society, but how to begin to build economic and social structures in which the individual can serve her or his own interests and the community’s interests at the same time. There need not be an irreconcilable conflict.
The tragedy is that under our current economic ground rules, many feel they must choose: either ravage our resources today to stay in business or conserve these resources and run the risk of bankruptcy.
Second, we must examine the myth that the essence of democracy is the unbridled freedom of the individual. But wait … every responsible society limits people’s freedom. In our society freedom is limited by wealth. Those who have wealth have many options; those without wealth have many fewer. Today the “freedom” to own farmland is denied to virtually all those without it, except the few with