“Ethical Markets highly recommends this article by Dr. Vandana Shiva, whose brilliance and dedication to global issues, especially related to farming and food, we take very seriously (see our TV shows with Dr. Shiva at www.ethicalmarkets.tv ). We thank our Global Advisory Board member Vicki Robin, author of “Blessing the Hands That Feed Us” (2018) for bringing Dr. Shiva’s article to our attention.
In our two recent Green Transition Scoreboard® reports:
“CAPTURING CO2 WHILE IMPROVING HUMAN NUTRITION & HEALTH: 2018), and our follow-up just released in May, 2019: “TRANSITIONING TO SCIENCE-BASED INVESTING“ (both free downloads from www.ethicalmarkets.com), we cover the exploding global plant-based food and beverage markets and the start-up companies, including Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and many others. We also cite the need to shift to salt-water agriculture and salt-loving (halophyte) plants, e.g. quinoa, China’s salt-tolerant rice, Salicornia and hundreds of other highly nutritious food plants.
Thus we read Dr. Shiva’s article with great interest, since we share opposition to GMO foods and the entire global agro-chemical industrial food system and point out all the reasons it is unsustainable.We favor this global shift to plant-based foods and beverages, and away from livestock-raised meat diets, now the cause of 14.5% of greenhouse gas emissions and contributing to health problems, as well as antibiotic resistant diseases. We agree that it would be better if Impossible Foods could source its soybeans from organic growers.
We also warn against this new plant-protein food and beverage market scaling beyond the imperatives of locally-grown indigenous agriculture, which is the best way forward, both for climate stabilization, CO2 capture and regenerating soils, the basis of all civilizations.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor”
Fake Food, Fake Meat: Big Food’s Desperate Attempt to Further the Industrialisation of Food
Dr Vandana Shiva
The ontology and ecology of food
Food is not a commodity, it is not “stuff” put together mechanically and artificially in labs and factories. Food is life. Food holds the contributions of all beings that make the food web, and it holds the potential of maintaining and regenerating the web of life. Food also holds the potential for health and disease, depending on how it was grown and processed. Food is therefore the living currency of the web of life.
As an ancient Upanishad reminds us “Everything is food, everything is something else’s food. “
Good Food and Real Food are the basis of health .
Bad food, industrial food, fake food is the basis of disease.
Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine”. In Ayurveda, India’s ancient science of life, food is called “sarvausadha” the medicine that cures all disease.
Industrial food systems have reduced food to a commodity, to “stuff” that can then be constituted in the lab. In the process both the planet’s health and our health has been nearly destroyed.
75% of the planetary destruction of soil, water, biodiversity, and 50% of greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agriculture, which also contributes to 75% of food related chronic diseases. It contributes 50% of the GHG’s driving Climate Change. Chemical agriculture does not return organic matter and fertility to the soil. Instead it is contributing to desertification and land degradation. It also demands more water since it destroys the soil’s natural water-holding capacity. Industrial food systems have destroyed the biodiversity of the planet both through the spread of monocultures, and through the use of toxics and poisons which are killing bees, butterflies, insects, birds, leading to the sixth mass extinction.
Biodiversity-intensive and poison-free agriculture, on the other hand, produces more nutrition per acre while rejuvenating the planet. It shows the path to “Zero Hunger” in times of climate change.