Sunday, August 26, 2012

Paying Attention to the Things That Actually Matter

Photo: Harsha KR. / Flickr.

A Critical Mass for Real Food
By Anim Steel / August 24, 2012

The old logic of the slave plantation is still the logic of our industrial food system, 500 years in the making. There’s a new way of thinking taking off.

Imagine that you are in room. It’s about 30 by 30 feet. The floor is stone, and the walls and ceiling are a mix of stone and cement. They are a little damp, which you can smell but you can’t quite see. It’s pitch black except for the light that comes in from a low, arched doorway in whose frame is silhouetted an iron gate. When your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can see a narrow stretch of beach and the blue and gray of the ocean beyond.

This, a doorway in West Africa's Elmina Fort, is a Door of No Return. It is the last part of Africa you would touch if you were a slave being led from the dungeon to a waiting ship.

I stood in front of this door a few years ago while visiting my family in Ghana. It is a place of sorrow and suffering. Countless human beings passed by this spot on their way to either a wretched death at sea or a life of bondage in the New World. They had been snatched up near their villages in slave raids; ripped from their families and everything they knew; shackled to others by the neck for a long march to coast; and thrown in a crowded, reeking dungeon for what might have been months until the next ship arrived. That was just the start of the journey.

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