In the 70s, when I lived in Italy, there was a lot of talk in books and magazines about the dystopia of modern life. People of the 20th century no longer experienced the daily earthiness that had in the past come from working the land or some other wholesome physical endeavor (which was of course romanticized, since working the land must take a harsh toll, not that I would know, and many people, including in Italy, are still busy every day doing just that) but were instead stuck with the crassness of modern culture, where daily life was reduced to a constant barrage of billboards, products, traffic, high rises, smog, and other blaring insults. There was a popular TV ad in Italy that illustrated this concept: a man sat at a small cafe table, blissfully enjoying a glass of vermouth, but he was smack in the middle of traffic, with a river of honking, lurching cars speeding around him. The tag line was: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” (This line was often repeated to great merriment on the bus to school: “Stop the bus, I want to get off!”)

In the 21st century, we have now become postmodern. We don’t, as a culture, fight or rail against modernity but accept it as the fabric that makes up our experience. Billboards, advertising, CNN, the minute details of the lives of celebrities: everything that makes up our media-driven culture are our collective experience. In Times Square, there are so many lit-up, animated, enormous advertising screens that being there is exactly like being inside your TV, as if you were Alice and had stepped through the looking glass, but no one seems to register much of a disconnect.

We accept now that our daily experience is pretty humdrum, and that our excitement, and even our musings and fantasies, as well as serious thoughts, come from what we read in books and magazines, or maybe the internet, and hear and see in movies and TV. And I think that’s generally a good thing, since I don’t want to have only what’s in my physical life to think about. Otherwise all I would think would be: “Should I go to the store?” “What can I eat?” “Wow, my apartment is really dirty.” Frankly that stuff takes up more of my attention than I would like it to.

When I was a kid, I was not aware of being postmodern, but I always found myself comparing my experience to what I read in books, which I took to be guideposts of some kind for how to live. I don’t think that’s necessarily unusual. I think it comes from our modern culture, which is so tame and bland compared to almost anything that would make a story in a book even mildly interesting.

And I usually felt that when my family and I did something in a way that was not like in books and movies, we were doing it wrong. This may have been compounded by the fact that I grew up in American culture without having ever been to the United States. I went to American schools in Brazil and Italy, starting at age six and through the eleventh grade, and school almost instantly became the culture I lived in and associated myself with. I talked and thought in English. I read American books. But these books were full of things I had never seen: yellow school buses, suburban neighborhoods, kids riding bikes to each other’s houses, holding bake sales, building forts, buying penny candy from the corner shop. In Sao Paulo, children do not wander around neighborhoods by themselves. Houses are surrounded by iron fences or brick walls topped with broken glass. I just read a statistic that in Sao Paulo someone is kidnapped every two days, and the murder rate is four times what it is the US.

But even among grown ups who grew up in their own culture right here in the United States, there’s a sense that our lives don’t count or are somehow lacking validation if they don’t conform to what’s on TV. Juliet Schor is quoted as saying one of the reasons Americans tend to overspend (and I would add the corollary that it’s probably one of the reasons people feel cheated and dissatisfied — not that there isn’t plenty of reason to feel that way anyhow) is that TV tends to portray a wealthy upper class lifestyle as the norm, whereas the reality is that the majority, even in the US, which is a relatively very wealthy country but where the wealth is very unequally distributed, has only a very modest income.

I’m not particularly concerned about material wealth in my own life, so I don’t care that people on TV live lavishly, but there are so many ways in which one can feel she’s missed the boat. It’s a constant struggle to try to keep some perspective. When you read a book and the person writing it seems impossibly brilliant, you have to keep in mind that’s their best foot they’re putting forward. Right? There are probably other times when they can’t think of anything to say, or can’t remember where they parked? I’m not really sure.

I think it’s okay to just be whatever you are, and that the antidote to anxiety and self doubt is acceptance. It’s good to be content, but striving doesn’t only lead to stress, it also leads to accomplishments. But I’m not sure if accomplishments are important or if they’re only vainglorious?

I think I had a point somewhere when I started writing this, but I’m not sure what it is anymore. Oh well.

As many as three billion people are food-insecure, and of those, one billion routinely don’t get enough food. Fifty thousand die from poverty every day, including 18,000 children who die daily from lack of food or related issues. Global food prices have risen recently, making matters worse, but this is not a new problem.
[Sources: 1, 2.]

The Global Conference on Food Security was held in Rome this week, and the results don’t seem to warrant much optimism. There were pledges of aid to relieve the short term impact, but there doesn’t seem to be any will, among those who might be able to do so, to change in the conditions that contribute directly to chronic poverty and malnutrition.

Some of the reason for that is that there isn’t enough demand for change from the public in developed nations, in part, it seems, because the issue is not an easy one to explain. When people talk about the free market system, they seem to think the options are to either make the market freer or impose restrictions, and that those are the two dueling camps. But as I understand it, the issue is who controls the flow of goods and capital. The market is “free” and made freer when it’s useful to those who have the most power. They are then free to exploit developing nations for their resources and, at the same time, make it so poor nations have to accept their goods, services, and prices on their terms. When it’s convenient for rich nations to protect their own interests, then they impose restrictions in those areas.

So discussing whether trade should be free or regulated is not exactly hitting the mark. What needs to happen, and this has been proposed by people who are far more knowledgeable about these matters than I am, is for local producers and consumers of food in developing countries, where food insecurity is a pressing issue, to be able to work in the way they think is best, without being forced to accept conditions from the outside, a concept known as “food sovereignty,” if I’m understanding it correctly.

The goals are well summarized in this article about a community group in Sri Lanka: “Work with local farmers to develop sustainable farming techniques and regain control of production systems. Establish food sovereignty on the local level by coordinating the sharing of food produced by farmers, and selling surpluses locally.”

Two essays in The Guardian were enlightening on the issues:

Certainly the world would welcome an end to the EU and US farm subsidies which lead to the dumping of agricultural produce on developing country markets, yet anyone who still believes that the WTO is going to deliver this has not done the maths. More importantly, agriculture needs a radical reorientation away from the mess that globalisation has made of it. In the current crisis, the food sovereignty model that puts local producers and local markets first is winning over more and more followers.

The Associated Press, on the other hand, reported on the squabbling among world leaders at the conference without giving much of an indication of which statements might have been somewhat factual and which entirely self interested and misleading.

For example, the president of Brazil and the US representative disagreed about the effect each of their countries’ policies on biofuels have on the food market. The concern is that using food crops for energy may divert agricultural resources away from producing needed food. Brazil makes ethanol from sugar cane, which is an extremely efficient method of producing alcohol and which, the Brazilian government argues, does not undercut food production. In fact, no rise in the price of sugar has been reported as a result of using sugar cane to make fuel. In addition, sugar is arguably not a food staple, since it doesn’t offer much in the way of nutritional value. The US makes ethanol from corn, which is badly needed for food and is a very inefficient crop to convert to alcohol. So inefficient that if it were not for heavy government subsidies, the US production of ethanol would be unsustainable.

As it happens, I have first hand knowledge about this. I used to live in Brazil, and for several years in the mid 80s my parents lived right smack in the middle of sugar cane fields. I mean that quite literally. There was a low fence around the house and the yard, and on the other side of the fence, in front of the house, there was a small cow pasture, and, beyond that, sugar cane fields as far as the eye could see. We were on top of a hill overlooking a broad valley, so the eye could see for miles.

(We were nowhere near the Amazon, I might add. We lived in the state of Sao Paulo, about 200km from the city of Sao Paulo. I don’t know whether the push to grow sugar cane has encroached on the Amazon or not: Brazil has a great deal of usable land that is not in the rainforest, but that doesn’t seem to have halted the inexorable destruction of precious forest land, so my guess would be that, among many other factors, it probably has.)

Behind the house were the factory and headquarters of a company that manufactured steam turbines, which were primarily used in sugar cane processing plants. That was where my dad worked as an executive. Virtually everyone we knew was in the sugar cane business.

The processing plants were entirely energy self-sufficient, so they were often in remote locations. We took a trip once, the whole family, to visit one of these plants, which may seem odd, but it was marvelously interesting. The directions we had were along the lines of, “Follow the dirt road that crosses the coffee plantation. When you get to a mango tree, turn right.”

The sugar cane stalks were first unloaded from the trucks, which ran on 100% alcohol. These were trucks with gasoline engines, not diesel engines, that are easily converted to use ethanol. Cars that ran on 100% alcohol were very common in Brazil. They are essentially identical to cars that run on gasoline. I think that the only modifications needed are that some parts have to be replaced to keep them from rusting, because alcohol contains a small amount of water (I don’t feel like looking up the details). The cane juice was squeezed out of the stalks by a grinding machine and was then fermented and distilled into alcohol (a process that is possibly even simpler than crystallizing it into sugar), and the woody stalks were then set aside to be burned to produce steam, which ran the steam turbines, which in turn powered the generators that provided energy for the entire plant. It was wonderfully simple.

Producing ethanol from corn, on the other hand, is so inefficient that the process consumes more energy than it produces. A peer-reviewed scientific study proved this, debunking a USDA report that claimed a very small net gain in energy when corn is processed into ethanol, but only if the by-products that can be used as animal feed are included in the equation. The US corn-to-ethanol industry exists only because it is heavily subsidized by the US government. In addition, the US imposes tariffs on imported Brazilian ethanol — so essentially it is not imported into the US — in order to protect this unsustainable domestic industry.

In spite of these well-established facts, the biofuel debate rages on, without the mainstream media seemingly willing to shed some light on who is telling the truth and who is intentionally obfuscating it.

Not that sugar cane ethanol is a panacea. There was a recent article in The Guardian about converting the harvesting of sugar cane to mechanization because of concerns about human exploitation. The article worries about the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. Having seen the sugar cane harvesters myself, I have to say their working conditions were very bleak. The sugar cane fields were set on fire prior to harvesting, which was quite spectacular. An entire field blazed, at nighttime. This was to burn off the excess foliage. After the field had cooled down for a couple days, trucks of people were brought in (news reports about truckloads of human beings being involved in accidents, with no seatbelts or protection of any kind, were not uncommon). They were covered in cloth from head to foot, I’m not sure if it was to protect themselves from insects or the heat. Then they proceeded to cut down the sugar cane stalks, which are tough and woody, like small trees, entirely by hand, with machetes. We were told at the time that the process could not be mechanized because most of the sugar is at the base of the stalk, and machines would cut too high and miss the most crucial part of the harvest. This explanation was probably disingenuous.

But as far as people standing to lose this terrible job, it’s an ongoing dilemma: whether it’s better for people to have access to some kind of job, exploitative and harsh as it is, or not have any means at all to survive. The answer of course lies in changing the conditions. But unless people in developed countries take the time to inform themselves, and agitate for change alongside those most affected, change will be slow to come.