Why Is Food A Commodity?

Back to reading "My Ishmael" with my teenage son this morning. Right now this is probably one of the highlights of my day. I take great pleasure in doing this. Out of all the things I can pass on to him Ishmael's teachings are probably one of the most important.

After reading two chapters with him today I have to ask: What guy came up with the bright idea to make a food a commodity? I remember first watching Daniel Quinn's "Food Production and Population Growth" video and him making the comment about doctors being paid to deliver babies. His point went was doctors don't get paid by the pound to deliver a baby. Likewise, why do farmers have to get paid by the pound to produce food. Can't their services fall under the category of service? I had the hardest time with that point when I first heard it, and I still do to this day. Having been conditioned for close to 25 years to imagine there is no other way to be paid for food production, is a hard habit to break out even if it is only an act of imagination.

Unschooling The World With My Teenage Son

Started off my morning reading "My Ishmael" with my 15 year old son. We managed to get a chapter read before the house became to chaotic. That chapter's title was: "Unschooling the World." It's still as fresh and vital as it was when I read it back in my mid-twenties (I'm going to be 40 in a couple of months!) This time there isn't as much hope, though. There is a lot more grief this time around. Why? I imagine it's because things just haven't changed fast enough. 15 years after I first read it we value buisness over people to an even greater degree than we did at the turn of the century. If this wasn't the case corporations would not have free speech rights and be allowed to flood political campaigns with money. Scott Walker wouldn't be touring the central part of Wisconsin thanking God and glaciers for all of the jobs created by the frac-sand they left us.

Barbara Ehrenreich on Families

This quote makes whole lot of sense to me:

"The problem with families is not that you get stuck in the same persona for life, which is what everyone complains about, but that you're always getting confused with someone else and end up taking the blame for them. You may think of yourself as a freestanding individual, a unique point of consciousness in the universe, but in many ways you are just subbing for absent family members or departed ancestors. You may even literally change places with them..." Barbara Ehrenreich, pg. 34, Living With a Wild God