Day 4 of our course on food, gender and politics started with an inconvenient lesson: we are often rather one sided in our attempts to make this world a better place. For instance, when we as representatives of the so called developed world put sustainable development on the international agenda we payed little attention to the fact that farming in most ´underdeveloped´ countries is done by women. Therefore our approach and methods didn´t fit in their way of handling farming, nor did they respect their knowledge and position. More or less the same can be said when it comes to women´s issues, ecological matter or health: the power to bring about change is not limited to governments and UN institutions, the economic and financial world play important roles as well. And these roles are becoming even more influential when neo-liberalism takes off. Wendy Harcourt opened the path to other ways of thinking in solving problems and we were in groups discussing the possibilities. What could we learn from one another? First of all that we somehow have to make connections between different layers of interest. Getting movements started or working on a small scale is motivating, but if there are no or few possibilities to change or influencing, then motivation often falls back. Geoff Tansey, who has a lot of experience in this field emphasized the power of financial and business world. Money and commercial interests often play a more powerful role than governmental institutions and regulations. Why bother about women´s rights and feminine knowledge if cheap labor is at hand, when companies can be bought and moved to other and cheaper areas? Even if therefore thousands of people lose their job, which is now the case in Eastern Europe? European or UN institutions stand aside and watch. So we have to think of other ways.
But which? Geoff Tansey showed us in the evenings films with possibilities: get organized on a local level, make local politicians interested, or tie knots with movements in other parts of the world.
Where comes food into the picture and how? The interesting thing is that it peeps up everywhere. If people loose their job their existence is threatened in many ways. They have to rely on cheap food which is not always healthy or nutritious, cooking or heating might become impossible, and so on. But it is a serious matter too if we look at the growth of fast food, sweet drinks, the use of additives and pesticides, the loss of biological diversity, pollution. Media are bought and they push unhealthy products every hour of the day. How do we concur this violence?
Part of the fifth day was used to discuss some actual problems of our own choice. The group I was in came up with four topics . The first: how to get children eat good meals instead of the chips and sweets which are around everywhere? The second: the poisoning of food because of expiration of dates, additives or the use of pesticides. The third problem was how to play and use the media. We started however with a topic which bothers us quite a lot: how to connect movements and local matters in an effective way? Another group had this question as well, so I suppose we will have more information on this. Geoff gave us a wonderful example of success, but we need more. And what our topics are concerned, we came with several suggestions for handling the meal problem for children. They can be summarized in: the use of good role models and possibly sport, get media involved, the example of Jamie Oliver, meals at school (also positive for women, they don´t have to cook dinner coming home after a tiring day ) ….Our day ended in the private rooms of an organic farmer and his family who served us a wonderful tasty dinner, and therewith showing us that it is possible to grow good and solid food in this day and age. Ally
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