User:Selena Savic/OpenEventEssay

How Should We Eat?

General Condition of Food

Thesis: food is mostly massed produced, which makes space for the monopoly of big (multinational) corporations in food industry and distribution;

Hyper-regulating small, independent farmers out of business, Monsanto lawyers

the cheaper - the better, political points!

Thesis: food is unhealthy, it is grown in such a way that it causes allergic reactions;

how are tomatoes produced, where do they come from, how long they have to wait before they reach the shelves in supermarkets and how do they turn red before?

11$ meal, 500$ medicine (from "FOOD Inc.")

(Horrors of) The Centralized Food System

Bureaucratic systems (Who can produce and who can sell, how is this regulated on the level of the EU);

The way of the food: The food production chain from seeding to the supermarket;

What happens and what can happen when food is regulated in such a way - examples of misuse in the way animals are grown, plants are engineered, labor is exploited>>
from FOOD Inc (watch on youtube), >> pesticides, ground, contamination, diseases

Bio Food - Making a Difference

The economy of difference and exclusion - mass food for everyone, bio food for the ones who can afford it (symbol of class, educational and social status wrapped in the "care for the environment" but also "care for oneself" position);

It is not possible to produce enough bio food for all;

Reactions:

activist and cultural (artistic) interventions in the food system, examples:

Squatting Supermarkets

"The vast network of connections that form the background story of a product is made explicit and accessible, making ecosystemic, narrative and poetic use of the data tracking and manipulation techniques that corporations otherwise exploit for purely commercial and/or political ends – the cross-referencing of data from barcodes, RFID tags, credit cards and financial transactions. The stories of a product and the people who buy it erupt suddenly onto the scene, in a distributed storytelling session. The gateway to these stories lies in the logos, in shopping-based narratives."

Supermarche Feraille

improvised store displays, surreal advertisments, distorted products

Detourned products

Barby liberation organization

Yesmen

Banksy

Detourned communiacion campaigns

AdBusters

Ceski Sen

References

movies:
OUR DAILY BREAD
http://www.ourdailybread.at

FOOD Inc.
official trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eKYyD14d_0
tv show
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXmF_erEv1o
a blog
http://radyananda.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/food-inc-exposes-horrors-of-the-u-s-centralized-food-system

FRESH
How we're supposed to eat? http://radyananda.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/fresh-how-we%e2%80%99re-supposed-to-eat