Changing the world forever for better

WRIGHTSTOWN EATS OUT AND IS BEING EATEN
by Eric Chaet

In 1935, 54% of the USA population lived on 6.8 million farms, according to Wenonah Hauter’s 2012 book, “Foodopoly.”

About that year, Woody Guthrie wrote and sang:
“I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-ramblin’ ’round —
I’m just a ramblin’ worker, I go from town to town.
Po-lice make it hard, boys, wherever I may go —
And I ain’t got no home in this world any more.”

Wrightstown is surrounded by fewer farms than previously, though as much, and more, milk and cheese is produced. Fewer providers of inputs and services provide for fewer farmers.

Big deals cooked up in Appleton and Green Bay produce big warehouse, office space, factories, and hundreds of apartments in Wrightstown. According to whose plan? Toward what result?

Wrightstown has an admirable tradition of providing assistance to its neighbors, when their sudden and acute need is known. Who considers who a neighbor?

Once, cloth was mainly home-spun, and clothing mainly home-made. Jefferson envisioned a nation of small farmers, the most likely people, he imagined, to be good citizens of a democratic republic. (Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and, previously, one of Washington’s aides, then, General, while still in his 20’s) thought the nation had better industrialize, fast, or be defeated by, most likely, the British Empire — or maybe the Spanish, French, or Prussian empires.)

Enclosure of common lands — among villagers — began first in England in the 1500’s and 1600’s, on the European continent in the 1700’s and 1800’s, mainly.

The lords were starting to shift from maintaining land-wealth, to dynamic tradable asset accumulation — at first, mainly industrial capacity (capital: machines and commercial operations plus cash and shares of stock and bonds). Woolen cloth and clothing was starting to become a modern industry. This would accelerate with the coal-burning steam engines and mechanical looms — and the global British Empire, especially India — but also the breakaway republics of South America — for its market. Wool, first, then American and Egyptian cotton. Then raising opium in India, to trade with China for its gold and silver — millions addicted — and, when the Chinese government objected, sending gun-boats to bombard Peking. Then, what China calls 100 years of humiliation — they’re still angry, and why not?

American Indians treated what became the United States mainly as common land, among their tribe members, before the arrival of the Europeans. Whatever their virtues or deficiencies, they did not “develop” the place recklessly — at least until the Europeans offered them liquor, metal objects, and guns, for furs — or ethnic cleansing if they wouldn’t play the Europeans’ game.

Enclosure was consolidation of land by the lords, for more efficient land-use — efficient for them, at the expense of the less-efficient villagers. The villagers’ traditions were disrupted, permanently. More and more people’s ability to provide for themselves at home was destroyed, and they became homeless — the condition of the majority of humans, now, it seems to me. Home, now, is mainly a refuge — like the robin’s nest of one spring and one summer. Once more, humanity reduced to a kind of animal struggle for merely continuing to live.

I don’t mean to suggest that the European village was delightful, wise, or just — only traditional.

Enclosure of American Indian lands, by the European settlers, was similar — only the settlers’ resulting properties were smaller than the European lords’ properties, mostly. Still, coming from disrupted villages in Europe, settlers felt like lords — and lorded it over the Indians, and resisted collective action to help any landless and moneyless European-Americans become capable of contributing more than they needed — not to speak of Indians or slaves or Mexicans who found themselves living in the USA. Then came wars, droughts, floods, inflation, soil depletion, diseases, continuous toxic political rhetoric and legislation, etc.

I’m a white man. White men have done plenty of good and plenty of evil, some of each consciously, some of each without realizing what we were doing. Some white men did most of the good, some did most of the evil, some tried to keep out of trouble and work themselves into better positions — fixing up the house, mowing the lawn, taking the wife out to eat (do you want cheese with that?), drinking, rooting for the Packers.

I don’t see how it is possible that white women, American Indians, Black slaves or freed men and women, Mexican-Americans could have done anything other than plenty of good and plenty of evil, some of each consciously, some of each without realizing what they were doing.

I believe that I have lost opportunities, and suffered, because I am a white man. It’s a damn shame!

But I believe that I would have lost opportunities and suffered, probably more, if I had been a white woman, an American Indian, a Black slave or freed man or woman, or a Mexican-American — or an inhabitant of one of the countries in what we call Latin-America, where U.S. armed forces disrupted democratic processes, in favor of U.S. corporations.

Of course there are foolish or unscrupulous people, or foolish AND unscrupulous people, who make a living expressing outrage at this or that particular injustice — demanding everyone’s attention and money. That doesn’t mean that no injustice has been perpetrated, or that the effects aren’t real and on-going.

I have felt like whining about this or that wrong I’ve suffered, but, once it’s happened, that”s bad strategy, foolish — I advise myself and everyone else, against it. Those who perpetrated the injustice consciously are pleased with the results, and pretty much everyone else is busy coping with their own problems, or trying to avoid thinking about what those problems are part of, and, so, their responsibility, their role. Besides, I don’t want to incite unbalanced people to violence.

Here are the names — besides Dick’s Family Foods — of some of those who get you fed (in exchange for your money) — your neighbors, and among your rulers, too, in a profound way:

McDonald’s, Yum! Brands, Wendy’s, Subway, Burger King, Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Sonic, Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, Walmart, Kroger, Costco, Target, JBS, Tyson, Perdue, Sanderson, Cargill, National Beef, Smithfield, Excel, Pepsi, Nestle, Kraft, General Mills, Dean, Mars, Kellogg’s, Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Hormel, Dole, Sara Lee, Unilever, Saputa, Campbell’s, Hershey’s, Bunge, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM).

You eat at local restaurants? Where do they get the food they serve you? Do you pay cash (who prints it?) or with a credit card — what corporation provides it on what terms?

Many corporations give their products various brands, which makes it confusing. But people are inclined to choose what to buy according to brands, so there shall be brands, and promotion of brands., on TV networks. The TV anchorman or woman may say that they were local before it was cool to be local, as the city of Nashville crooner wearing a cowboy hat may assure you that you are the salt of the Earth.

John Vanden Wymelenberg, at Dick’s Family Foods — he consistently provides me with most of the nutirents I need, while also fielding a lot of products I disdain, and hires extraordinarily considerate and competent people, one after another — told me that his operation is small — only 15,000 “stock keeping units,” SKU’s. (It’s bigger than MY operation! — so far, at least.)

I don’t doubt that many people with the best intentions are employed by the large food corporations — and big farms, ranches, feed-lots, trucking and distribution corporations, and (maybe) financial corporations. Still, the corporations thrive, while farmers (and many of the rest of us) of less than enormous operations fall by the way-side, or hang on with small subsidies and off-farm employment, on short rations. They farm, but they don’t survive by farming alone. They generally have little choice who to sell their perishable product to, or on what terms. There are fewer and fewer and larger and larger co-ops. Maybe you have little choice in whom you do business with, or for, or the terms, too?

But you may have a computer or smart-phone — which is progress, right? — but you have to pay, monthly, and cope with upgrades and outages and hacks — you have to work to maintain what you pay for. Who gets the computer, smart phone, apps, service provider money? Can you — or your kids doing homework — do without them? How much choice do you have when it comes to who you deal with? Do you have enough information and skills to deal equally? That is, who has what power? More and more, government agencies require you to interact with them, using your computer or smart-phone.

The corporations are owned by a small number of large shareholders, plus a larger number of small shareholders. Does’n’t this sound like lords and peasants?

I’m not saying that this sittuation, oppressive for far more people than it is empowering and enriching, is as bad as Russian-style tyranny — the poor Russians! — but doesn’t it sound a bit like oligarchy — and doesn’t it sound like something to be changed for the better, if possible without everybody getting killed in the process — rather than something to proclaim is glorious?

Various American and western European agencies are in the process of confiscating Russian Oligarchs’ yachts, since the invasion of Ukraine. (They were supposedly okay until the invasion.)

It’s not quite the same as when a farm family might have one cow, whom they treated as a family member, and whom they milked twice a day. Or moved a small herd from pasture to pasture. They’d better produce big-time, confine cows, feed them grain instead of grass, milk them intensively for 3 years, then sell them for fast-food hamburger, expand, buy big combines — or sell out, and use the inflated land value’s price, to somehow start a new way of earning a living — or just go on a slow-motion binge (“retirement”), then die.

Some groceries are nutritious, some mainly calories with little nutrition. Some people become simultaneously obese and undernouished. Some people go hungry, some starve. Some additives do no harm and do some good, while some do more harm than good, providing employment for medical professionals and the insurance companies that are now part of every medical consultation or procedure. (Health care isn’t the same thing as health, is it? Often, it’s not caring, either.)

What, besides food, do you buy from fewer and fewer corporations, over and over and over? — some “nutiritous,” some just addictive — your hard-earned or supposedly free government money flowing to those less in need of it, than you?

Who are your neighbors? And who governs you? Is it really just the Republicans, as the Democrats say, or the Democrats, as the Republicans say?

There is a lot more to agriculture and to food; and a lot more to land, capital, and labor; and a lot more to aspiration and resignation; and a lot more to surviving, building, and maintaining infrastructure; and a lot more to playing together and relationships and competition and cooperation and war; and a lot more to homes and paying the bills; and a lot more to who governs who and how; and a lot more to coping and planning and training and risking and self-discipline; and a lot more to continuous production and continuous consumption.

But I can’t say much in a single article this size — already too big, I’m sorry — about Wrightstown.

Correct me if I’m wrong, please!

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–Wrightstown Article #6 © Eric Chaet 2022, used in The Wrightstown “Spirit” by permission. To use this article in another publication, or to sponsor upcoming articles, email Eric Chaet at chaetsarticles at gmail dot com.