Ideas For Democracy:  Goal #21

Agriculture and food and nutrition distribution are the foundation of a human civilization.  Precise identification of all agricultural products, food and nutritional values are absolutely essential to the validity and success of a free market economy. 

 

Citizens who want real democracy will actively support this policy and vote for trustworthy candidates who actively support this policy.

 

IFD - policy:  The Periodic Table of the Elements is beautiful and profoundly useful, but that doesn't mean we have to eat everything in it.  A major set of problems of the twenty first century is that during the twentieth century we discovered that we could manufacture imitations:  imitation silk (nylon), imitation butter (margarine), imitation rubber (butyl), imitation leather (naugahyde) and imitation wood (plastic).  And so much more, imitation bread, imitation cheese, and a host of organic chemicals WHOSE PURPOSE WAS TO ENABLE FOOD TO REMAIN SALEABLE -- ON A STORE SHELF -- FOR SIX MONTHS OR LONGER.   Food preservation science was already an admirable achievement:  pickling, drying, canning, marinating, salting, fermentation, and natural cold storage.  But the capitalist, industrialist movement was not satisfied.  They thought we had to make foods as durable as lumber and ceramics, and they adjusted the factors of nutrition to the purpose of reducing a loss of profits arising from spoilage.  Obvious, if nothing spoils, no profits are lost.  But nutritional values are lost and adding chemicals to foods makes the chemicalized foods toxic and the cause of injury.  At the present time we do not know all of the destructive side effects, those disastrous "unintended consequences," of food additives that turn out to be hormone disruptors.  See Our Stolen Future by Colborn, Dumanoski and Myers.  Unintended consequences and dangerous side effects have become the expected outcome of our bad science that ignores the reality that there is no cause that has only one effect.

 

The harm hidden in chemistry progress:

These researchers went out looking for carcinogens and found hormone disruptors.  Sea birds laying eggs and then leaving the nest to go cuddle with another adult mother; alligators with penises too short to perform their reproductive function; male humans with lower sperm counts; female humans developing uterine cancer at age seventeen; an increase in autism; an increase in breast cancer; an increase in obesity; an increase in diabetes; an increase in resistant disease microbes.  And we now understand our modern technology secret:  for any newly discovered medical trend we must consider the possibility that another gift of "better living through chemistry" in food preservation or a cleaning compound that wipes grease away, or a cosmetic or a medicine or fabric or flooring or plastic containers or any other wonder of bad science, could be the cause of a new disease epidemic.  What is the legal and moral status of "unintended consequences."  How about when a man plays with a loaded gun and accidentally kills his neighbor.  No motive being clear, he and others describe it as an accident, not a willful act.  So, do we usually say that such behavior is entirely acceptable.  I don't think so.  Like the boys who hit a baseball through a picture window, which happened to be in the outfield, we assign a form of disapproval that is generally called "negligence" or "carelessness" or "wreckless endangerment."  Even though our civilization has a tradition of concepts that reduce blame or exonerate an actor based on evidence of intent, we still do not consider a lack of intent as acceptable behavior.  We all have an obligation to exercise "ordinary care" (common law) for the people and property around us.  Less than ordinary care means you have failed to meet the standard expectations of the community.  You cannot be free of accountability.  You must accept responsibility for your careless and dangerous behavior and the harm that it caused.  Unless you are a corporation.  People have both rights and responsibilities.  Corporations have only rights accompanied by avenues of escape.  Some people in the United States of America really believe that corporations have no obligations to the community.  Some with this belief have been elected to Congress.

 

Some members of Congress and state legislatures want the government to join with corporations to deceive the public with the idea that a genetically modified plant or animal is "the same" as one that is the product of the natural evolutionary process over time.  That is profoundly bad science.  It is not possible that it could be exactly the same.  These arguments are based on the premise, never proven, that a genetically modified plant or animal has the same nutritional values as the natural organism.  But other logical principles of science are denied.  Any naturally occurring plant or animal  -- including one that is bred by intelligent selection -- is the product of mating, the process of dividing (haploid) and joining or recombining (diploid) genetic material, AS THE NATURAL EXECUTION OF THE ACT OF MATING.  IT IS VALID TO CALL THIS PROCESS NATURAL GENETIC REPRODUCTION.  But the act of mating is blocked in the process of chemical or mechanical genetic modification, because a gene is "injected" into generative material and a new organism is thereby "invented."  Genetic modification or gene editing is the extension of the "imitation" movement that started in the twentieth century.  This human impulse to substitute human artifice for the creations of Nature is based on a crazy interpretation of the Old Testament and an irresponsible form of bad science.  The "gift" of the world to humankind, as described in Genesis, is taken by the industrialists to mean that the world is ours to conserve or exploit or destroy as we please.  But the true meaning, based on the history of human religious thought, is that the world is in our hands not to be exploited but to be conserved and protected at our extreme peril.  The irresponsible form of bad science is the wooden-headed arrogance to presume that we can improve upon Nature by making imitations of everything that we see and our imitations will be an improvement, by some ridiculous logic, upon three billion years of evolutionary caution.  So then, if there are superior intelligences in the universe, the reason we do not hear them is not because they are not talking to us but because we have our head up our ass.

 

The chemical society and the free market economy:

In a truly free market economy, the consumer is sovereign.  The free market functions primarily by the individual and household customers making the choice what to buy.  In order to apply their choices to the free market, every product must be precisely and accurately identified.  Neither governments nor corporations are assigned the function of telling people what to buy.  Anyone and everyone can make suggestions, but all that is for sale must be distinguished by factual identification in order for the market to be true and free and driven by the economic sovereignty of the people.  Anything on the market that is disguised or misrepresented is an offense against the economic community, or against the ECONOMY OF THE COMMUNITY.  Any law or program that enables prescriptions for customer choices is a frontal attack on democracy.