#anti agriculture

[balkanradfem]

religion will be like, it's because women talk to animals and eat fruit that childbirth is so painful, and the soil so hard to work! Not because we took away all of the midwives and created horrendous agriculture practices

[moxogeni]

poverty is not natural.

before we created artificial cities, there was no poverty. each man had all he needed to create all he needed. the only difference is our environment and how we expanded what our "needs" are.

[vegantinatalist]

I respect vegans' love of animals, really I think animals deserve more compassion than they get. I am personally not vegan. I do not think it is wrong to eat the body of something that was once alive. Tbh thats including humans given the individual had consented, (ideally similar to how organ donations work). I think it is wrong to torture animals such as what factory farms do, I'm a strong believer in small-scale hunting and ethical farming, we as a species have been eating meat in some capacity for thousands of years, the best we can currently do is be kind about it. It's something we have to reconcile with as a species. Truly I don't think a vegan revolution will be viable until we have affordable lab-grown meat.

I disagree with everything you said, heres why. -"I respect animals" then immediately proceeds to call them "things". You respect humans because you considered their consent and previous lives in the matter and how your action may have affected them, you did not with animals. Animals do not consent to being raped farmed and slaughtered. Meat doesnt come from the sky. Vegans dont revere dead bodies either. This is not some religious crap. We care about the harm being caused to the living as a result of paying an evil industry and supporting an evil practice. We want to stop the breeding of animals for the sake of exploiting them. Vegans do not necessarily love nonhuman animals at all. Plenty dislike being around or are indifferent to nonhuman animals. Veganism is not rescue, its not about having a sex-buyer-like savior boner for them like carnists do. It's just sparing them and leaving them the fuck alone and not tormenting them. -The only way small farms are consistently "more ethical" is just that not as many animals are being abused. Any revolting disgusting practice you have seen a large scale farm practice, I have seen a small scale farmer do the same or worse. I have seen farmers prostituting their barn animals, I've seen countless horrific hoarding cases that arent technically illegal and so no one can do anything about it, I've seen every horrific practice from teeth cutting and tail docking to too small enclosures, shutting animals out to intentionally cause them to die by exposure, killing with a hammer etc etc etc. -There is no such thing as ethical exploitation. The animals in hunting zones are raised in game farms. Even if they werent, hunting is not ethical. I've seen deer with their jaws blown off slowly starving to death and every kind of terrible injury you can imagine, many inflicted on purpose. Not to mention how hunting is a practice that attracts sadists and abusers and preens their violent tendencies, increasing rates of domestic violence. -Appeal to tradition fallacy. And no it's not the best we can do lmfao veganism and not killing them is very obviously better than "being nice about how we kill them". You dont have to reconcile shit. Stop doing it. Literally just stop. Spare them. You have other food available that is nutritionally complete and cheaper that takes less resources to grow and distribute. A vegan revolution is and always has been viable since the dawn of man. People were opposing animal agriculture since it's inception. Pythagorus and his students didnt need lab grown meat in 470 BCE. Benjamin Lay didnt accept slavery of humans or animals in any capacity and refused to use horses and lived just fine. Coretta Scott King and Dexter Scott King both spoke of veganism being the next logical step to antislavery and were vegan animal rights activists. Alex Hershaft. I could go on and on and on. Please discuss this more with me if you are interested, or spend time immersing yourself in content made by animal rights activists and learn what we are actually trying to inform people of.

[anarchotolkienist]

51

The Gaelic folk-rock band Rùn-rìg's amazing version of a Mhic Iain 'ic Sheumais, a ballad that goes back to the 16th century and a battle in South Uist between Clan Donald and Clan MacLean - the foster-mother of the clan Donald chief sang it on the boat going out to his wounded bed when she was told by her men that her foster-son lay wounded, describing her emotional devastation. It also includes one of the rare mentions in modern Scottish Gaelic (as the habit had already largely disappeared at this time) of ritualised blood-drinking by women, which was a medieval habit during the Caoineadh, the keening of fallen male relations in battle - 'Latha blàr na fèithe/Bha do lèine ballach/Bha fuil do chuim chùbhraidh/A' drùdhadh tron anart/Bha mi fhèin ga sùghadh/Gus na thùch air m' anail - with some evidence for it in earlier sources and contemporary ones in Ireland, but this is to my knowledge the last mention of it in a keening in Scotland. A very interesting song.

I really like Rùn-rìg's early material, especially the ones in Gaelic - listening to it is as though you're listening to an alternate universe where rock was based on Gaelic traditional music, rather than southern American folk music (especially Black southern American folk).

[dailyanarchistposts]

It doesn’t take a health food nut to see that modern society has a dysfunctional relationship with food. As in almost every other arena of life, our priorities are elsewhere — if not in wage slavery and staying out of debt, then in escapist entertainment or selfnumbing addictions. Even among radicals and anarchists, healthy and mindful dietary practices are often considered a luxury reserved for that mythical post-revolutionary era that we are supposedly laying the groundwork for, when our children’s children, or their children, can enjoy safe, pure, nutritious food. Sounds like a plan. Except for a few things...

While time frames are questionable, there is no denying that the current food production system is a recipe for disaster. Soils are becoming sterile, salinated and toxic, eroding into streams and poisoning irrigation and drinking waters. As is a basic natural inclination, “weeds”, insects, viruses, fungi, and bacteria are adapting to each new, stranger dose of pesticide and herbicide with a vengeance/developing resistances that rival that of the pathogens resisting antibiotic drugs in medicine. The health crises resulting from the malnutrition of the industrialized west — and those outside the west who have been force fed our diets for a century or more — multiply and deepen faster than the pharmaceutical industry can develop their quick fixes.

More fundamental problems like global warming, species extinctions, and polluted waters, all of which affect agriculture and health profoundly, complicate the crisis. So when passing off the job of steering our food systems back on a path of ecological and social sanity, just what is it we are asking future generations to inherit?

[themoonking]

i have an issue with lore olympus's depiction of persephone's "goddess of spring" thing. first of all she shouldn't even be the goddess of spring yet, as spring shouldn't even exist yet. but whatever rachel doesn't understand / care about the myths she’s adapting what else is new.

but also i don't quite understand why, especially in the beginning, rachel chose to make everyone (including persephone) act like "goddess of spring" is like.. an unimportant job? like she's "just" the goddess of spring? does rachel not understand how fucking important the end of winter and the coming of spring would be to a society that relied heavily on agriculture for their food?

idk it seems like rachel thinks spring is just flowers and it shows :-/

[queers4years]

Indigenous Hawaiians really had a good system going: wake up reaaally early and do most of the days work while it's cool and by the time the sun was up and it got hot the work was done and you're free to surf and socialize. I wish the white people realized they themselves could work smarter and not harder and get time to relax. Instead of calling Hawaiians lazy (and being genocidal about it)

[catsinacottage]

It’s very sad to me how left vs right a lot of people think instead of anti capitalist vs pro capitalist.

The RFK jr thing and his Make America Healthy Again thing are a good example of this.

The idea that people need access to healthy food, that large corporations do not have our best interests at heart, and skepticism towards big pharmaceutical companies, big agriculture etc is not a right wing position. Frankly RFK jr isn’t even a right winger.

His handful of strange behaviors and frankly singular harmful behavior (the anti vaccine propaganda leading to multiple deaths of children in America Samoa which I am NOT defending) were all weaponized by the media when he was a threat to the two party system in the presidential election.

Not to mention the fact that hoards of people who consider themselves progressives took to social media ridiculing him for his experiences with addiction, something I thought we were supposed to view with compassion?

He ended up allying with Trump and now one of the most popular and powerful skeptics around public health is considered a crazy person. The ceding of this extremely important topic to the Right is incredibly dangerous.

The mainstream media in this country, and internationally too I’m sure but that outside of the purview of this post, exists to help prop up Capital, and so does our two party system. And no one thought it was bizarre that RFK jr was on the receiving end of so much ire? From the eating dogs to the brain worm. (Which if I may I don’t care if he are a dog and he only said he had a brain worm to try to get out of paying alimony in his divorce which is shitty but like whatever) meanwhile Joe Fucking Biden and most of the congressional republicans and democrats were assisting in genocide. Meanwhile Donald Trump was on Epstein’s flights and island (with Bill Clinton if I may add but he was still permitted to speak at the DNC)

I could go on all day but it isnt as easy as left vs right. It’s about capital.

The maga movement is seeing a resurgence and Donald Trump will be president again in just over a week. But people are too concerned with watering down their enemy’s (perceived or actual) positions down to strawmen and even outright lies. We need to unite around what unites us all. Class. Workers of the world unite. Unite in opposition to our stolen wages, to the poison in our food, water, and air. Unite in opposition to foreign wars, unite in opposition to climate change. Unite in opposition to fascism.

[vegantinatalist]

How are you as a feminist gonna look at men saying "man has dominion over animals, we are to breed the females" and not notice that they also say "man has dominion over his wife, a wifes duty is to bear children"

[jasab]

A must watch 🙂▶️ The message, wisdom, and the bold yet respectful timbre of Zach's voice are so powerful and mesmerizing; you can clearly see that Jay is somewhat overshadowed by him. A pure bliss if you can spare the time.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Against Agriculture: Sowing the Seeds of Resistance

For those of us conscious about the way our food choices affect others, the basic act of cutting out meat and/or dairy products, or eating only organic, feels like a huge step and is often as far as we can manage to take our concerns. But the politics of food go far beyond veganism and organics. Economic and social factors like the conditions of migrant farmworkers, or the low labor standards in most Agriculture in the global south, rarely influence our cultures’ purchasing decisions. Even organic farming often reproduces many of the same ecological and economic dynamics at work in commercial farming. What about the soil erosion from over-farming huge fields, even if crops are organic? (According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, topsoil is lost on average 17 times faster than it is formed, and it takes at least 100 years to form one inch of topsoil). The use of Slaughterhouse byproducts to replace the soil lost from heavy tilling, and the overuse of “biological” fungicides and herbicides, undoubtedly maintains an imbalance in the give and take relationship that forms the basis of ecological values.

The trends toward “natural food” and “organic” are quickly being co-opted, as green businesses consolidate their power and corner markets, gobbling up profits as they go. Consequently, these concepts are losing their meaning altogether. The notion of “sustainability” has been colonized by the profit-hungry. The biotechnology industry touts the term whenever they get the chance. Of course, what they are talking about is the sustainability of profits and the dependence of farmers on them, not sustainability of ecological systems and social bonds. So when we examine the idea of sustainability we should always define what ft is we are trying to sustain. If we are thinking of ecology and cultural survival, then we must remove the factors that contradict those: industrialism and capitalism, to start with.

To be against agriculture does not require advocating mass starvation or a return to an exclusively primitive or foraging existence, and it doesn’t lave to mean eradicating cultivated food altogether. We need to make a distinction between “agriculture” and other plant (aid possibly animal, although the ethics of the domestication of animals should be viewed with suspicion) “cultivation” methods that have been, and are continuously being developed by people around the world. The problem of agriculture is largely related to the scale. “Horticulture” refers to garden-scale cultivation rather than field-scale, as in the prefix “agri”. For example, permaculture is a specific cultivation method that aims to integrate die garden system into the wild ecosystem around it. Industrial farming (even organic) places the “field” — the monocrop — outside of our immediate surroundings, removing our social lives from the polycultural, intimacy of “the garden”. Subsistence horticulture doesn’t depend on industrial systems or take more than they give back ecologically, or even require specialization of labor, or long monotonous work hours. The most effective methods have always been diversified community efforts, which cut down on work hours as well as monotony.

When farmers in India plant a seed they pray for its endurance. But the “gene giants” have their sights trained on “terminator” technologies that break the seed’s reproductive cycle. Hybrid seeds produced in laboratory conditions are usually bred to retain certain characteristics patented by the breeder. If saved and replanted they will not show the same traits, and may turn out to be something weird and unpalatable. Open-pollinated seeds defy this controlled approach. When replanted for generations they adapt to local climate conditions, and develop a bioregionally distinct immunity. When saved for many generations they become Heirloom Seeds. For example, we have seeds that have been in circulation since Cherokee gardeners first grew and saved them hundreds of years ago, and took them on the Trail of Tears. They made their way back to the Southeast and to this day are still being passed around. The more they’re grown out, the more decentralized the seed becomes. These seeds are crucial to maintaining plant biodiversity. The reduction in varieties that comes with industrialization and capitalism has created a massive loss of genetic diversity (75% in the last century, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization), which weakens the plant’s insect blight and disease resistance, and their adaptability to changing growing conditions. The Irish potato famine was a direct result of the dependence on one variety. Breeders had to go back to the Andes to find a potato that would resist the blight. In the face of the elimination of ancient varieties in favor of more uniform crops that ship and store more efficiently, heirloom seeds are truly Seeds of Resistance. Check out Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth for detailed instructions on seed saving.

Humanure and Greywater are traditionally used methods intended to keep nutrients in the garden ecosystem, thereby closing the circuit rather than requiring imported materials. As these methods are inherently non-capitalist and non-industrial, it would not be possible to adopt these practices (or to return to them, depending on how we look at it) beyond just a small privileged minority, within the capitalist market or the industrial model. True sustainability actually requires the subversion of those institutions.

On a personal level, we can take steps to re-establish foodways in our cultures by learning about our food, discovering what foods grow where and in what season — and where those foods originated. We should know where our food comes from and seek out food grown locally. We can seek out those with traditional knowledge, learn how to cook with whole foods, then teach others. We can learn about the wild edible plants that grow around us, and about the ancestral people who ate and propagated those foods. This knowledge provides us with an essential missing component that early horticultuialists combined with cultivation. (A great reference is the work of Steve Brill, an urban wild plant forager in New York City: www.wildmanstevebrill.com). Challenge your taste buds to appreciate foods in their natural state, and replace the junk foods you crave with natural sweets and snacks.

Reconnecting with our food goes beyond the personal. Taking food out of the capitalist market means reintegrating ourselves with the processes of growing food — whether that means getting to know local farmers and buying from them, getting involved in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) or a food co-op, going to farmers markets, or even better — growing your own. These options increase the security of our access to healthy food, lessening our dependence on the market. In urban areas this can be much more challenging, but all the more rewarding if you can challenge the obstacles. For some inspiring examples of urban food security check out Www.foodsecurity.org. The Hartford Food System in Hartford, CT (www.hartfordfood.org) and The Food Project in Massachusetts (www.thefoodproject.org) are amazing examples of urban food security ] that truly challenge the class structures that keep people dependent on Agriculture.

The challenge of feeding ourselves ! sustainably might be the fundamental question for our future survival. There is not one path forward out of this mess, but many possible options, and we’ll have to make up a lot of it as we go. But our paths will be totally new and unique. Learning from the mistakes and the successes of the past is crucial to bringing the modern world back in direct relationship with nature, and the life-support systems on which we depend. We should celebrate the opportunity we have to examine and analyze what has worked and what has compromised our freedoms and our health, and move toward post-industrial and post-capitalist models of sustenance. Rather than an afterthought of social revolution, reclaiming truly sustainable foodways could itself be a catalyst for challenging the deep alienation of our modern world.

[wachinyeya]

Capitalism’s endless economic growth prioritizes the individual over community and creates extreme inequality. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

[anarkittyuwuuniverse]

I always kinda thought that once the term "ecofascism" would enter public discourse it'd get significantly diluted and just used as a prejorative against anyone who's advocating environmentalist lifestyle changes and perceived to be doing it in a forceful way, and lmao that fucking vegan to ecofascist pipeline post. Like the post does talk about the whole malthusian overpopulation thing but kinda ignores other crucial aspects (like the whole "blood and soil" thing) and it's just soooo telling that the post ultimately ends with "once you start fORciNg YoUR LiFEsTyLE ON oTHerS that's when it gets dangerous" like of course that's what it was about all along.

[karl-marxs-ghost]

100% understand being a vegetarian/vegan because of the awful conditions of industrial slaughterhouses for the animals etc however the conditions on industrialized farms producing every other agricultural product are often extremely bad for the people working there which also includes industrialized slaughterhouses and meat processing facilities.

Workers in both meat and produce production, especially undocumented workers, face unsafe conditions, fear speaking out when they witness health and safety violations, are underpaid, and overworked.

Critically all farm workers are exempt from both state and federal minimum wage requirements. “Seasonal” workers as well as people under the age of 20 are allowed to be paid as little as $4.25/hour for the first 90 days of employment which often winds up coinciding with the length of their contract. Some businesses even habitually fire and rehire these workers to keep resetting the 90 day employment period.

And these things are also what helps keep grocery costs low because we can produce food at such a scale so efficiently there isn’t any true scarcity anymore. It’s also why the gov has to subsidize farmers because otherwise there basically wouldn’t be an industry.

Perhaps a system which relies on profit to exist while also having to provide essential goods to people like FOOD isn’t a good idea.

Both industries have adapted to some critiques and create fair-trade, free-range, organic, etc. brands and lines so the consumer still buys things from them just under a different label. Even if they don’t change their business practices they engage in enough marketing to make you think they do. Even the “good” ones.

And it’s also true that these bad conditions still occur at independent/family/small businesses. Sometimes even moreso because they’re given certain exemptions simply because they don’t have the capacity of the massive producers so gov regulations try not to overburden the small business owner.

It’s not just the industrialized meat industry that’s bad. It’s all bad it’s all fucked.