aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Personal responsibility just can’t do it!

I’m comfortable with my decision to continue eating meat. But I don’t honestly think it makes one whit of difference in changing the industrial food system. Nor do I think it would change the industrial food system if I chose, instead, to become a vegetarian.

I would encourage you and my friends and my neighbors and my countrymen to also make ethical personal decisions regarding food. But even if you all do I’m still pessimistic about our ability to make a difference. That’s because the problem I see is an entrenched systemic problem. It’s not an individual choice problem.

The system is big and it is powerful and it’s broken. But we can’t hardly see that because we’re so busy taking on the blame for all the bad choices we make.

Of course, we can only choose among the options presented. And of course our choices are influenced by the billions spent on advertising and proximity and placement and policy and the myriad of other factors over which we have so little power as to be virtually powerless.

But still, we take on the blame for our choices.

It’s the system that must be changed. So good for each and every one of us who acts ethically. But let’s not forget that with each and every one of those ethical choices, the fight has just begun.

On issues of our industrial food system I am informed by Michael Pollan. I am also informed by Eric Schlosser.

In his keynote speech, “The True Cost of Cheapness,” to the Fall 2006 Food, Ethics and the Environment Conference at Princeton, Schlosser concisely addressed the limits of personal responsibility and how it plays into the interests of our corporate food system.

I have quoted it often:

[from the podcast at 01:02:13] For the last 25 years we have been preached a gospel of personal responsibility and personal freedom. That is what has been drummed into our head for the past twenty-five years. Personal responsibility. And I believe in that. I believe in personal responsibility and personal freedom.

But I’m now worried that my own work has stressed that element too much. And this whole idea that every purchase that you make is a vote, and that every purchase that you make has a ripple effect, and that we all must be responsible and ethical consumers. Well, I agree with that, but at the same time there is a pressure on all of us to be pure, to be morally pure, to think that we’re really going to change the world by what we buy and...it gets really hard to be pure. It’s complicated. Well, should I be buying organic or local or should I… What should I do?

The pressure is on us and I think that what we buy can make a difference and that we are responsible and that we do have an obligation. But I think that changing the world by what you buy is only going to go so far. And it only works to a point. And after that point I think it is delusion that as consumers we are going to change that system fundamentally or we are going to change the world.

Missing from the discourse, missing from the dialog over the last twenty-five years have been a couple of other phrases. One of them is “corporate responsibility"Â� and the other one is “collective responsibility.” And I stand here honestly saying that I’m not pure, my purchases are not ideal, and maybe some of you in this room are pure but it’s hard to be pure in this country in the year 2006. But ultimately the problems that...I’ve tried to outline are not due to individual faults. They’re really not. They have been caused by big systems. Systems of belief, systems of production, systems of making a profit. And without looking at them from a systemic approach there is no possibility of meaningful change...what we do as consumers isn’t going to make a profound difference. And I think we cannot allow this movement surrounding ethical eating to focus only on our personal responsibility and on consumer power.

Emphasis mine. What was true in 2006 is still true in 2008 and will still be true in 2010 unless we do something.

I fully expect a Democrat in the White House. Then it will be our time to put up or shut up. That system is not going to want to give. But we’re going to have to give it all we got!