I chanced upon the transcript of a speech Dr Vandana Shiva delivered at Emory University, Atlanta, USA, and want to share an excerpt with those who read my blog.
Vandana Shiva is an internationally renowned voice for sustainable development and social justice. A physicist by training, Shiva is director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in New Delhi, India. Shiva’s book Staying Alive helped redefine perceptions of women in the developing world; she was the recipient of the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Prize, “for placing women and ecology at the heart of modern development discourse,” according to the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. Shiva’s latest book, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, describes what a sustainable future for the planet could look like, outlining the bedrock principles for building living economies, living cultures, and living democracies. Both activist and scientist, Shiva leads, with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, the International Forum on Globalization, a group of intellectuals seeking alternatives to increasing economic globalization by corporations.
She also happens to be one of the most interesting, enthralling and charming people I have ever interviewed for a story on powerful women I did for ELLE India
Eating as an ecological act
I mentioned the billion who are hungry because of not having enough to eat. But the same system is giving us two billion who are suffering another kind of malnutrition, the malnutrition of the wrong kind of food—the kind of malnutrition symbolized so dramatically in that film Supersize Me. Obesity has become one of the biggest killers of our time, and it is totally linked to rotten food. I would call it nonfood. We are eating nonfood. We are eating things that are not worthy of being eaten.In fact, there was a big international cultural congress in Spain, and I had to go talk about ecology. And I had a group of Vedic singers with me, brilliant, beautiful women, who did Vedic chants. And I had been asked to serve an organic meal, so they had carried our organic food from India, and we were going to cook an organic meal. So these women came to me and said, “Can you please give us some of that grain?” I said, “Of course. But why do you need it?” They gave me a word which I had no idea exists. They said, “The food here is abaksha.” I said, “What does that mean?” Baksha means worthy of consuming. Abaksha means unworthy of consuming. Our food has been rendered abaksha.And I think the highest level of ethics is the ethics of recognizing that we are violating our own bodies, we are violating the sacred trust of our lives by bombarding ourselves with food unworthy of being called food. That’s why some of us around the world have said we need to move away from the language of being consumers, because, you know, the word “consumption” came out of tuberculosis in the Middle Ages. It was meant to describe that which kills. And our current food systems do kill. They kill the planet, they kill the farmers, they kill our health.
For the entire speech, log on to http://hudson-valley.chronogram.com/issue/2007/4/News+&+Politics/The-Politics-of-Food
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