Bulldozing hundreds of established olive trees last week, and thousands since 1967, and unleashing feral pigs to destroy Palestinian fields and gardens are parts of Israel’s war on agriculture and the environment. These tactics are important to Israel’s national security project. A country has a right to defend itself, after all. Targeting food and the ability to grow and produce food to defeat an enemy, as well as for domestic population control, is historically typical state methodology.
North American bison were all but eliminated in order to drive native Americans off their lands and hunting grounds. We watch historical dramas like Downton Abbey and marvel at how food defines and separates class, liberty and power. Americans, as tenants of empires on the cusp of collapse will do, obsess over food, and their health. Simultaneously the people who will build the new republics that will inherit this continent are studying how the state, especially the corporate state, uses food for profit and control – and we are discovering and building new ways to combat that.
The last thing the state wants to see is someone who can grow and produce his or her living, and share with their community via a marketplace, unhindered and untouched by the state. There is a reason that there are so few local USDA inspected meat processing facilities serving small-holders – as this same federal entity banned all sales of non-USDA inspected processed meat, and other food items. Creative solutions, like farm shares, have become the only way that many people can access fresh and raw food and not be criminals in the eyes of the authorities. Food icon and rebel Joel Salatin had to buy and refurbish his own processing facility in Harrisonburg in order to honestly serve his customers and live more freely. His facility is, of course, USDA approved. Government is so important, a real value add.
The US is blessed with natural abundance and a relatively sparse population, and Americans in general believe caring for land and producing food for the market are good things. Farming and food production is hard work, sometimes impossible, and for many, not rewarding or even happiness-producing. In this arena, the difficulty is compounded by hundreds of US state agencies and functions, and thousands of pages of regulatory controls. These should all be altered or abolished – but in the meantime we’ll do just fine. After all, USDA, FDA, Commerce Department and IRS agents aren’t armed and deputized, right?
The Visual Capitalist recently assessed countries in the world in terms of daily calorie consumption. I’m pretty sure even all-you-can-eat Florida Congressman Randy Fine won’t be able to guess which country is Number 1!
It’s Belgium! It’s sheer coincidence that Brussels is the “de facto” capitol of the European Union, filled with unelected bureaucrats and those getting wealthy on insider information and war. No, it’s just expensive cheese and chocolate.
The number 2 country was a real surprise: Israel. Number 3? The US. These runners-up come in at 3875 calories (US) and 3895 (Israel), only 20 calories separating them. It’s almost like they are the same country!
There are a lot of jokes about “traditional Israeli” food, and obesity in America, but it’s no laughing matter. Both countries face significant hunger, with 1 in 7 Americans not being well nourished. In Israel, one in three children live below the poverty line, according to Yadezra, an Israeli charity oriented to feeding the hungry in Israel with their American partners. Oh my!
The Visual Capitalist analysis just ranked the top 40 calorie consumers. With a bit of digging, we can find how other populations are doing in the food races. I suspect that Gaza is near the bottom of the list, with a whopping 245 calories a day reported last year in northern Gaza, fourteen starving months before the UN backed body, the IPC, actually declared a famine there last month. Wait – did I leave out a zero? No, sorry, Gaza’s daily calories are in the low triple digits, far below the calories required for sustainment of life. Turns out, it’s a genocide after all, even according to key Israelis.
Curiously, the top three calorie consumers, where nutritious and high caloric food is most plentiful, have all worked really hard to continue the devastation being wreaked on Gaza’s mostly unarmed, unfed, unhoused and uncared for. Belgium, in hosting the EU, is stuck with a unelected bureaucracy for Europe that is remarkably corrupt and out of touch. The US consistently armed and subsidizes Israel, and vetoes UN statements of support for Gaza, and organizational attempts to feed people. The US Ambassador to the UN denies that Israel is intentionally starving the remaining 1.7 million Gazans that our bombs and munitions haven’t killed or buried already. Israel maintains that starvation and state murder is just national security, and as we all know by now, Israel has a right to defend itself.
Controlling human movement and access to food is how the state in extremis manages its population. Israeli weapons of crowd control, targeting-AI like “Where’s Daddy,” advanced population surveillance techniques, and drone warfare are all being tested and honed on a weakened, concentrated and largely dying Gazan population. Also being tested are the weapons of lockdown, movement corridors, food dissemination and adulteration, water and environmental poisons. The US government and its War Department are knee deep in all of it.
As we approach our Labor Day festivities, perhaps with a big meal together at the end of summer, we may ask each other if we are hungry yet, as we anticipate a satisfying meal.
After we eat, maybe we can begin to digest the deadly dangers of our own government, and its corrupt and warlike allies. It has always been the state that salts the fields, starves the children, kills the livestock, crushes the cities, and corrals the people on a can of beans a day.
Like all states, in times of trouble, war and even in peace, the US exhibits totalitarian overreach. Washington’s current domestic wars – on drugs, COVID, immigrants, the First, Second and Fourth amendments, dollar-based purchasing power, working class prosperity – are matched by an array of bristling global military outposts, threats of war, aid to wars in dozens of countries, and ongoing CIA regime change operations. The weapons the state now wields and trains on – including some of what we are witnessing in Gaza today – will come home, not only to haunt us, but to destroy us.
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