Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell

Cover of Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Edward Abbey

Today is break from the cancer reportage.

Edward Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire in 1968, about his time as a Park Ranger in a Arches National Monument in Moab, Utah. Often compared to Walden by Henry David Thoreau; it was an early contributor to confrontational environmentalism. Thematically, Desert Solitaire showing Abbey’s disgust with mainstream culture and its effect on society.

“If industrial man continues to multiply its numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth.”

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell,'' he wrote. And he adopted for a motto Walt Whitman's line: ''Resist much, obey little.'' Another motto was Thoreau's summary in ''Walden'': ''If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?'

Edward Abbey profile, NY TIMES

Left unattended, anger of the everyday grows inside, turning anything good to more anger. Left to its own devices, we see only the shell of a person, cream filled with anger, transforming into cancer.

Cancer loves to grow in an inflammatory environment. Your body is assaulted daily with the foods you eat, and the insidious poisons we allow companies to knowingly put in our food. We see gross photos on the sides of cigarette boxes in Canada, but equally disturbing images do not come with grocery items.

In California, they have Proposition 65 which mandates disclaimers on any ingredient that may cause cancer to be at least acknowledged as such. Because California is such a large market, some companies ask for Prop 65 statements on the organic ingredients which my company sells in bulk.

The list is exhaustive and perhaps in some cases overkill, but it does create a goalpost, which without mandated goalposts, corporate interests look for ways to circumvent, cut costs and increase profits. Profit can come from raising prices, as we have seen in the runaway food inflation of the past year, (some of which was legitimate), to simple greed by grocers. The other way to increase profits is to lower costs. Costs can be lowered with greater efficiencies, better buying of materials , just in time production, and the oldest favourite, just lower the quality. We have seen a lot if that in the post-Covid world.

In certain categories, we see the rise of food fraud. Our company used to sell organic soymeal to various large US agricultural corporations. They were happy to go offshore to find non-American soybeans, as long as the documents were good. But when the next step is to pressure your third world suppliers for lower prices, the only way that usually can happen is to lower quality, I.e. add more “non-food” to the food. As this product s fed to animals ( cattle, pigs, chickens), quality is relative.

The other way to cheapen organic food is to fraudulent mix with conventional food, and just call it organic. We were losing our contracts at one point, only to discover our competitor was doing just that, mixing non-organic with organic and calling it organic. This fraud was discovered, and they lost their licence and certification. This was about 8 years ago.

Six months later, they were back in business, certified by a company in another country. The organics industry in recent years tightened documents and overview of regulations to protect the good guys and expose the fraudulent suppliers. But at a certain point, you have realize that it is a race to the bottom. We made a conscious decision as a company to walk away from this line of business. That is a decision I was very proud of us making.

Another issue that relates to fraud, and criminality in food production is child labour. Child labour is increasing dramatically, especially in large agricultural based states.

The New Yorker wrote an enlightening article June 4, 2023 by William Finnegan.

“Today, however, child labor in America is on the rise. The number of minors employed in violation of child-labor laws last year was up thirty-seven per cent from the previous year, according to the Department of Labor, and up two hundred and eighty-three per cent from 2015. (These are violations caught by government, so they likely represent a fraction of the real number.) This surge is being propelled by an unhappy confluence of employers desperate to fill jobs, including dangerous jobs, at the lowest possible cost; a vast wave of “unaccompanied minors” entering the country; more than a little human trafficking; and a growing number of state legislatures that are weakening child-labor laws in deference to industry groups and, sometimes, in defiance of federal authority.”

Up 285% from 2015.

Did you ever wonder where all these refugee children end up when separated from their families at the border? Providing the labour to work in the fields that American workers cannot be found to work. It is the same situation in Canada. If they do nit have this labour, food rots in the fields. Essentially it is another form of human trafficking and near-slave labour. This is where it starts.

Finnegan goes on to say,” Typically, the new laws extend work hours for minors, lift restrictions on hazardous work, lower the age at which kids can bus tables where alcohol is served, or introduce new sub-minimum wages. In Iowa, a new law allows children as young as fourteen to work in industrial laundries, and, with approval from a state agency, allows sixteen-year-olds to work in roofing, excavation, demolition, the operation of power-driven machinery, and other dangerous occupations. In February, the Labor Department announced that it had found more than a hundred children between the ages of thirteen and seventeen working in meatpacking plants and slaughterhouses, in eight states, for Packers Sanitation Services, one of the nation’s largest food-sanitation companies. The children worked overnight shifts at such jobs as cleaning bone saws and head splitters with hazardous chemicals.”

This is why unions are still needed. Because left to their own devices, the rich white men who run this machine know that we are addicted to low prices, because we can’t afford more. We crave and insist upon that our food is subsidized with actions like this. A whole other part of the story is that we throw out almost 40% of food grown. According to feedingamerica.org , when asked the question of how much food waste is there in the United States? “ Each year, 119 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to 130 billion meals and more than $408 billion in food thrown away each year. Shockingly, nearly 40% of all food in America is wasted.”

So if the costs are fixed, there is less volume to spread the costs, raising the price.

Surely we are doing a better job in Canada, you say. “According to the UN Food Waste Index from 2021, the average Canadian household wastes 79 kilograms of food every year. In comparison, the annual household food waste in the United States is 59 kilograms and 77 kilograms in the United Kingdom. https://madeinca.ca › food-waste-ca

We’re number one! US gets bronze medal for food waste. Averages for the world is about one third of all food is wasted. Lack of food is often given as the rationale for using more pesticides and Genetically Modified Organisms ( GMO food), yet little effort is made in reclaiming this loss of food. Instead, we add more poisons to the food grown. In what works does that make sense? In a world where growth is king, anything goes if anything grows. Even cancer.

We’re on this planet to use our gifts and spread our love.” Heather Havrilesky