Time for a reckoning
How so you visualise the future? Is it a sterile, plastic, techie world where we wear white suits, live in minimalist apartments, eat pills for nutrition and zoom around in electric vehicles . . .
Or is it an apocalyptic, hell hole, scrapping for raw meat in a battle for survival against the elements and against each other.
Do the decisions we make today reflect our future view or are we unable or unwilling to project far ahead?
What does New Zealand look like to you in 10 years? Fifty years or 100 years? How much do you care about a future that belongs to someone else – you will be gone but your great grandchildren will be affected.
Did your great, great grandparents consider you in their decision-making processes – I think not.
I personally could not even name my great, great grandparents – can you?
But each educated generation is less concerned with survival/reality and more with existentialism. We have not been bothered by wars (close to home), money is given by the government, either as a benefit or a government job to many, food does not need to be grown as the supermarket is full of it.
Many people are losing touch with basic realities of life – getting their hands soiled in the garden, digging up worms, uncovering a rock with scurrying beetles underneath, if you live in an urban environment you and your kids may not get to experience this, let alone milking a cow, rearing a calf and dealing with the good and bad which can arise from that. Individuals say we don’t need certain kinds of food – often the most nutritious kind. They may not think they need it but others do.
Knowing where your food comes from is important. And it can be hard to make the connection between the plastic wrapped sanitised version of food, chilled milk in a milk bottle, skinned and trimmed meat wrapped in plastic so the blood does not offend, vegetables and fruit selected for their perfect shape and colour
. . what you see in the supermarket can be a far cry from the processes necessary to get the food from farm to plate.
So if you cannot stand the thought of what it takes to get, for example two litres of milk or a roast of lamb to your table or even a patty for your burger, you need to ask yourself why? . or at least be grateful or acknowledge there are other people around prepared to manage the less savoury elements of food production whether it is getting your hands dirty or worse, so that you don’t have to.
Political pressure is closing in on food producers and it’s very easy for sanitised people to vote for taxes on farmers who they perceive as dirty, totally missing the connection between utilising the lands resources and basic human survival in the form of food they eat.
Fonterra produces milk products that feed and nourish 51 million people worldwide.
Fonterra is not a faceless company, it is a co-operative of New Zealand dairy farmers who have families, who work hard and are trying to make a living like the rest of us.
New Zealand drystock farmers (sheep and beef) feed many people at home and overseas and produce a grass fed product that is the envy of the world. If all the farmers in the world were able to produce food in the same way as we can in New Zealand global agricultural emissions would be lessened by a third. Yet farming (food production) is New Zealand is under political threat.
Do we need a reckoning – do humans need a little bit of payback? Because we are heading in a direction where we will get what we deserve.
Pristine apartment or dank cave (or worse.)