act9_es

“Supermarkets were not invented to make our life easier, they were created to make a profit. Just a generation ago, my grandfather had it very clear; food is essential. In his post-Spanish civil war mentality, -a time of extreme shortage-, it was unthinkable that your neighbour would be without at least some fruit to eat, it was unthinkable. Food was an essential right, recognized by society.

Neo-liberal thinking tells us it is just another merchandise, as is health or happiness… everything is for sale and can be bought.
From the perspective of Food Sovereignty we say no, it’s enough! We ought to place Food where it belongs, as a Right, an individual Right and a collective Right.”



“Where a “big-box” -as they used to call the supermarkets-would spring up, then the corner store, the street markets would immediately disappear. They can’t hold out the competition. Frequently supermarkets sell way under cost, making the so-called “fair-competition” unviable.

Traditionally farmers markets are not only a place for commercial exchange, but they’re also a meeting place. It’s a space of showcase and conflict resolution, where women from the neighbourhood, and men too, exchange, have conversations, resolve. These are rich social relationships. When replaced by a supermarket, the relationships in that space become the opposite; you are the individual, the consumer, and your function is to consume and get back home. Nothing else is expected from you.”

“ ‘We’re what we eat’, the Classics used to say. When someone’s food is junk, its body, its container becomes junk. They begin to get sick. The World Health Organization considers that diabetes and some kind of cancers are closely related to unhealthy diets. Junk diets found in junk spaces like supermarkets. It is the great provider of lousy ‘foods’, which should not even be called ‘food’.

It’s incredibly nice when people getting a nice produce in a cooperative or on a farmers market say: ‘the tomatoes have flavour!’. ’But of course!’; we’ve been eating junk, and here the food is flavourful! And the tomato has seeds and can be planted. Many people keep the seeds to try them in their balconies.

Consumers’ cooperatives are learning again about the cycles of Nature, about the adapted food varieties that grow in the area, the transmission of culture, the understanding, recovering their ways of cooking and proper diet. It moves you to search for the roots with the Land, this relationship with Nature, which I’d call the “agro-culture”, where food is no longer a merchandise but a right. You’re not only buying a tomato, you’re building up a social relationship with the farmer, and that is investing in your own happiness. It sounds naïve, but it is like that.”