This Dinner Brought to You by Slaves

What will take to end the practice of slavery in our food chain? Read this article and realize this is not an issue happening only in the dark and poor corners of the globe. No folks, this is YOUR dinner we’re talking about. MY dinner. These are slaves working for Americans, bringing our food to the grocery store. And they are not just working for slippery American criminals is some hidden black market: no, this slavery is documented in the rules and laws of our federal government and the local agencies of our states. It’s not only happening, our laws perpetuate it.

I know we need to eat. I understand that food can’t be so expensive that people can’t afford to buy it. But we must stop this. We must stop it and never allow it to happen again. Maybe we need to sacrifice. We sure as hell don’t need a wide overabundance of food in our system, a great deal of which just gets thrown away.

Think about that. We have slaves suffering in horrendous conditions to provide us with too much food, most of which spoils in trucks and stores and restaurants, that we then throw into overfull landfills.

This is not impossible to fix. This is just a matter of people acting as responsible human beings, who understand that what we do as a society matters on a global scale. There are many things we can do immediately:

• Understand how our society functions and insist that it function with honor and fairness.
• Stop functioning as a society that uses money as the bottom line for everything.
• Stop stockpiling so much of everything.
• Understand the full cycle of every product we use, and make sure ALL of it is used.
• Don’t make things or grow things with parts that can’t be used again for something else.
• Obtain mot of our food from local farmers, ranchers, and fishers. Join a CSA and make sure the workers are paid decent wages, have good working conditions, and have the FREEDOM to live their own lives.
• Understand and regulate trade agreements for everything we can’t obtain locally. Again, make sure all workers along the supply chain are paid decent wages, have good working conditions, and have the FREEDOM to live their own lives.
• Don’t allow any supply chain to get so large, it is impossible to regulate effectively.

I’ll say it again: this is not impossible to fix. And if we don’t fix it, American society does not deserve to survive.