Poem highlighting the problematic focus, incentives and effectiveness of farming systems research by universities and experiment stations around the world.
Donnellan, LaRae M. (author), Montgomery, F.S.Dodrill, S. (author), Whiting, Larry R. (author), and West Virginia University; University of Idaho; Ohio State University
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
1996
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 101 Document Number: C08671
17 pages, A significant effect of industrial capitalism on the modern Western world is the generation and perpetuation of a physical and discursive distancing between people and food – a result of what Marx termed the metabolic rift. Studies of alienated relationships often homogenize the rift experience. This paper explores how rural Ontario dairy farmers experience what John Bellamy Foster calls ‘metabolism’ and their perceptions of the alienated states of non-farmers. Results from on-farm semi-structured interviews suggest these farmers are aware of a distancing between non-farmers and food (milk) that is a different experience than that of farmers. Such perception of milk alienation involving an external group – or what I term third-party alienation – is accompanied by farmer-initiated interventions, such as on-farm educational visits and educational programmes, attempting to mend non-farmers rift experience. Third-party alienation exemplifies the ways in which metabolism can be diversely embodied – and possibly mended – within current human–food, and human–nature, relationships.
