The below text is a reproduction of a letter and article by Eric Holt-Giménez
The spoofs on the “God Made a Farmer” Super Bowl commercial are starting to go viral. Their takes on Dodge RAM’s two-minute homily suggest the automaker may have irked as many people as it pleased: God made a (factory) farmer, God made a (woman) farmer, God made a Farm (worker).
The commercial is based on a speech given thirty-five years ago to the Future Farmers of America—about the time half of the country’s family farmers were going bankrupt. It was the onset of “free” markets, giant feedlots, GMOs, global warming, obesity epidemics, the massive migration of Third World farmers and the unprecedented rise of the great global food monopolies. It was the dark dawn of the corporate food regime.
None of this, of course, is addressed in the commercial. Commercials are for selling products, not for educating us about the food system. Right?
Wrong.
Commercials are about winning hearts and minds in order to sell things. They tap in to our desires and our belief systems from a very early age. In this sense, they are part of our ongoing ideological education. They reinforce the mythologies that shape our understanding of the world.
In “God made a Farmer” Dodge RAM tapped into national agrarian nostalgia by wrapping its product in one of our society’s great mythologies: the Dominant Food Narrative.
The Dominant Food Narrative goes something like this:
Through rugged individualism, entrepreneurship, technological superiority and free markets, today’s industrial food system is the most productive in history. While not perfect, it is the best way to feed the world.
This set of assumptions contains an important, unspoken assumption:
Without the industrial food system, we’re all going to die.
The unspoken assumption is the most powerful of all because it holds all the others together with the sticky glue of fear. The Dominant Food Narrative allows a broad set of myths and claims to be presented as facts. (First exposed in Frances Moore Lappé’s “12 Myths About World Hunger.”)
The Dominant Food Narrative is good at selling products, and not just trucks. It sells GMOs, CAFOs, and agrofuels. It sells policies like the Farm Bill and global campaigns like the new Green Revolution and Feed the Future. It sells plenty of politicians…
The other important thing that the Dominant Food Narrative does is to make things invisible. For example, “God made a Famer” makes farmworkers, women, land grabs and factory farming all invisible. It also makes alternatives to the industrial food system—like agroecology, CSAs, and urban farms—invisible by denying their achievements in hopes that no one will take them seriously. This reinforces the other unspoken assumption crafted thunderously into the Dominant Food Narrative:
“There is No Alternative.”
Practices that deviate from industrial agriculture (read: do not consume its products), science that is not at the service of the industrial food system (agroecology) and experiences that contradict the dominant food narrative (Campesino a Campesino, Cuba , Rodale), must be dismissed as non-existent, impractical or even “elitist” in order to ensure the dominance of the industrial food system.
But the Dominant Food Narrative is crumbling. It is harder and harder to hide the superweeds, diet-related diseases, land grabs, racism and global suffering intrinsic to the corporate food regime. More and more people can see the Food Emperor had no clothes. The Dominant Food Narrative may sell trucks, but it is getting harder to sell GMOs, processed food and the beneficence of Wal-Mart,
Other food narratives are emerging from other practices that not only challenge the old narrative, they make us realize that there plenty of alternatives to the industrial food system. Around the world, communities are showing that the practices and the narratives can be changed to serve other purposes rather than food for monopoly profit.
The next step will be to change the rules and institutions governing our food system so that these “alternative” practices become the norm.
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THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF PAUL HARVEY TALKING ABOUT THE AMERICAN FARMER:
And on the 8th day God looked down on his planned paradise and said, "I need a caretaker." So, God made a farmer.
God said I need somebody to get up before dawn and milk cows and work all day in the fields, milk cows again, eat supper and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board. So, God made a farmer.
I need somebody with strong arms. Strong enough to rustle a calf, yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery, come home hungry and have to wait for lunch until his wife is done feeding and visiting with the ladies and telling them to be sure to come back real soon...and mean it. So, God made a farmer.
God said "I need somebody that can shape an ax handle, shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire make a harness out of hay wire, feed sacks and shoe scraps. And...who, at planting time and harvest season, will finish his forty hour week by Tuesday noon. Then, pain'n from "tractor back", put in another seventy two hours. So, God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds and yet stop on mid-field and race to help when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place. So, God made a farmer.
God said, "I need somebody strong enough to clear trees, heave bails and yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs and tend the pink combed pullets...and who will stop his mower for an hour to mend the broken leg of a meadow lark. So, God made a farmer.
It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight...and not cut corners. Somebody to seed and weed, feed and breed...and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece and strain the milk. Somebody to replenish the self feeder and then finish a hard days work with a five mile drive to church. Somebody who'd bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who'd laugh and then sigh...and then respond with smiling eyes, when his son says he wants to spend his life "doing what dad does". So, God made a farmer.
