Dianne Bersea Perambulations
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Here we go......

1/23/2015

8 Comments

 
Thanks for joining me.  I've been expanding, commenting, offering suggestions, asking questions on posts all over Facebook.  Time to jump in with my own thoughts, notes and excursions in whatever form they may take.

I'm going to start by posting an unpublished article I wrote about eight years ago.  It was inspired by a photograph a friend showed me of glamorous diners on an Atlantic Crossing, on one of those magnificent older style passenger ships, a ship that predates the current 'cruise' industry.  As a member of an International Gourmet Club, Bett's 'cruise' offered a culinary journey with the famous French chef Paul Bocuse, cooking classes and exotic dinners of many courses.  Oddly enough, it was simply the presence of one particular person in the photograph that inspired this literary observation..., a Mrs. Cargill.  Please read on:

Mrs. Cargill

I have a confession to make.  I have a Cargill connection.  It’s a bit tenuous, but still, the connection is closer than I suspected.  And it’s put a face on that  corporate giant called Cargill, that pervasive transport and ‘agricultural’ monolith which has swept across our Canadian and world landscape changing what and how we eat.

Lets step back a few years..., twenty years ago to be exact.  At that time I was working as a publishing consultant and food stylist on a cookbook project, a collection of recipes and reminiscences from a famous Canadian prairie restaurant.  This restaurant inhabited several locations over the years, beginning with a few tables in the authors home on the edge of the Porcupine Hills.  When it came time for the food photo shoot, this rustic, screen doored, two story, wild rose surrounded, weather beaten home-place overlooking a aspen filled coolee, could not be reproduced in the cold confines of a big city photo studio.

So it came to pass that for an intense week in a hot July the production crew and a team of cooks laboured in Bett’s southern Alberta home.  All in all we created some remarkably evocative food photos with a plethora of farm raised corn, zucchini, potatoes, squash, poultry and a side of beef.  With the addition of a wagon wheel table, an old side board, wire egg baskets, collectible plates and serving trays, checkered table clothes, canning jars from the cold room and a cheese wheel secured from a neighbouring cheese factory, the setting burned a hole in nostalgia.  Barn-board walls and a window view of dry grass and southern Alberta sky provided additional ambiance for a cornucopia of mouth watering ranch food.  And yes, we ate it all.

Late each day, when the hot house atmosphere of location shooting was complete and all was quiet in the house, Bett and I would spend the evening chatting and looking at her photo albums.  A devotee of all things food related, Bett’s albums were filled with pictures of food and the people who enjoy it.  Lively scenes spilled from overflowing albums.  Weddings, birthdays, holiday celebrations and community events filled each photo, happy people chowing down on Bett’s legendary menu.  Local folks from town, area ranchers, friends, celebrities from near and far including as I was often reminded, John Wayne and Bing Crosby. 

Several albums documented Bett’s annual trip with an international gourmet club, each photo accompanied by a commentary on the who’s who of the culinary world, with chefs and dinner guests seated before plates of sumptuous food served in extraordinary settings, here castles in Spain, there sun burnt palazzo’s in Italy.

Pointing at a photo, Bett might say, “Here’s Prince Vladimir of _________ with Paul Bocuse at Paul’s restaurant in Paris.  And this is Lord and Lady _________.  They were so funny!  Oh, and here’s Mrs. Cargill at a dinner party on the SS France”. 

Mrs. Cargill?   Of the Alberta Cargills?  “Yes, Mrs. Cargill, you know, the grain people”.

I leaned closer to peer at this startling image.  What I knew of Cargill, “the grain people”, was of an monstrous corporation devouring small town Alberta.  The Cargill centralization of grain collection and distribution, and the large Cargill granaries, three and four times the size of garden variety grain elevators, were reducing once viable towns and farms to dust.

I looked down at the 4 x 6 inch photo, a patch of bright colours against the album page.  I wanted to know what people look like who are building an agricultural and marketing monopoly and in the process altering our food and our relationship with its production?  Pretty much like you and me.  Here I saw a prim, well dressed, gray haired woman who looked a lot like my mother, if my mother were to be found dining with European royalty on a luxury liner in the mid-Atlantic.

Fascination bound me to the page.  I asked Bett to point out Mrs. Cargill in a series of opulent ship board dining photos.  Despite the wealth and array of exotic food, Mrs. Cargill continued to look very much like you or me.  And why not.  She was someone’s mother and grandmother, a wife.  Still and all, it was difficult to reconcile this proper older woman with the wreckage of lives and rail lines that I knew to be occurring. 

Only a few weeks prior to finding myself perusing photo albums in an Alberta farmhouse, I had visited an artist friend in north central Saskatchewan.  Magda had hopes of creating an ‘artist’s colony’ in the remnants of a small town decimated as its elevator and spur line met the Cargill juggernaut.  Magda bought a church for $200, and another friend picked up the community hall, complete with sprung floor, for a song.

Despite the depopulation, my visit to Magda’s coincided with a community reunion and by the afternoon of the second day, the nearby playing field was filled people and long tables sagging with potato salads, meat loaves, buns and biscuits and breads, juices and jams and jellies, hot dogs and cold cuts. Over 300 people had come home on a summer afternoon to eat and talk and play ball.  Just plain folks sitting around on lawn chairs telling tales and remembering.  I noticed eyes drifting now and then to the elevator and the line of trees where the tracks had run.

When I stopped in at Magda’s four years ago, the elevator and railway tracks had disappeared completely.  Magda had the town to herself and it’s been so since the last of the hold out old-timers passed on.  Magda struggles to make ends meet with a couple dozen sheep, a small wheat field swamped by nearby agribusiness over spray, and a museum of how it used to be.

It is easy to feel nostalgic for the demise of a small town in the vast Canadian prairies, for a way of life that kept people in touch with the land.  But there are even larger issues at stake here, issues that are large and frightening because Cargill and like-minded corporate interests are reaching far beyond a monopoly in transportation.  In the late 90’s I came across a news release published in the “Ram’s Horn.  It was and is, a clarion call for our attention to eroding food safety and control.  This corporate press released trumpeted the intent of Cargill and Monsanto for form a worldwide joint venture first to create..., “a system that links biotechnology research and development from seeds through processing to the customer..., with plans to explore future opportunities to expand the partnership into agriculture and food.”

As we know, these pronouncements have largely come to pass.  More centralization of transport, terminator seeds, cattle cloning and genetic engineering..., a process that violates species and organism boundaries.

I was initially taken in by the propaganda of genetic engineering; that genetic engineering is merely a step beyond natural selection, a tweak here and a tweak there, and voila! a marvelous pest free, self fertilizing, sunshine producing agricultural marvel.  I considered the media reports that extolled GE and its offer of abundant and overflowing crops for the starving masses.  But, when I learned how genetic engineering introduces genetic material into a cell that would not normally accept such an addition I was shocked.  It is done with great violence.

My mind flashes back to Bett’s photo album and pictures of her gourmet dinner companions.  I see Mrs. Cargill lifting a fork to her mouth, glancing unemotionally at the camera.  Granted, this Mrs. Cargill may have had little to do with the decisions being made to dramatically and violently manipulate our food.  Somehow I envision the people behind such threatening science, such mono-focused, bottom-line oriented thinking as dark-suited power brokers with leering grins.  What intrigued me then and intrigues me now is a frightening suspicion that the Cargill’s are real people, who travel and eat, just like you and me. 

Copyright  Dianne Bersea






8 Comments
Linda Gardner link
1/23/2015 06:15:06 am

Very cool! congratulations, so sweet to follow you in cyber land.

Reply
Murray Lundberg link
1/23/2015 06:19:29 am

Welcome to the wonderful world of blogging, Dianne! I've been a fan of your artwork for quite a while now, and am extremely pleased to read your first post. The demise of small Prairie towns is indeed sad - my Mom's family played a part in the development of several towns that no longer exist, so part of my history has vanished with those towns. I look forward to listening to many more of your thoughts about this country that you show so beautifully in a visual way.

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Lynn Erin link
1/23/2015 06:51:16 am

Wonderful Observations in writing from an Amazing Visual Artist. Makes one wonder what Mrs. Cargill is aware of.

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Lee Simmons link
1/23/2015 07:24:10 am

To steal your words: "it put a face on"...prairie farm houses, big Cargill signs, prairie RR Xings, and a host of other memories. So very well done, Dianne. Thanks for the memories even if tinged (through no fault of your own) with nastyGMO visions.

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norberto
1/24/2015 01:47:06 am

great launching Dianne !

We know how dishonest these huge food corporations are, the most important goal for them is making money, regardless of who is hurt or the damage they may cause by being "... the global leader in nourishing people" (as they say in their website)

And they define their goals this way: " Our goals are to engage employees, have satisfied customers, enrich communities and experience profitable growth".

Now, if they use a little bit of GMOs in their products, this is how they justify themselves: "Advances in crop biotechnology are important tools for meeting the growing global demand for abundant, safe, affordable and nutritious food. GM foods can help us conserve existing water and soil resources needed to feed the 9 billion people expected to live on our planet by 2050. GM food has been consumed safely for the past 20 years."

There you go, according to this monster, GMO is safe, and they are really good for the planet and all the people in the world.

There are so many issues to cover, indeed.

If you allow me one suggestion: at the same time you talk about problems, issues and so on, try to identify some actions and things we all can try. I believe it is too late just to keep crying and complaining.

We must take action. Before. It is. Too late.


thanksDianne,

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Cindy Whitehead link
1/25/2015 03:17:38 am

Excellent article! I read an article a couple of days ago about the loss of the human connect and addiction. "The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think", Huff Post The Blog. Johann Hari says 'the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.' I think that this is the case for the need for greed and power, we have lost the human connection. We are one big family but we live as though we are separate from one another, earth is our mother but we continue to abuse her. What gives me hope is the strength of the First Nation people, and young people of today. Burnaby Mountain and all of the people pulling together is an excellent example of human connection. There are examples everywhere of people making a conscious decision to connect with other people, including the organic farmers at the local farm market to a young 24 yr. old woman who now employs women who were homeless, (www.empoweringwomennow.com). A loving connection to one another is definitely a step in the right direction.

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Dale Fehr link
1/25/2015 09:56:31 am

Congratulations, Dianne, if that is your real name LOL. Until a few years ago I was ignorant of the world takeover of our food supply. Isn't that how armies traditionally starve out the enemy, who I guess is us. Recently I have developed allergies and other problems caused by the non-food additives, etc. and it is getting harder to find the staff of life, bread, that doesn't send me into a coughing fit. My pet peeve is Cellulose Gum, formerly from plants and now legally from wood pulp. I love trees, but not with a nice sauce!
Your excellent(as always ) blog project deserves much wider exposure to multiply its effect on the public. I suggest a high-profile regular column, or even opinion page spread, perhaps glossy magazines, expecially relating to health and food. You know which ones are your allies, hopefully are, that is. I would also like to see you on TV, and with the articles compiled in a book. This all might seem like a lot, but you are already doing the ground work anyway, and I might say your writing is highly credible and readable. Very much enjoyed the launch!!

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Linda G. Swales
1/25/2015 11:34:50 am

Thanks, Dianne, this was a great article. It is interesting how people came together back then ate home grown wonderful food. Now when you go to a gathering you find food trucks dispensing fast food. Go to a children's festival and see what is offered there. Very sad, really.

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    I'm Dianne Bersea, a person of many personalities and endeavors..., photographer, painter, illustrator, designer, thinker, visualizer, writer, sometimes iconoclast, and often frustrated communicator.  This blog provides an outlet for all of the above. All images are mine.

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