The Dark Procession of Our Grocery Store Food

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Jessica Morey-Collins
Activist Post

The dark procession is unending. Even the blessed wealthy are not exempt, even we who have captured the elusive desk jobs must suckle from industry’s cold, chaffed teat. The bitter, subsidized production lines, the brown cracked hands that pass over the genetically modified corn and cabbage, the desperation funneled into the food that finds its pinnacle against first-world lips: we are lucky.

We are the sanctified few who consume the ends that match the torturous, protracted means—the Frankenveggies coaxed from desiccated land, from Frankensoil reanimated with the compressed death of petro-fertilizers. We have designed our vegetables to be greedy, to offer no libation to the land, no pittance to the insects.

How did we come to rely so heavily on the ancient dead? Did the primeval forests sense their fate as fuel for the McSystem that disregards planetary health in lieu of the deified dollar? My world in its entire is manufactured. My world is oil. My words are plastic, my sustenance refuses to acknowledge its context.

The horror is that there is no half-way leaving this way of life. To make any meaningful break I would have to entirely disengage from my present circumstances, leave the blessed desk job that funds my comfortable but unfulfilling lifestyle. To make a meaningful break I’d have to step into the unknown.

I am weary of bending my knee to a fiat God, of spending my days and nights in manufactured environments, of connecting only with irrigated nature.

Before the sun comes up I wake to the freeway hush, the backtrack of my home. The hiss of traffic is as familiar as the bloodrush behind my ears. The sound of my body moving blood and oxygen through its limbs mirrors the sound of my nation moving food and goods through its suburbs; for now these sounds are symbiotic. They echo one another as they reinforce one another.

The ghoulish grocery store patrons continue their unending procession with weathered faces, bent bodies. Even as the system sends its sponsors to hell, they scramble to its gates, exchange their imaginary money for Frankenfood that will continue to sicken them and send them headlong into the open pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. Art and media have begun to expose the machinery, but not yet offered a viable means of disengagement. The system reinforces itself so effectively that it sometimes feels inescapable. As we begin to understand the framework of the beast, we understand ourselves as a part of it; how do we move forward from here?

Jessica Morey-Collins (B.A.) is a poet living and working in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Visit her blog at http://jmoreycollins.wordpress.com/