By Dave Id, via San Francisco Bay Area Indymedia.

As U.S. congressional leaders are hashing out the next Farm Bill in the Senate — an event that occurs every five years — farmers, activists, food justice advocates, environmentalists and many others are hard at work trying to salvage conservation and alternative farming programs from budget cuts. The bill, in all likelihood, will further hand the food system over to industrial agriculture and food producers. It has sweeping implications across the globe, affecting domestic and global food assistance, farmer crop insurance, conservation programs, commodity subsidies, and more. In essence, the Farm Bill props up the industrial food system, even as it contains small programs that support alternative and organic agricultural practices.

Last Sunday, when 200 people set out to grow food in the overgrown fields of the Gill Tract, a 10-acre agricultural lot in the East Bay neighborhood of Albany, Ca., owned by the University of California — and slotted for development — they were directly challenging the ethos of the industrial food system that the Farm Bill represents. The plan for the action, dubbed “Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Gill Tract,” was to celebrate Earth Day by turning this piece of rich agricultural land into a vibrant urban farm.

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By John Bennett, via Flickr.

“What do you do for a living?” — or its shorter (and more annoying) cousin, “So, what do you do?” — is the kind of question I avoid these days.

In my head, I tend to get snotty: “I live for a living, duh!” But out loud I am glib: “I am a woman of leisure”; or vague: “This and that”; or inaccurate: “I’m a housewife”; or an oversharer: “Well, it all started in 2009 when I realized I wanted a radical change in my life…” I can go on in this vein until the listener’s eyes literally fall out of their head with boredom. But on the forms I have to fill out, I am much more succinct. Occupation: unemployed.

In this, I am not alone. The official unemployment rate in the United States — calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — is currently 8.3 percent, or about 12 million people.

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Occupy the Food System—the day of action for food justice on February 27—could be the beginning of a broad-based food justice movement that is global in scope but local in action. A unique coalition of food justice workers, consumers, farmers and activists, organized by Rainforest Action Network, momentarily converged under the banner of ending the corporate exploitation of our food system for a day of protest and consciousness-raising.

Noticeably lacking, however, were the rural farmers. To be sure, a number of farmer-backed groups, like Family Farm Defenders and the National Family Farm Coalition endorsed the action, but endorsing is a far cry from nitty-gritty organizing that turns people out.

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A picture of smiling people from the Fiddleheads Food Co-op website.

I am the loose tea buyer at my local food coop. Oh, stop—it’s not as glamorous as it sounds.

All I do is maintain an inventory of about 30 kinds of teas—black, green, herbal and medicinal. I am learning as I go, since coffee (black, hot and copious) is my beverage of choice. The teas come in pound bags and I transfer them into attractive jars, refilling the stock as needed and keeping the area tidy. The whole job takes 10 to 15 hours a month, and I earn a 15 percent discount on my groceries. When I took over teas, I also absorbed most of the “medicinal herbs” that were sprinkled throughout the nearby loose spices area. So now my bailiwick includes everything that you mix with hot water before consuming (except the already-lamented coffee). Every time I walk into the store, I take a few minutes to tidy up my area and make sure the teas are still in alphabetical order.

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