A thread on the value of educating people about growing food was removed as being “off topic”. What?
The r/antiwork rules do not say what constitutes “off-topic” but it seems clear that one of the core principles is to encourage people to reduce their exploitation which put another way, is to recapture more of the value of their labor. IOW, to not pay into and be captured by an exploitative system any more than necessary. What could be more fundamental to that than some ownership over the means of your survival?
When you work for yourself, given perfect market (be it barter, trade, or for $) conditions, you capture 100% of the value of your work/effort/labor. When you are forced to work in a capitalist system you capture only a relatively small percentage. It's inherently exploitative. Sometimes, if you include all the components like mental and physical health, the value you take away can be negative.
Obviously the capitalist system isn't going away any time soon and we can't all work for ourselves because perfect market conditions (ie distribution of the value of your labor) are hard. For many things, production of the value is also hard. I can't for example, make a bicycle or a computer from scratch. I could go live in the woods or maybe squat on some land and grow carrots. But for most folks this isn't realistic and it doesn't need to be.
Eroding the hegemony of capitalism, even by degrees, is worthwhile. This is about “getting the most out of a work-free life” but since most of us cannot be entirely work-free it makes sense that reducing work is at least helpful. Taking back that power matters. Witness the resurgence in unions. That doesn't eliminate the problem but it does improve conditions and lessen the degree of exploitation.
So: One of the few areas in life where we can actively and with relative ease take back some of the value of our labor is production and use of food. This is similar to, say, being able to repair things instead of buying new. We can lessen our dependence on a capitalist system and thus lessen our exploitation.
The trouble is, people have been brainwashed. This is no different than being brainwashed to believe that to survive you need to work at least 40 hours a week and that work is your life.
In that removed post there were the usual objections and most used the same old talking points that we hear from the giant multi-national “food” production companies. They stem entirely from ignorance and propaganda.
The industrial food system desperately needs you to understand as little as possible about food production so that you will believe that we cannot feed ourselves. They do this through propaganda fed to us in marketing materials and in the education system to the point of convincing many that to grow food is degrading and tantamount to being a peasant. The only antidote to propaganda is better education. Knowledge is power.
Core to this propaganda is focusing on the one metric they are superficially good at while waving their hands and bullshitting about feeding the world, economy of scale and “efficiency”. That metric is yield. Not all yields, just certain kinds. It's a bit like a factory bragging they made 20% more widgets this month but then throwing that 20% away. Why? Because yield in the absence of qualifying measures is useless. In the USA estimates of food waste run from 25% to 50%. As a former agricultural worker, I'm inclined to believe 50% and if you doubt that go to the field of a large industrial farm immediately before & after harvest, look in the dumpster of a grocery store, and then look in your own fridge. What does this tell you about where the value in food production is going?
And because industrial food production is optimized for profit it systemically degrades what makes food worth eating: nutritional value and taste. Worse, because you've been sold the narrative that you have to work constantly to survive and the narrative that you can't feed yourself, the system finds it's profit growth through two insidious mechanisms: “adding value” by processing food into more “convenient” and “time-saving” permutations and by ensuring that more food is wasted. Does this cycle look familiar? So while you've been taught to think that industrialized food production is efficient, the opposite is true. It has to create more useless widgets to be more profitable, just like you need to buy a new phone every year or two.
You can still buy a bag of chips and you don't have to live off the land to erode this system and regain some control over the means of production – growing food is one of the very few cases where individually we can do that and where collectively that translates into tangible impact. But for this to happen people have to know it's possible, realistic, and beneficial.