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Satish Kumar, an international peace and sustainability activist and editor of Resurgence magazine, examines our crisis of food-related culture and spirit in the opening keynote address of the conference The Future of Food: Transatlantic Perspectives. Kumar, a former Jain monk, argues that gardening, farming, and cooking should be a spiritual practice. Factory farming has become a commodity, he says, and feeding people is now a mere byproduct of making money. Therefore, food goes to those who can afford it and those who cannot continue to go hungry, a system contrary to human and animal nature.  For food to have a future, Kumar concludes, we must go back to considering food as sacred, and reconnect ourselves to nature and the land that provides our sustenance. 

 

Kumar’s lecture kicks off the two-day conference of speakers, film screenings, and cooking demonstrations, held to examine the causes of the global food crisis while offering solutions for creating a sustainable food system. It was funded by the European Commission Delegation in Washington, D.C., with additional support from the Ford Foundation.

 

Video Length is 00:30:06.

 

Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk, is the editor and publisher of Resurgence, a magazine that promotes ecological sustainability, social justice, and spiritual values. A native of India, Kumar is also a nuclear disarmament advocate and peace activist, best known for his 8,000-mile peace walk to the capitals of nuclear-armed countries. He now resides in England, where he serves as the founder and program director of Schumacher College, a sustainability education center, and its counterpart secondary school, The Small School. He has written a number of books, including The Buddha and the Terrorist (2006), No Destination: An Autobiography (2004), and You Are, Therefore I Am: A Declaration of Dependence (2002).