Presentation of Alfredo F. Bowen for the 2023 CONFERENCE of the Canadian Association for Food Studies, June 1, 2023, Keele Campus, York University, Toronto, CANADA.
Poems about cybernetics, patriarchal and matristic conversations, alimentation, nutrition, ecology. ©
Alfredo F. Bowen
M.Sc., in Alimentation (Food) and Nutrition Planning and invited Professor - INTA Universidad de Chile - United Nations University
alfredobowenb@gmail.com
KEYWORDS: Poetry, Cybernetics, Alimentation, Food, Nutrition, Ecology, Patriarchal, Matristic.
ABSTRACT: This paper provides new ways to reimagine what alimentation (food) is and what alimentation (food) and nutrition studies can be by exploring new epistemologies and is part of the author´s presentation at the 2023 Canadian Association for Food Studies Conference at York University in Toronto in June 2023, based on the author´s book “Food Ecology”. New ideas are proposed, expressed through poetry that can make them easily reach the hearts of readers and attendees to awaken their ability to evoke. Extracts of two key poems from my book Food Ecology will be recited, with basic concepts of the biosphere and its ecology, ecosystems, alimentation, nutrition and health, epistemological explanations and cybernetics to understand the negative effects of ideologies and describing the patriarchal conversations versus the matristic conversations and the negative effects of the patriarchal ideology on our Alimentation, Nutrition and Health. Then a new proposal will be presented for an updated FAO/INTA original Alimentation and Nutrition System of the 1980´s, (the first one to be proposed and successfully used in the world, improving Health in Chile for more than 40 years, surviving different political regimes).
RÉSUMÉ: Cet article propose de nouvelles façons de réimaginer ce qu'est l'Alimentation et ce que peuvent être les études sur l'Alimentation et la Nutrition en explorant de nouvelles épistémologies et fait partie de la présentation de l'auteur à la conférence 2023 de l'Association Canadienne des Études sur l’Alimentation à York Université de Toronto en juin 2023, basé sur le livre de l'auteur "Food Ecology". De nouvelles idées sont proposées, exprimées à travers la poésie qui peut les faire facilement atteindre le cœur des lecteurs et des participants pour éveiller leur capacité à évoquer. Des extraits de deux poèmes clés de mon livre Food Ecology seront récités, avec des concepts de base de la biosphère et de son écologie, des écosystèmes, de l'alimentation, de la nutrition et de la santé, des explications épistémologiques et de la cybernétique pour comprendre les effets négatifs des idéologies et décrire les conversations patriarcales versus les conversations matristiques et les effets négatifs de l'idéologie patriarcale sur notre Alimentation, Nutrition et Santé. Ensuite, une nouvelle proposition sera présentée pour un système d'alimentation et de nutrition original FAO/INTA des années 1980 (le premier à être proposé et utilisé avec succès dans le monde, améliorant la santé au Chili depuis plus de 40 ans, survivant à différents régimes politiques).
Note: This article contains copyrighted material from the author´s book “Food Ecology”.
1.- SUMMARY OF AUTHOR’S RESUME.
ALFREDO F. BOWEN, Activist and academic researcher Graduated with a B.Sc. in Economics/Management and a Master of Science Degree in Alimentation and Nutrition Planning from the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA), both degrees granted by the University of Chile. He has dedicated his life to the study an activism in Ecology, Cybernetics, Alimentation, Nutrition and Public Health. Between 1975 and 1976 he studied in Milan with Swiss-French Doctor Robert Berthet Dunant, Earl of Chevigny, who was a physician, pharmacologist and biochemist, as well as father of Food Ecology and disciple of the great doctor and Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel. He was his last student and heir to his science, which is transcribed in this book. At the INTA he studied Public Health and Nutrition under the prominent physician Francisco Mardones Restat, one of the leading scientists who contributed to the defeat of child malnutrition in Chile. He managed to succeed in building and launching the first fermenter, in Chile to prepare probiotic functional foods learned from the sage Berthet that improved the health of many people and assisted in the early development of organic agriculture. In the 1990s he conducted research with Dr. Mardones regarding nutrition education for parents of disadvantaged children in Chile; getting significant improvements in height and weight. He has taught in seven universities, holding chairs in Alimentation Economics, Evaluation of Interventions to Prevent and Cure Nutritional Diseases, and Cybernetics and Management. In 1993 he was appointed as visiting professor of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology INTA of the University of Chile – United Nations University (UNU). He has also held senior advisory and executive positions in the Ministry of Agriculture of Chile, in the National Planning Office of the Presidency of the Republic of Chile and in the Port of San Antonio of Chile and in important private companies such as NCR, Citibank and others, all of which have given him an in-depth insight into the existing challenges at the governmental level to implement successful development policies in some of which Chile has been an example to the world. He has given many lectures promulgating healthy eating habits and Food Ecology. In March 2017, he founded a web page in the Facebook application called "OBSERVATORIO DE ALIMENTACIÓN SANA" with 4,171 followers, where he disseminated complaints about toxic food additives and bad eating habits that affect health, reaching some of his posts more than 800,000 views. In 2019, he taught a Healthy Eating course on the Island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), at the request of island women's organizations. In August 2022 he was appointed as Affiliate Member of the Margaret A. Gilliam Institute for Global Food Security of MacGill University in Montréal and in March 2023 he became member of the Canadian Association for Food Studies.
2.- WHY I AM AN ALIMENTATION (FOOD) ACTIVIST / EXPLANATION OF THE USE OF THE WORD “ALIMENTATION” INSTEAD OF “FOOD”
I will recite some excerpts from my poems but before doing so it is essential to understand the motivation I had for writing them and the scope of some concepts that appear. It was not possible due to the short time available to recite the complete poems, we will now distribute some copies where the complete poems appear and that is the article that will appear in the publication "Canadian Food Studies" of the CAFS.
The central idea of my work is the study of the devastation caused by human beings in the natural ecosystem and in the food markets inducing bad diets and toxic additives and its close relationship with the state of the Alimentation (Food) and Nutrition System and consequently on health and hence on quality of life and I announced in the year 2015 that serious problems were coming to us such as pandemics, all within the concept of "One Health" . Then, my work deals with the study of societal issues such as politics and its impact on the Health and Nutrition of a society. If you want to improve Alimentation in one community, without understanding this social side, it is useless to know a lot of Nutrition. To achieve this, an interdisciplinary study that includes concepts of economics (social sciences) and biology (natural sciences) is required to properly demand the implementation of efficient and effective public policies to solve the serious problems we face. I am a social scientist (Economics and Alimentation), as well as a natural scientist (Ecology and Nutrition); It is from this interdisciplinary perspective that I write these lines.
I have also resorted to a poetic approach, where certain deep and important concepts are explained in verse in order to awaken the reader’s capacity to evoke and to be moved, so as to acquire a new experience that is not only a mental concept, but one of the heart as well. In these very difficult times that we are living, I feel that poetry and art in general help to move and explain in a simple way to people the fundamental challenges that we are facing.
Because of the problems we face in Alimentation, Nutrition and Agriculture, I postulate that our survival is dependent on understanding the phenomenon of health and Alimentation as a social science. The ability to nurture ourselves well in human society is based not only on agronomic, biological or industrial factors, but even more so on societal factors, such as politics and economics.
Our current capitalist, “neoliberal-patriarchal” government system favors scientific studies in the area of exact and natural (hard) sciences, with a timid and small contribution to social (soft) Sciences and art. This, because the Social Sciences and the Arts are seen as a source of subversion, a "distraction," threatening the sole purposes deemed important today: the return on money invested and the mass production of goods and services, as Humberto Maturana says, “the patriarchal conversations of ownership" which I will explain in the poems that follow.
When I began my career in Economics in the 1970s, I studied the work of Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman, inspirer of the “neoliberal” model of social and economic organization adopted and pioneered by Chile beginning in 1973, and thereafter by most of the world to the present day. Friedman argues in his classic book Capitalism and Freedom that economic freedom is inextricably linked to political and individual freedoms and is a necessary condition for achieving the latter two.
An authoritarian syndrome is embedded in this “neoliberal” model of thought, although some center-left governments in Chile and other countries, which have been governed according to these principles, have undertaken reforms since 1990 to decrease this authoritarianism. However, these countries still remain subject to the de facto influence of the dominant economic groups and the economic imperialism of the superpowers. That is why I call it in this work as the “neoliberal-patriarchal” model.
Indeed, just as North Korea is the only most extremist Communist country in the world, so I maintain that Chile is the “North Korea” of Capitalist Patriarchal Neoliberalism. Despite its economic success that has made it one of the richest countries in Latin America, it has one of the worst income distributions in the world. As my professor, the economist Gonzalo Martner says, in the concentration of income in the richest 1%, according to the figures available from the United Nations (UNDP), Chile is in one of the worst positions, ranked 5th in the world, after of Mozambique, the Central African Republic, Mexico and Malawi, where the richest 1% takes 27.1% of Chile's national income in 2020, which is not acceptable in a democracy and indicates that the cause comes from the dictatorship between 1973 and 1990 that led to Friedman's monetarist neoliberal model that, in addition to concentrating wealth in 7 billionaire families that currently control the economic activity of Chile (all in the well-known "Forbes" international ranking), which together with unscrupulous foreign investors, have devastated, among others, the subtropical native forest ecosystem of Chile, unique on the planet, planting pines and eucalyptus trees for the timber business and seriously affecting the ancestral Mapuche nation, whose lands have been taken from them and seriously affected their survival, in addition to giving miserable pensions to many elderly in Chile, with a private system of pension administrators owned in large part by said families that also use said pension funds to finance their businesses. As if the above were not enough, said elite has recently been involved in acts to corrupt the legislature and political parties in Chile.
As Martner says "The cause is a regime of capital accumulation and an institutional framework that favor concentration with political and media agents that support and protect oligarchic interests and have not allowed the redistributive changes necessary for basic cohesion in Chile." I believe that all this caused the social outbreak in Chile in October 2019 and the hitherto failed process of drafting a new Constitution to replace that of the dictator Pinochet and that arose from said outbreak, which still continues after many inconveniences.
And all this, as I say in the poems, has also manifested itself in our Food, Nutrition and Health. During my visit to Montreal in 2022, Professor Moubarak from the University of Montreal showed me an interesting investigation directed by Dr. Mélissa Mialon about how the food industry in Chile, linked to the 7 aforementioned families and transnational companies, has influenced lobbying to affect public Food and Nutrition policies in Chile, for example, taking more than 10 years and finally hindering the implementation of Chile's new food labeling law (a pioneer in the world and now being adopted by many countries), which required warning of excess calories, sugar, fat and sodium. That attitude of the food industry in Chile, as it appears in my poems, is a patriarchal ideology, “conversations of appropriation”, with the sole interest of earning more and more money regardless of the health of the population. For this reason, and for being an activist for healthy eating, I have suffered discrimination in Chile, at the launch of my book at the GAM cultural center in Santiago de Chile, "The 7 Horsemen of the Food Apocalypse" in 2015, winner in the Los Lagos Region of the Chilean 2015 Book Promotion Contest, only academics, politicians, activists and friends attended, no one from the government in spite of the invitations, and no one has supported me in my endeavors. I know of several more cases of intervention and corruption regarding food in Chile such as those mentioned by Dr. Mialon and some I mentioned in my book but not all. I have written a book about my political experiences in Chile that I have not dared to publish until now, I will try to do it in Canada.
But the neoliberal model also restricts another freedom that I propose Mr. Friedman add to his list: ecological freedom, i.e., the right of human beings and other living things on the planet not to be contaminated and become extinct. The precise problem is that the current neoliberal model of "globalization" is characterized by economic freedom, limited political freedoms, and almost no ecological freedoms.
In short, from economic freedom derives the concepts of "Economic Justice" (Justice to undertake) and "Social Justice" (Justice to redistribute economic benefits), from political freedom derives the concept of "Political Justice" (justice to exercise political freedoms) and from ecological freedom derives the concept of "Ecological Justice" (justice to protect the ecosystem and its species).
Without this ideological perspective, it is impossible to understand the Alimentation (Food) system that is influenced by these ideologies, which then determine what kind of food we eat and our health.
The principal purpose of my work is to promote education for teachers, students and researchers in the fields of alimentation (food), nutrition and food ecology, as well as for the general public interested in healthy food and the prevention of health problems caused by the food we eat, but before understanding the current problems of alimentation and nutrition in a particular society, it is necessary to understand the basic concepts; otherwise it is impossible to understand the extent and origin of the various problems that arise, such as a public scandal over food contamination. As you English – speaking readers may have noticed, I am using the ancient old fashion English word “Alimentation” instead of using the word “Food” to refer to the phenomenon of eating. There is a powerful reason to use “Alimentation” since it is a totally different concept than “Food” as we will study in this book, it is a concept to describe the human food phenomenon from the soil where the food is produced until it reaches the human mouth, so it would be impossible to explain it if we misunderstand both. Thus in the English speaking academic environment the word “Food” is wrongly used to name the Alimentation process. This does not happen in the Spanish (Castilian) and French languages, where the word Alimentation is correctly used.
So, there is a problem with the English language since it tends to confuse "Food" with "Alimentation" and "Nutrition" since they are different concepts and it is essential to differentiate them, as it was done successfully in the experience that Chile had between 1970 and 1990 to combat the child malnutrition when the concept of the "Alimentation and Nutrition System" had to be elaborated, so I propose here a new definition in English for both words to help understand the functioning of the Alimentation and Nutrition System of our society and thus be able to study and apply policies successful in this field, which is impossible if a differentiation is not made.
Therefore, I propose that Alimentation is the study of food’s journey from production to the human mouth; it is an economic phenomenon in the social sciences. I also propose that Nutrition is the study of food after it is consumed; it is a biological phenomenon in the natural sciences.
So "Food " is not synonymous with "Alimentation" or "Nutrition" they are different things, Food is a noun, a physical object that provides us with the process of Alimentation that enables the process of Nutrition. A noun is different from a process and confusing them leads to misunderstanding neither the noun nor the process, making it impossible to propose policies to deal effectively with the processes.
3.– AN EXPLANATION USING POETRY AND CYBERNETICS OF PATRIARCHAL NEO-LIBERALISM AND THE PRESENT AGGRESSION AGAINST THE BIOSPHERE AND THE ALIMENTATION (FOOD) AND NUTRITION SYSTEM (relationship between ideologies, ecology, economics, alimentation and nutrition).
The explanation of the 7 horsemen of the food apocalypse of the XXI Century and the aggression we are inflicting on the biosphere which I presented in my same title book as of the year 2015, and how this is affecting our daily health, is also one of the greatest problems and challenges we face as Humanity to survive properly. This problem cannot be addressed without first explaining the relationships between the human and natural ecosystems outlining why these Alimentation problems being denounced occur. That is, we must understand the relationships between the dominant ideology in XXI Century human society and how said ideology causes the problems reported in our Alimentation and Nutrition.
For example, nothing is gained by continuing to receive alarms about contaminated food through the press and social networks on the internet and worrying about it, if we don’t first understand why such problems occur, which would allow us to avoid them and protect our loved ones.
It is therefore essential to understand the origin of the patriarchal neoliberal ideology that has dominated the planet since the late XIX Century. Without such a perspective, we will not be able to understand the ideological framework that has given physical form to the social reality we live in, with all of its social injustices and aggression to the biosphere in the form of contamination and depredation of the natural ecosystem.
Alimentation and health in the human ecosystems are directly affected by said ideology and its negative effects. Therefore, understanding it gives us the ability to make the “click,” the change proposed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the “break” that opens new ideological possibilities and allows us to see new social strategies to live in a more pure and healthy world with a high-quality Alimentation.
As I did in the case of ecology, I’ve chosen to explain these important political concepts and propose new ecological ideas through poetry. I’ve taken the liberty, and I hope the authors cited in the poem forgive me, of incorporating some of their texts and highlighting parts in bold. This has been necessary to speak more directly through your feelings to your hearts regarding the principal types of conversations that exist in the XXI Century and the proposal I make of an ideological message for the new era of respect for our biosphere, Mother Earth – GAIA.
The origin of these ideas is in a presentation I prepared for a conference in the Institute of Nutrition INTA, University of Chile in 1992. It was necessary to refer to patriarchal and matriarchal models to explain how ideologies affect methodologies for evaluating public health programs, but that subject is enough for its own entire book, so I won’t attempt it here.
Having clarified all these crucial concepts, then I invite you to listen to me recite my poetry dedicated to the trans-disciplinary study of Alimentation, Nutrition and Health and that tries to unite science with art so that hopefully your hearts will be moved and the ability to evoke will awaken in you so that you can help the world to improve our Alimentation, Nutrition and Health.
4.- RECITATION OF THE FIRST POEM
POEM-REPORT ON ECOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEMS, ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION
To begin our explanation of ecology,
nothing better than a poem-report
dedicated to life.
It is curious to say the least
that in this remote country in the South of the world
it occurred to us to explain
ecology in verse,
but Chile is poetry.
LIFE
Protoplasm
Cell
Tissues
Organs
Organ Systems
Organisms
= individuals
LIFE
Individuals come together in populations
Populations form communities
Communities live in an ecosystem
Human communities are autopoietic
(their own dream)
Ecosystems live in the biosphere
Biosphere: planetary zone suitable for ecosystems
The human ecosystem
lives surrounded
by the natural ecosystem
(jungles, oceans, savannahs
steppes, deserts,
ice and mountains)
The natural ecosystem processes and detoxifies waste
from the human ecosystem
and sustains life in a permanent,
free and independent way,
and that’s how LIFE works.
Within the natural ecosystem live three human ecosystems
self-sustaining human settlements:
small indigenous communities,
guardians of ancestral wisdom.
the urban-industrial ecosystems
and the agricultural and livestock production ecosystem,
which contaminate and downgrade
the LIFE of the very biosphere
that supports their existence,
reducing the planet’s surface
suitable for ecosystems,
and all this because of the patriarchal unawareness
of those ambitious for power and wealth.
(But a few “industrial saints”
employ non-contaminating technology
may GAIA, the biosphere, bless them.)
Only life gives negentropy (increasing order)
if life decreases, entropy (disorder) increases
human acts against life prolong periods of disorder
and the human ecosystem, the people, rich and poor, suffer.
the government that ignores this,
governs blindly
only for the immediate benefit of the next election, of their wallets
and of the “elites” who serve
but the ecosystem works by increasing life always, disregarding time.
Ecology = study of the function and structure of nature
beyond the individual level!
observing the populations in the communities of ecosystems:
natural and human.
Ecosystems relate to each other
and depend on others to survive
The imbalance of one ecosystem
(regardless of its size)
diminishes life in all
The Buddhist monks were right: even the life of an ant matters.
LIFE = ALIMENTATION = NUTRITION
All living beings on the planet
feed and nourish themselves with food =
sunlight and gases,
vegetable and animal substances.
To nourish oneself is to exchange elements with the biosphere,
to acquire energy and matter,
minerals, and complex biological molecules from food
to build and repair tissues.
Alimentation = the study of the social phenomenon of food
from its production until it reaches the mouth of the consumer:
how the food was obtained,
which food was available in the biosphere of its ecosystem,
how that food is produced
Its level of study is more social and ecological (the community level),
and in the case of humans, only possible to address
in an inter-disciplinary perspective
between the social and biological sciences.
Nutrition is the study of the biological utilization of food
from the consumer´s mouth inward
its level of study is more individual,
and exclusively in the field of biological sciences.
Let’s leave nutrition to specialists and researchers,
let’s teach alimentation to ordinary people and politicians
to secure more LIFE
The inhabitants of the urban-industrial ecosystem
are driven crazy by the bombardment
of recommended diets and nutritional panaceas
Therefore, the clarity of these initial concepts.
Because of the relationship of the ecosystems,
the alimentation and nutrition within each one depends on the others
The 7 horsemen of the food apocalypse of the industrial society of the XX and XXI centuries:
pernicious eating habits and excessive dependence on medicines
lack of companionship and pleasant atmosphere while eating
low biological quality and transgenic food.
food contamination by heavy metals
contamination of food by chemical additives, drugs, pesticides,
plastic waste and chemical fertilizers
radioactive contamination of food
poverty and hunger.
These are 7 adverse environmental situations
of alimentation and nutrition
that lead to diseases and epidemics;
the diseases diminish welfare and the quality of life
= decreased health
It is necessary to monitor these seven horsemen and direct them toward health.
“Providence is a beautiful story opposite one’s own work,”
said Robert Berthet (father of food ecology):
We must organize to defend our health,
commended to God and our own efforts.
LIFE = INTER-DISCIPLINE
The human ecosystem contains within itself the alimentation subsystem
we must understand it as a social and biological system
To understand a social system
first there must be understanding between the exact and human sciences
this is called inter-discipline
without it there is no social understanding
The (human) social sciences have no absolute truths
but reflections emanating from a value system and framed within it.
The exact sciences believe they have absolute truths,
but, according to the latest experiments in quantum physics,
they don’t have them either
So in the first place, to understand each other in the sciences, let’s just say it frankly:
neither the economist nor the medical doctor have absolute and immutable /truths
they only respond to the information they manage in their human ecosystems.
(autopoietic)
The blind application of absolute truths in human Governments
has caused much suffering.
Human behavior is not totally predictable,
science does not have immutable and transcendent truths.
The only great truth is that we are alive
and not alone in this corner of the universe:
we are accompanied by other populations of animals,
plants and microorganisms
and we are what we believe we are.
(End of poem)
Notes to the poem: (In order not to hinder the reading of the poem, I placed the explanatory notes at the end.)
1. - Poem-Report: The name of this type of poem was invented by my wife Nadia Carcamo (1931-2017), inspirational muse for many artists, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart.
2. - The human ecosystem has three sections:
- urban industrial
- agricultural and livestock production
- self-sustaining human settlements
3. – Later, these important ecological concepts will be explored deeper in the section on “Social Ecology,” and then in the Section “A letter –report on human ecology opens the door for me to study with Berthet”
4. – By “Autopoietic” I refer to the fact that human ecosystems fulfill what Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela describe as autopoietic systems, i.e., compound and complex units, alive, with organization and structure, open to importing energy and closed to information. Being systems closed to information means, for example, that the viewpoint of a scientist regarding phenomena is always subjective because he is part of what is being observed; in other words, we see what we want to see. As humans we construct our social environment according to what we believe it to be or ought to be, following our values like I intone at the end of this poem, “And we are what we believe we are.” See the continuation of the poem-report below, where I deal in more detail with the “Autopoiesis,” which is what this characteristic of living systems explains, because if, for example, I see my world as a place to appropriate resources, that world will be managed in that manner, exploited and hostile, with weak ecosystems. But if I see the world as a place of participation and respect for the biosphere and its ecosystems, the world will be managed as a place of happiness, well-being, solidarity, health and ecosystems full of life and beauty. Thus, the problem of the relationship between human beings and their surrounding ecosystems is, ultimately, a problem of values, the patriarchal vs. the matristic, or whatever you want to call it.
5.- RECITATION OF THE SECOND POEM
POEM-REPORT ABOUT CYBERNETICS AND THE ORIGIN OF PATRIARCHAL NEO-LIBERALISM (DEFINITION OF PATRIARCHAL AND MATRISTIC CONVERSATIONS.)
Two great Chileans:
Humberto Maturana and Francisco “Pancho” Varela further clarify the dilemma
we face as scientists,
in an impressive work
in the field of biological sciences
that has spread around the world:
in the conceptualization of the epistemological challenge
(of how the subject knows the object)
that affects all sciences
especially the social,
we need to understand our autopoiesis
to reach new frontiers of scientific knowledge,
for example,
great advances will come
a thousand times larger than the computer,
if we and the biosphere understand each other.
Maturana and Varela say:
“TAUTOLOGY =
Unspecified definition,
to define “good man”
as one who performs “good” acts.
“The universe of knowledge,
experiences,
and perceptions of human beings,
is not possible to explain
from a perspective independent
of that same universe.”
Says Von Foerster, another father of cybernetics :
“…nolens volens
(willing or not)
scientists
have to describe a system
of which they themselves
are components…”
“…if the social thinker
excludes
(himself)
from society,
he doesn’t produce
an adequate theory
because that theory
doesn’t include himself…”
Maturana and Varela also say:
“...If he is a biologist
exploring how the brain works
to become aware of cognitive phenomena
he will discover that his description
of the brain’s functioning
will necessarily be incomplete if he doesn’t show:
how in himself arises,
with his brain,
the ability to make those descriptions…”
Therefore, the social, natural and exact sciences
are all subjective
each scientific approach follows
the worldview of the observer”
There are two types of views of our world
already identified
Patriarchal conversations, says Humberto,
are conversations of ownership,
of procreation as a process of continuous growth
where female sexuality is associated with procreation
where birth control is an abomination
in which war and competition arise
as natural ways of living
and even as values and virtues
in which the mystical is lived related to subordination
to a cosmic and transcendental authority
that requires obedience and submission
where the divine arises as a normative and arbitrary authority
which requires total submission and obedience
where thinking is linear and life is lived in denial
of that which is different
and interpersonal relationships arise based mainly
on authority, obedience and control
Matristic conversations, says Humberto
are conversations of participation
of fertility as a vision of harmonious abundance
of all living things
in a coherent network
of cyclical processes of birth and death
where the sexuality of women and men
emerges as an act associated
with sensuality and tenderness
where procreation is respected and actions of birth control are accepted
where the enhancement of cooperation and partnership arise
as natural ways of living together
where the mystical emerges as conscious participation
in the establishment and preservation of harmony
of all which exists
in the continuous and coherent cycle of life and death
where the divine arises as relations of evocation
of the generation and conservation
of the harmony throughout all existence
of the legitimacy of everything in it
and not as authorities or powers
where thinking is systemic and one lives with the invitation
to reflect faced with difference
and interpersonal relationships emerge mainly
on agreement, cooperation and co-inspiration
The patriarchal vision combines at the end of the XX Century
with economic liberalism
and now we have the liberal-patriarchal vision
of the economy and the world,
authoritarianism and predator capitalism at hand,
their official head pontiffs
are the great thinkers of neoliberalism:
Friedman and Harberger (Chicago) in the U.S.A.
Von Hayek (Mont Pelerin) in Europe
but the hidden pontiff, the head puppeteer of the marionettes
is called Mammon, the pig with feet of clay,
the insatiable glutton of gold coins
whose throne is in the city.
This vision, where profit as the sole motive joins patriarchal authoritarianism,
and it is the origin of the ecological problems of the world
But there is also a new vision of love to save us:
“the implicit emotion of mutual recognition”
as defined by Humberto and Francisco
discovering how cells love each other
Thus, the matristic vision of love is alive and well,
in many small self-sustaining human ecosystems
communities of ethnic minorities
communities of hippies and ecologists
and some conscious individuals in large cities
hoping to awaken new types of friendlier businesses,
like the wave of flowers that awakens in the Atacama Desert when it rains after many years
some of whose seeds lie dormant for decades.
CONTINUATION OF THE POEM-REPORT: ECONOMY, ALIMENTATION, NUTRITION AND ECOLOGY = INTER-DISCIPLINE
ECONOMY, ALIMENTATION, NUTRITION AND ECOLOGY: EXAMPLES OF SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS.
The concept
of the alimentary-nutritional phenomenon is visualized
through systems theory:
one speaks of the “alimentation and nutrition system”
and its components
to which we will return later
The same applies to management science
and organizational development:
they use systems theory.
The neoliberal-patriarchal economy rejects systems theory
and presents itself as the only valid approach
without realizing that they themselves
project their patriarchal ideology
onto mathematical equations,
supposedly objective,
thus claiming to explain human behavior.
The economy is ecology,
it is study of dynamic ideological systems,
It is impossible to reduce it exclusively to mathematical terms.
CYBERNETICS, ECONOMY, ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION
(INTER-DISCIPLINE)
“Cybernetics comes from the Greek “Kybernetike”
meaning “the art of governing.”
Norbert Wiener defines it
as “the science of control
and communication
in complex systems.”
Pask and Von Foerster define it,
as the study of relationships
of the components
of a system
to exist
as an autonomous entity”
“The study of systems
supposedly ‘independent’
from our cognitive activity
was called
‘first order cybernetics
or of observed systems’”
“the study of systems
in which our own descriptive activity
is a constituent part thereof
was named ‘second order cybernetics’
or ‘cybernetics of observer systems’…”
then, the study of alimentation and nutrition
corresponds to second order cybernetics
in its social and ecological part
and to first order cybernetics
in its biological part.
Alimentation:
Social phenomenon
its field of study
is the populations
of human ecosystems
Nutrition: Biological phenomenon
its field of study
is the individual
and his internal ecosystem
Economy = Alimentation = Nutrition = Ecology:
Inter-discipline
the content has been interchanged
this is a real example
(end of poem-report)
Notes to the poem:
(1) Humberto Maturana Romesin: Born in Chile in 1928, passed away in 2021. Scientist in the fields of neurobiology and its application to human society, he began studying Medicine in the University of Chile, then Biology in England and later earned his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard in the USA in 1958 and his post-doctorate in the Physiology Laboratory from the same university in 1960. He became a professor in the School of Sciences in the University of Chile in 1960 and has been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois and at Bremen, Doctor Honoris Causa, Free University of Brussels and Premio Nacional de Ciencias (National Award of Science), Chile. He is the author of the following books: Biology of Language, The Epistemology of Reality, Autopoiesis, A Theory of Living Organization, De Maquinas y Seres Vivos, El Arbol del Conocimiento, Amor y Juego Fundamentos Olvidados de lo Humano, and many other important publications.
(2) Francisco Varela G., 1946-2001. Chilean, Biologist, Ph.D. in Biology, Harvard, he studied with Von Foerster, Porter and Humberto Maturana and published a number of prominent books and works in the fields of neurobiology, cellular biology, epistemology, cybernetics and applied mathematics, including El Arbol del Conocimiento with H. Maturana. His final works were conducted in France, where he studied the in-depth functioning of thought and the brain, and bringing together Eastern and Western thought that appears in his book of conversations with the Dalai Lama. Unfortunately, he died at a young age.
(3) Wiener, Pask and Von Foerster are the fathers of Systems Theory and Cybernetics.
6.- THE ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION SYSTEM: MY PROPOSAL FOR THE THE 21ST CENTURY
My work is related with the purpose of the 2023 CAFS Conference and comes from the rich experience that a remote country, Chile, in the South of the world had from the 1930´s, fighting successfully against children malnutrition and infant and mother mortality, by using in a pioneer way the systems approach, inter-discipline and the capacity to implement policies who survived governments of very different ideologies in that 92 year period of time.
With my experience learning and teaching about nutritional policies and planning for more than 30 years I am hereby proposing new ideas expressed through poetry that can make them easily reach the hearts of the readers. I come here to exchange this knowledge with the Canadian nation, which I love and respect so much for it is an example of a more matristic than patriarchal civilization, with a strong commitment for innovation and tolerance to accept new points of view such as this one I am presenting to you.
Considering that I managed to translate only the first part "Food Ecology" of my original book in Spanish (“Los 7 Jinetes del Apocalipsis Alimentario”) into English, and that the second part "The Alimentation (Food) System" is pending to be translated into English, I think it is important present here an advance with the basic concepts and background on the Alimentation (Food) and Nutrition System due to the relevance it has for the attendees and readers to be able to know them, because it comes from the rich experience that Chile had when it was the first country where the idea was born and used to implement successful nutrition and health programs for more than 90 years up to date.
I developed some of the definitions that follow based on the concepts of the team led by my dear Professor Sergio Valiente from the INTA Institute of the University of Chile, who was the pioneer and almost certainly the first alimentation and nutrition scientist in the world to introduce the “Alimentation and Nutrition System” in the 1980´s to design and follow nutritional interventions that finally led Chile to get rid of child and mother mortality having presently one of the best indicators of the world in this respect. I updated these basic concepts, linking them with economic concepts and changed the focus towards their application to understand and act in the entire spectrum of the food and nutritional phenomenon for the entirety of our human ecosystem (urban, rural, self-sustaining communities), and not only to combat malnutrition in rural areas and in child malnutrition, as originally proposed in 1980 (according to what was the central concern at that time).
Jeff Sobal and his team from Cornell University in New York, USA, developed a very similar conceptual model of the Alimentation and Nutrition System in the 1990s, emphasizing its application at the local level and they proclaim to this day to have been the first in the world to have conceived it, which is not true since it was the team of the INTA institute of the University of Chile directed by Doctor Valiente in the 1980s as I indicate below here. Also Australia adopted the ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION SYSTEM as a conceptual framework for its food legislation.
The concept of the ALIMENTATION SYSTEM finally appeared for the first time in the world, in Chile in 1982, in an Alimentation workshop with the UN Food Agency (FAO), to promote the teaching of nutrition in schools of medium level agricultural technicians in Chile. As a result of that meeting, it was proposed to design a new updated material for the training of agricultural engineers in Latin America. The FAO and Dr. Laura Harper of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1982 developed a first version of the Course "Alimentation, Nutrition and Agriculture" that was tested in Indonesia with good results and since 1984 in other English-speaking countries. Thus, in 1983, the INTA finally achieved the collaboration of FAO and USAID to publish the course in Spanish , adapting it to Latin America, and as Dr. Valiente says in the course book “... the adaptation of the course consisted of respecting the System approach of Alimentation and Nutrition, already tested by the INTA...”
Then, in 1986, the remarkable book “Alimentation, Nutrition and Agriculture” appeared, edited by the team of my dear Professor Dr. Sergio Valiente from the Institute of Nutrition and Food Technology (INTA) of the University of Chile, and the “Alimentation and Nutrition System” began to be taught: first to the Agricultural Engineers of the Catholic University of Chile and then until the 1990s in the Master degree in Food and Nutrition Planning of the INTA Institute of the University of Chile.
In summary, it can be said then that this new approach as a "system" of Alimentation and nutrition phenomena appeared in Chile and Latin America in 1982 due to the need and convenience of integrating the teaching of agriculture and food sciences to combat rural malnutrition, with the support of the FAO and USAID agencies, INTA finally finished preparing it adapted for Latin America in the aforementioned book.
In addition, the development since the 1940s of the Systems Theory applied to biological and social systems according to the pioneering work of Ludwig von Bertalanffy and many more who followed him, especially in management science, influenced the appearance of this way of seeing Alimentation as a "system".
It is curious and interesting that the need for the appearance of the systemic approach to Alimentation, as a part of our society, started in the world on the side of teaching Alimentation to agronomists and in South America: but this was due to the problems of malnutrition in rural areas of Latin America in the 1980s, because it was thought that teaching Alimentation and nutrition to these professionals could help. Apart from the afore mentioned book where the concept of the ALIMENTATION SYSTEM is enunciated for the first time in the world, there is no more official bibliography on the matter in Chile. It seems that the concept was proposed with some timidity, limited only to the agriculture-food relationship, despite the fact that Valiente himself, said several years later that the concept of the ALIMENTATION SYSTEM was decisive in the eradication of malnutrition and infant mortality in Chile.
Then, I define the ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION SYSTEM as a "systemic, global and multidisciplinary concept for the study of food and nutrition within the complex of ecological, economic, social and cultural conditions that affect human communities, to interpret and measure variations of food and nutritional status as an indicator of quality of life”.
It consists of three elements:
• Food availability: Factor of the food and nutrition system which determines the production (Supply) of food in a community.
• Food consumption: Factor of the food and nutrition system which determines the type, quantity and price (Demand) of food purchased in a community.
• Biological use of food: It is the factor that determines how food is used in our body to provide us with energy and build or repair tissues.
According to the above, I define ALIMENTATION as the social process of the human Alimentation and Nutrition System for the availability (production-supply) and consumption (demand) of food, encompassing the entire food phenomenon from when the food is produced until it is consumed when it reaches the mouth, "from the farm to the fork".
Next, and to graphically summarize all that has been said, I will show a new scheme that I propose to represent the Alimentation and Nutrition System, based on the one by Sergio Valiente (INTA) mentioned before, and with the following changes:
• Using the classical view of Systems Theory (that all systems have INPUTS, PROCESSES, OUTPUTS and FEEDBACK), I will classify AVAILABILITY as INPUT of the Alimentation and Nutrition System, CONSUMPTION and BIOLOGICAL USE as PROCESSES and as PRODUCTS (OUTPUT) to NUTRITIONAL STATUS and QUALITY OF LIFE and as FEEDBACK to ALIMENTATION-NUTRITIONAL SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS and ALIMENTATION AND NUTRITION POLICIES.
• I separated more clearly the different stages within each system, reviewing their causal relationship, for example, in the 1986 version of INTA it appears that marketing and prices determine the demand for food, here it is stated that these two factors plus income and nutritional education determine the demand for food and its interaction with availability (supply), ultimately determining its price and consumption.
• I revised some terms, for example, for the term “income-purchase” used by INTA, I replaced it with “income”, because it is a different phenomenon from that of purchase.
• INTA pointed to the Alimentation Policies in the “What to do” section of its scheme, and the “Surveillance systems” in the “What to monitor”, I propose to group and place these two functions in the feedback of the system, since it is about precisely from that: by monitoring I detect problems and correct them through policies, in this "monitoring" it not only includes governments and experts in nutrition and Alimentation, but also includes the movement of private human beings in the social networks of the internet that are denouncing the problems of our Alimentation and ecosystems and demanding action to solve them, a movement that is bigger every day and that contributes to breaking the inertia of the Governments in this regard.
• In the question who needs? of the System, I refer, according to the classification of ecosystems already exposed, to the "human ecosystems" of all kinds that need to feed themselves, in the cities and in the countryside, unlike the INTA that speaks of "populations", which as we have already seen at the beginning, it is a very generic concept and therefore more limited, since the human ecosystem includes the populations of individuals in the three subsystems that compose it, already mentioned above (Urban-Industrial, Agricultural Production, Human Auto – sustained Settlements).
• In the question What to know? of the System, INTA placed only "Nutrition" and "Educational Information", to those, I add many more disciplines, necessary today in the 21st century due to the greater understanding that we have today and that is required to study increasingly complex Alimentation and nutritional phenomena, due to their multi-causality, such as Economy, Administration, Educational Information, Ecology, Psychology, Computer Science, Statistics, Government, etc.
7.- PROPOSALS FOR THE FUTURE
As the ideas need to be applied in reality, we are working on concretizing all the above in some initiatives in which we need help:
• Rapa Nui and Polynesia Project: Because in Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and Polynesia there is a high burden and incidence of chronic non-communicable diseases of nutritional origin such as Diabetes, Cancer, Obesity, cardiovascular disorders and nervous diseases and there are food supply problems since food is very expensive, we are working with a non-profit organization from the Rapa Nui community who have strong links with other communities ealong the Polynesia region, where we try to implement a "Natural Food and Health Institute" to provide education in healthy eating and health, starting from Rapa Nui and with the intention of covering all of Polynesia, from Hawaii, French Polynesia (Tahiti) and New Zealand. Due to the budgetary problems that affect the local government of Rapa Nui due to the effects of the recent pandemic, it has been impossible for us to continue with the courses that we had begun to give since 2019. Any help will be welcome. Contact the author on his email: alfredobowenb@gmail.com
• It is required to finish the English translation of the second and third parts of my work “The 7 Horsemen of the Food Apocalypse”, on which this presentation is based, and to begin the French translation of the entire book.
• Another area of interest would be the elaboration of a mathematical model to be able to diagnose and project the food and nutritional condition or status of a human population based on the concept of the Food and Nutrition System proposed here.
• Also, I am willing to provide education and do research in Food, Nutrition and Health based on food ecology and interdiscipline.
• A web page on social networks like the one I have in Chile "OBSERVATORIO DE ALIMENTACIÓN SANA" (HEALTHY FOOD OBSERVATORY) can also be implemented in Canada to teach the public eating habits that help their health.
Alfredo F. Bowen, Puerto Montt, Chile / York, Canada, May-June 2023
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