In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi and a handful of supporters marched some 240 miles to the sea to “make salt.” That is to say, they gathered up and thereby claimed that life-sustaining mineral as their birth right, not a commodity controlled exclusively by their British colonizers. For that act of civil disobedience, those Indian Salt Marchers–and the tens of thousands who soon joined them–were arrested en masse.
While you, I and our fellow Americans are today free to march to the ocean and collect salt, if so moved, to say that we are in charge of our food supply is nevertheless a fiction. But shouldn’t we be?
Joining Peter to explore how we might become sovereigns of the food, water and land that nourish us is Beverly Bell, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and founder of the non-profit education and movement-building collaborative, Other Worlds. She is the author of four books, most recently Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agriculture Systems in the Americas.
