Telos Journal Edition Three October 2013 | Page 17

economic food culture in the Western complex and some areas of the Eastern world.
The lessons we learned represented the fallibility of making food into a merchandisable
component of economics. The exploitation of food is both natural and synthetic;
natural in that it is a result of people leaving the soil for cities and growing less of their
own food; synthetic in that it is powered by the acquisition of money and often enough
greed, which leads eventually to fragmented communities, less autonomy, and a foul
reliance on a few elite executives and elite groups (the government), who
economically orchestrate by owning the most of what greed aspires: money.
Please imagine the setting: post-adolescent students broken up into medium-sized
groups, playing a game like ‘Telephone’. But instead of passing a string of words down
a line, a product of some sort was passed around: in our game, some items of the
generic factory farm.
Each student played a market character that set the scene. Between the producers
and the buyers were middlemen. Each real-time second represented twelve hours in
the game. Accordingly, each middleman had to raise and negotiate the price of the
product, and, if ostensibly necessary, adulterate the organic composition here and
there so it lasted yet still retained its preliminary function (of being edible food). The
purchase of the goods had to be anticipated so the items were finally met by its buyer
with both monetary and aesthetic approval.
We started the game enthusiastically and simply. Communication was rather basic: the
producer-farmer decided on a farm item and showed it to the first middleman whereby
they decided on a price with little thought. A simple nod or shake of the head solidified
the transactions at this stage. But as the product moved down the short line of
middlemen, the represented hours building up, the life curve of the product became
apparent to the middlemen players. The groups with a larger pool of middlemen had to
move faster so the product was at last acceptable; Balinese know how long their
bananas and water spinach last.
The game flowed well at this point. But many grew bored. Famers wanted to leave the
farm: they were tired of producing. So after a few rounds, growing bored of the same
old dealings, the groups combined from medium to large scale undertakings. This
indicates the rural exodus and surge in urban numbers.
The game continued. Goods were passed off, time accumulated, and preservative
food measures were taken at guaranteed points: farmers either chemically sprayed or
picked their products well before ripening to make it finally desirable. The transaction
process thus turned chemico-orientated and scientifically expansive. What we initially
had were students playing farmers, vendors, and customers; now chemists and food
inspectors were thrown in, all tangling together in one game. Whereas the game
intensified because more technical decisions were made based on the occasional
unpredictability of man and nature, things became terminally easier for the
orchestrator-referees. The market had indeed merged; the collective groups had
gotten fewer and larger.
Soon many of the purchasers were a bit unsmiling, however. The products and prices
were in doubt; purchasers either bought the product or could not bear to recognize it.
Some voluntarily left the game; they became irrelevant and somehow parasitic to the