Metro Pulse, Food, and Ownership

by Chad Hellwinckel

Last week the Metro Pulse was closed down by their corporate owners. The Metro Pulse was a popular weekly paper  in Knoxville. If you were cruising through downtown on any particular day, you could probably see several people on benches or in restaurant windows thumbing through the paper. Like most weeklies it had a focus on the city, its people and culture. It really has deepened our communal thought process and image of ourselves. Downtown development, the music scene, and even the local food scene would not be what it is without the Metro Pulse. Overall, it was loved by the people who live, work, and play here. But for reasons of profit, it was shut down without warning or even a ‘for sale’ sign.

     The whole ordeal has added up to a very good lesson in where to place your trust. Our community weekly was a dear enterprise of the city. But those who loved it and benefited from it did not possess it. We did not control it. We did not own it.

     Now I’m thinking of food. Food is dear. Food is precious. We take it into our bodies. it keeps us alive, it becomes our body and mind. Pretty important stuff! Who owns it? Us? The community? Or the same types of entities that closed the Metro Pulse? Yes, if you buy food in a grocery store it was shipped there by corporate trucking companies, processed and boxed in corporate factories, possibly fed in a corporate CAFO, or maybe grown on a struggling 2000 acre family farm, leveraged in debt, dependent on government subsidized insurance, and selling bulk ‘commodities’ on the marketplace.

     This is nothing new. You’ve heard this all before. What is new to me is the insight. Our food supply is at the hands of the same system as the Metro Pulse was. There is no mission beyond the profit…beyond the stock market. If, for some reason, selling us food is not in the strategic interest of maximizing profit….well…it could go away as suddenly as the Metro Pulse was shutdown. 

     In the crash of 2008, a few box stores folded…like Staples. It got me wondering about Kroger. What if Kroger’s finance system got all clogged up? Things could close quickly. And what about all those financial agreements up the food chain from Kroger back to the farmer? Only money is the ‘glue’ that sticks it all together. If money goes away, or more realistically, gets jammed up real bad for awhile, well, there would be nothing sticking it together.

     Once again, this is nothing new. And once again, I want to re-iterate that just witnessing the Metro Pulse’s closing — the devastating rapidness of it–has made me ‘get it’ at a deeper level.  It ain’t just theoretical “what if..” scenarios! The reality of our relationships can manifest quickly. And that reality is that we have entrusted our food supply to a global money system beyond the control of individuals who care and know us.

     So as we are connecting ourselves to food with other ‘glue’, besides global corporate money, lets make sure we can trust that new glue.  Friendship. Human-scaled relationships. Mutual dependence. Lets keep it in the family and within a day’s wagon ride.