Fortnightly Poem 12.B (Karen’s)

To celebrate the arrival of my newest collection (Appetite- the politics of food) I’m including the poem that summarises the theme. Appetite will be available from my website on Friday 15th December!

Voracious Appetite

Voracious (1)

We live in the heart of a beast (José Marti)

We live in the belly of a beast –

Lives on profits and always hungry

A Midas beast, all he touches

Becomes a Commodity

Even the stuff of life – our food,

We grow what feeds him, not what we need

To appease him we must consume and consume

Greed is good: several courses, afters, befores….

I want it all and I want it now

Don’t like it, chuck it. The beast loves waste

To fill his fat belly we grow more and more

Pesticides, fungicides and we’re eating it all

Give them what they love, and hey it’s addictive!

Why does it even need to be food?

Sugar salt fat, they keep coming back

Fat sugar salt, with plastic toy, petrol voucher

To please him we must accumulate:

Say Moses and the profits*

Swallow the small guy, swallow the farms,

Swallow the forests, the fish

Accumulate! Exterminate! peach groves in Shepparton

Cheaper from China, buy bulk, sell cheap…

They tumble and roll, tumble and roll

into the coffers of Woollies and Coles

No flavour, no smell, but our Beast has no taste…

Greed and Waste, greed and waste

But they sow the seeds of his destruction.

* Karl Marx wrote in Das Capital that the ultimate goal of capitalism is not production but accumulation
(Accumulate… Moses and the prophets) is a phrase he uses ironically quoting the scriptures. He also said
‘Capitalism sows within itself the seeds of its own destruction.’