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opinion
Consumers need to educate themselves
By RALPH NADER
Consumers who spend hundreds of hours a
year earning money to pay for their food purchases
will not spend ten hours a year learning about what
foods to buy and what foods to avoid. Yet consumers
are oomplaining strenuously about rising food prices,
inadequate nutrition, suspicious fillers and additives
and agribusiness deals such as the Russian grain
deal and its immense inflationary consequences.
Just what is it about our formal and informal
educational systems that pay so little attention to
such an enormously important subject?
The problem is not just with elementary, high
school and college curricula. Medical schools have
relegated the study of nutrition to a very minor part of
their courses for students. Television and radio con
vey information which worsen diets with their stress
on advertisements Dromoting foods with high sugar
or fat content heavily colored with artificial dyes.
The costs of such popular ignorance about
food—its price, quality, distribution, subsidy and
monopoly control—are enormous. Overseas, mass
starvation of millions is coming closer to reality. Too
many poor Americans are afflicted with hunger or
severe malnutrition. The family farm has been rapidly
disappearing with giant corporations taking greater
control of food production, processing and distribu
tion. As medical researchers probe deeper into the
sources of diseases, the tracks are leading more and
more to diets and the kind of foods which are con
sumed.
There is no doubt that more people are awaken
ing to the need to educate themselves about food
and food policies and then become involved in shap
ing those policies. Families from Massachusetts to
California are joining to form food cooperatives to
improve their purchasing power. There is even a
paperback out describing how to form such coopera
tives.
To accelerate this growing food price and quality
consciousness, the non-profit Center for Science in
the Public Interest (CSPI) is spearheading a national
day for action on the food crisis to take place all over
the country on Food Day, April 17,1975. Backed by a
prestigious advisory board of scientists, including
Harvard nutritionist Jean Mayer and Nobel Laureate
George Wald, CSPI is working with student, con
sumer, environmental, church, poverty and other
groups to organize teach-in and action programs in
hundreds of communities.
Dr. Michael Jacobson, author of the popular
"Nutrition Scoreboard” and CSPI coordinator for
Food Day, believes that April 17th “can be a
watershed in understanding the food crisis, in in
creasing competition and responsibility in the food
industry, in improving the nation's eating habits, in
aiding millions of people overseas, and in eliminating
hunger in the U S.” He views Food Day as not so
much “a solitary event as the most visible part of
continuing activities.”
CSPI has ten full-time people working to make
Food Day a continuing success. From their offices at
1785 Massachusetts Ave. NW, Room 206, Washing
ton, D C., 20036, consumers can receive free mater
ials which will help them organize Food Day activities
and action programs in their area. Included in the
packet, for example, is the Terrible Ten foods which
CSPI believes epitomizes “everything that is wrong
with the food supply.”
In early March, a “food action handbook" will be
released full of suggestions for community activities.
What CSPI is really calling for is a dramatic
change in consumer lifestyles which will reduce the
price of food, improve the quality of food to avoid
diet-related diseases and sharpen the moral con
sciousness of Americans to respond to the problem
of world famine.
People, by personal and political actions, can
help solve these serious problems and help them
selves live better. If they don't, then the giant food
corporations and their compliant government agen
cies will continue along the path which has already led
to the multiple food crisis.
Released by the Register and Tribune Syndicate,
19/5
‘Lettuce trial’ defendants ask for student support
By BERT KNORR and TOM DONOBAN
On Wednesday and Thursday of this
week there will be a series of trials in stu
dent court growing out of various activities
related to the ongoing effort to get non
UFW lettuce off campus.
The Wednesday hearing will deal with a
number of alleged violations stemming
from a rally and demonstration on on Dec.
11 in support of the farmworkers and the
EMU boycott. Several individuals active in
the boycott have been charged with such
misdeeds as tumultuous behavior, malici
ous destruction of University property, dis
orderly conduct and interference with Uni
versity activities What this means in plain
Engish is that the accused are supposed to
have kept their speaker system on too loud
during the rally, and spilled scab lettuce on
the EMU floor after that rally (much like the
scab tea that was thrown into Boston harbor
over two hundred years ago).
The maximum penalty for these indis
cretions is expulsion from the University.
The trial was set for Wednesday after an
earlier attempt to railroad the case through
student court on the last day of fall classes,
with than 24-hours notice, was aborted be
cause of a backlog of other unrelated
cases.
The Thursday hearing concerns the Jan.
8 occupation of the EMU room vacated by
the main desk. Boycotters had taken the
room to sustain the alternative food opera
tion in the face of the cold and snow which
r
threatened to grind the boycott to a halt on
the EMU terrace. The EMU Board subse
quently upheld the right of the UFW Solidar
ity Committee to use the room for boycott
activities. The charges brought in student
court by “conduct coordinator” Steven
Barnes have effectively circum
vented the authority of the board, and pro
voked it to admonish Bames to “keep
hands off." Bames has also charged two
campus organizations in an effort to curb
their political activities.
opinion
These trials must be seen in the context
of the history of the UFW struggle on cam
pus, and the clear design of the administra
tion to suppress this struggle and all politi
cal activity which challenges its authority.
The boycott of the EMU was initiated last
spring, after the thousands of student sig
natures on petitions calling for a ban on
non-UFW produce, and the overwhelming
mandate of 71 per cent of those votina in a
student referendum were callously ignored
by President Clark and Vice-President
Bogen. Even the initial stages of the boycott
met with attempts to destroy it by using the
student court to discipline boycott activists.
These efforts failed dismally as case after
case failed to produce a conviction, and
student supporters packed the hearings,
__ i t ilia mm
indignant because of their obvious political
nature.
This year the administration had decided
to “speak softly” and hide its “biq stick”, as
the boycott of the food service was allowed
continue with minor bureaucratic harass
ment in hopes that UFW support would
weaken as the boycott continued. The pre
sent flurry of indictments marks a return to
overt repression on the part of the administ
ration. Why has the administration gone to
such lengths to keep scab lettuce on cam
pus and defend its strike-breaking policy?
Whose interests are being served? Cer
tainly not the expressed interests of Univer
sity students. Certainly not the interests of
the farmworkers and other oppressed peo
ple. Certainly not the interests of the work
ing people and taxpayers of the state of
Oregon.
Clark maintains that he is simply a bu
reaucrat doing his job. responsible to the
State Board of Higher Education. THe State
System has its largest shareholdings in
Safeway (over $140,000), one of the big
gest agribusiness operations and exploit
ers of farm labor in the country. State Board
members include two lumber tycoons, four
corporate lawyers, a former PR man for
Portland General Electric, and a couple of
Republican party hacks. Not a single
Chicano or worker are among
its eleven members. How can this
board be representative of the working
people of the state of Oregon? How can it
adequately uphold the interests of the
>i m a
'PLEASE COOPERATE
I'VE NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE!
farmworkers? How can the University s pol
icy of “neutrality" be anything but a mask for
the corporate interests that it really repres
ents?
Since it must defend those interests, the
administration is forced to resort to the re
pressive apparatus of the student court to
curb the militant actions of students that
inevitably result when student opinion is ig
nored. Clark and his obedient underlings
like Barnes are trying to isolate the most
politically active students, and eliminate
this "handful of troublemakers' from the
University community. In this way they at
tempt to protray the present lettuce con
troversy as a conflict among the students
themselves, rather than between the stu
dents, who have no real power with the
existing University structure, and the ad
ministration, which determined to keep the
University from taking a principled political
position in support of the workers who put
the food on our table.
Clark & Co., and the big corporate in
terests that they serve, are frantically trying
to prevent the revival of a politically con
ous student movement. The propaganda of
the mass media, which depicted the anti
war movement as a failure, and now talk
incessantly of the apathy of the students
and the “cooling of the cam puses', have
tended to obscure the real strength and
power that were inherent in the student
movement of the sixties. The present CIA
revelations aptly demonstrate the extent to
which the government, bent on continuing
its unpopular impenahst war, feared and
dreaded that movement. The current
economic crisis provides the real possibility
for unity between students and Third World
and other working people, on a scale that
did not exist during the sixties. We must
begin by uniting to fight—to get scab lettuce
off campus, to support student rights, and to
defend those who are coming under attack
for their involvement in this struggle. The
Wednesday (3:15 p.m.) and Thursday
(2:15) hearings in the EMU will be open,
and they will each be preceded by a short
rally. A big turnout on those days will be a
big step forward in building unity among the
progressive students on campus, and get
ting the administration to take us seriously.
This column was written by Bert Knorr and
Tom Donovan on behalf of the United
Farmworkers Solidarity Committee. Knorr
is a graduate student in history. Donovan is
a freshman in education.