The Social Vision of the Alternative Food Movement - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 529

Redemption for these people, according to Shiva, lies in embracing a premodern
pretechnological way of life.
In her much acclaimed book Staying Alive , Shiva opens her attack on reason and
science with a broadside against the Enlightenment. According to her, the spread of
Enlightenment thinking has actually meant “the spread of darkness, the extinction
of life and life-enhancing processes” (Shiva 1989, xiv) for people in the non-Western
world. Shiva, a scientist by training, reserves special venom for science. “It is thus not
just 'development' which is a source of violence to women and nature,” she writes. “At a
deeper level, scientific knowledge, on which the development process is based, is itself a
source of violence” (Shiva 1989, 14).
The worldview promoted by Shiva is admiringly described by her supporters in the alter-
native food movement as “ecofeminism.” Though the use of this label indicates a certain
desire to claim the legacy of the feminist movement, its ideals are actually very different. For
instance, one of the central goals of feminism is to enable women to have greater choice over
how they live their lives. This is exemplified by the work of Margaret Sanger, a pioneering
American feminist, who sought to make greater reproductive choice available to women
and, as part of this endeavor, played a key role in the development of the contraceptive pill.
Shiva's ecofeminism completely rejects Sanger's approach toward reproductive choice. In
the topic Ecofeminism , Shiva and her coauthor Maria Mies criticize “technical fixes” such
as the contraceptive pill. Such “technical fixes,” they claim, have only imposed on women
“domination by pharmaceutical concerns, medical experts, the state, as well as by men who
now expect women to be always available to them” (Mies and Shiva 1993, 221). In Shiva's
ecofeminist worldview, the condition of peasant women in the non-Western world will be
improved, not by giving them greater choice, but by reducing their dependence on mod-
ern entities such as corporations, the state, the scientific establishment, and so on, and by
encouraging them to live their lives entirely according to the norms and practices of tradi-
tional societies, which are deemed to be close to women and to nature.
Peasant women in the non-Western world, claims Shiva, “expect nothing from 'devel-
opment' or from the money economy.” For Shiva, the ideal life is that of a peasant woman
toiling away all her life in the fields, working harder than “men and farm animals, “invis-
ibly with the earthworm” (Shiva 1989, 108-109) to sustain a subsistence-level existence.
“Traditional economies,” says Shiva, “are not advanced in the matter of non-vital needs
satisfaction, but as far as the satisfaction of basic and vital needs are concerned, they are
often what Marshall Sahlins has called 'the original affluent society' ” (Shiva 1989, 12).
Shiva's portrayal of Third World peasants, particularly women, glorifies them and
extols the supposed virtues of their way of life. But, ultimately, it also ends up dehuman-
izing them. Consider, for instance, that life expectancy in preindustrial societies is only
about thirty years or less (Lomborg 2001, 50-51), compared to seventy years or more in
the industrialized West (“List of Countries by Life Expectancy” 2013). Infant mortality
in such societies is around 150 (or more) for every thousand live births (Lomborg 2001,
53), compared to 6.3 per thousand in the U.S. or 3.2 in Sweden (United Nations 2006,
88). When Shiva declares that traditional societies are better than modern technologi-
cal societies at satisfying people's “basic and vital needs,” she implies that these people