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Our most valuable currency in life is time, not money
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This idea was made clearer to me in the highly problematic book, The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. MJ believes that personal responsibility is the biggest, if not only, determining factor in a person’s financial success. Not demonstrating any understanding of structural oppression aside, this book helped me to understand that I, for most of my adult life, have probably been over valuing my money and under valuing my time.
Don’t get me wrong, money sustains so many things I wouldn’t want to be without, but the value of money is best understood, I’ve come to realize, through the time it can buy back to you to do more of the things you value.
Almost every semester I ask students why they are in college, and almost all of them say some version of, “so that I can be qualified for a well paying job”. Fair enough, that’s why I went to college too. Yes, I wanted to pursue my interests, but those interests had to pay the bills if I was going to have enough freedom to enjoy my life.
That calculus hasn’t changed as I now work in a job mostly to help keep the lights on and food on our table. I really like my work, but if I had enough money in the bank — let’s say $10 million — I likely wouldn’t keep working in my current job.
Skewed Math
In Anti-Indigenous Civilizations, the majority of us spend our lives trading our time for money. Our society nowadays is so complex, and in some regards sophisticated, that high levels of specialization are needed to create and maintain our technological conveniences. That specialization requires time to become proficient and even more time to establish a labor class for manufacturing and maintenance.
Your smartphone takes a handful of technicians to conceive, design, and market, and thousands more to produce at scale. The technicians are highly trained, but the laborers that allow you to buy your new iPhone are time oppressed. Same for Amazon workers. And for the most part, we are willing to fall into this pattern of industrial society because of the time we are freed up from other essential tasks that others are doing for us on a daily basis.
You don’t worry about your bodily waste once you flush it and you probably don’t think much about the people responsible for making sure you have the groceries you want at the store. I don’t either.
Don’t want to cook your food every day? No problem. Just make sure you work enough hours and/or earn enough money to pay the folks at your favorite take-out place for their labor of making you dinner.
But this system comes at an incredible cost, namely necessarily large underclass of people who keep the wheel of modern convenience turning. We all know that to be a high achieving person in this society is to be as far removed from working class poor as possible. But the other side of that coin is that the lifestyle we are socialized to aspire to cannot be maintained without people none of us want to be.
We also believe that those super rich people are the smartest of us. Folks like Elon, Bill, and Jeff have earned their extreme wealth and specialization in direct accordance to the value their “brilliance” has created for the masses. Again, don’t get me wrong, Amazon, Microsoft, and Tesla cars are all really neat things that add value to my life, but those achievements are not automatically a net positive because of the benefit they provide me as an individual.
The lowest members in their hierarchy have little chance of freeing their time from labor because of the demands of capitalism because consumers — including those workers — need their products at a low price. No one said the system was fair, but it’s the best we’ve got…right?
Wild Food as Time Freedom
“Why spend all that time hunting or whatever, when I can just go to the grocery store and buy red meat?”
This was one of the questions I got from a student in class when discussing alternative food systems a few years ago. A question that makes all the sense in the world to ask given how food in America works and how we’re socialized to believe that it’s the best system we can come up with.
But this system was spawned from the same worldview that conceived chattel slavery and that’s something many people aren’t conscious of or concern with. In order to make packaged meat readily available at an affordable price nearly any time of year a lot of exploitation of humans and other animal relatives must take place. The folks who handle your meat, especially the ones killing and processing the bodies, are disproportionately undocumented workers living in constant socio-economic peril. Grocery store meat prices would skyrocket if companies had to provide safe working conditions, healthcare, and other worker benefits. Processing animals is a lot of damn work!
The cost of growing that meat also comes with heavy doses of chemical inputs; antibiotics to prevent the spread of nasty bacteria from overcrowded feed lots and growth hormone to make sure meat can go to market quickly enough to meet our demand for meat.
We trade our labor for the privilege to earn money that will buy the food our society has decided needs to be under lock and key to incentivize us to trade our labor for the privilege of…wait a minute!
What would you do if I told you that in the next year, after a moderate investment of time and money, you would only need to spend two to four weekends to secure all the red meat you’d need for the entire year?
Would you be interested?
What amount of time and/or money would you save to be used in other ways if you didn’t have to constantly trade your labor for the meat you consumed?What would you do with that time? What other time/money savings could be gained by embracing more wild food in your life?
I’m attempting to answer these questions for myself, but I think I’m on to something. Not something totally new as many people already have robust wild food practices in their lives, but new and evolving for me in a way that will hopefully allow us all to grow together in meaningful ways.
Buffalo and elk used to roam this entire continent and a single one of these relatives would be enough to feed a small band of humans for more than a year. These relatives were extirpated from much of the land because they were inconvenient for the industry of cattle farming that, according to its advocates, needed to replace the wildness these lands possessed.
Those at the top of cattle industry, and its spinoffs the food industry in the US, won big by destroying alternatives and requiring those desiring access to pay. Yes, you can buy a quarter pounder with cheese anytime you want so long as there’s an underclass to process the components and so long as you work in a job to earn money to buy said burger. Is it health? What do you care? It’s cheap and convenient.
Settler-colonialism has always been a solution looking for a problem.
The United States government understood that in order to break the rebellion and sovereignty of the Lakota, Dakota, and other close kin occupying the then western frontier (now known as the upper midwest) they had to destroy those peoples’ ability to provision from the land.
“Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” - Colonel Richard Dodge (1867)
“With my cavalry and combined artillery encamped in front, I wanted no other occupation in life than to ward off the savage and kill off his food until there should no longer be an Indian Frontier in our beautiful country” - Lieutenant General John M. Schofield, commander of the Department of Missouri (1869)
A populous that is well fed is free to wonder, study, and change the status quo. White supremacy has always understood that, seeking to undermine food freedom movements like Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative a hundred years after efforts to destroy Indigenous resistance to U.S. Empire.
Why Wild Meat Won’t Work
My friend and I have been having a debate about modern humanity and the trajectory of our species since we both read “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn back in college. I am the dreamer and they are the pragmatist. We are good for each other’s thinking as we challenge each other to think beyond the logical conclusions of stances.
People shifting to wild meat simply won’t work because there are too many people, the current structures are too entrenched, the people are not knowledgeable, and the powers that be are too powerful to allow such change.
My friend is right. As much as I hate to admit it, they are right about this reality.
Except they’re wrong about reality.
We both are, because while a future reality can be predicted, it is almost never follows that prediction. And the more of a departure from the status quo that’s proposed, the less predictable the outcome.
Only a fraction of USians can attempt to gain their red meat independence through wild relatives. There are fewer than 50 million deer in the lower 48 by some estimates, which is not enough to provide wild meat to the entire population that wants it. And that’s if everyone had the time to learn and practice the skills necessary to harvest deer. And, and, that’s if everyone who wanted wild meat had access to land to hunt.
What I’m proposing isn’t a swap of the grocery store supply chain for a wild supply chain. I’m proposing a steady abandonment of a system that is demonstrably awful for all involved towards a way of acquiring animal protein in the tradition that worked better for our species for orders of magnitude longer than the system we currently operate.
My ultimate hope is that we all turn away from industrial meat production and return — in any/all the ways we can — to the practice of wild harvested animal relatives. This obviously won’t look like what it used to because so much has changed for us as a species. What more wild meat harvesting looks like for the masses is not really my concern, nor do I think it’s anyone’s right or responsibility to determine what “the best plan looks like”. That kind of homogeneity is what would give rise to a wild meat industry rooted in profit feasibility instead of ecological feasibility.
I simply want my children and future generations to value an alternative that was once their birthright as Homo sapiens, and to continuing building a bridge to a more sustainable and just food future away from the lies of modern convenience.
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