Farming Contradictions
At the age of 17, my family decided to leave the city and move to a remote place in Dong Nai province to live. I find it difficult to understand when my mother, a successful literature teacher, decided to stop teaching to become a farmer. But I believe she has a good reason. As for me, I have to stay in the city to continue my studies, so I rarely have the opportunity to visit her.
After a year, during the summer, I took the opportunity to visit my mother. It was the rainy season at that time, and my mother had become a skilled farmer. I really remember the smell and sound of rain there, the smell of moisture and the sound of falling rain were like a blend of everything here. They are cool but slightly bitter. I asked my mother why I could feel the bitterness of the rain, and she said it was because the rain was carrying away pesticides, herbicides, and growth chemicals that had accumulated on the plants. I wonder why people have to use those chemicals, even though everyone knows how toxic they are. My mother told me that because of the needs of buyers, they want the fruit to be beautiful, free from worms, and preserved for a long time. Only then can farmers sell and have money to live. This makes me think a lot about aesthetics. As Boris Groys wrote in Art Power, when something is associated with aesthetics, in this day and age, it is often understood that that thing is losing its function. The same goes for the fruits here. Customers want these fruits to be beautiful, but in order for them to be beautiful, they are no longer food, they are covered with layers of chemicals that slowly kill those who consume them and even kill the habitat. This is so contradictory.
Boris Groys also writes that a modern (including contemporary) work gives us the best perception of those works as paradoxic objects. The more a good work of art contradicts itself, the more it contradicts itself; those works have the ability to establish and maintain a perfect balance of power between thesis and antithesis. I thought to myself. Can we build on Boris Groys’s ideas and argue the opposite? Is something like fruit covered in chemicals—something contradictory—a work of art? I’m afraid not. Although chemically sprayed plants are inconsistent, they do not establish and maintain a perfect balance of power. This is inequality.
I wonder when this problem will be resolved. Firstly, consumers must accept and understand that in order for fruit to seem beautiful, it has been treated with cancer-causing chemicals, and that this is hurting the ecosystem. Secondly, growers accept that they will no longer use insecticides and will only harvest pest-free fruits. However, if these two things are done, the supply-demand balance will be significantly disrupted, with a small amount of clean fruit sold and a large demand for consumption, resulting in very high costs. People with low earnings will be unable to consume clean fruit. This will exacerbate the gap between the rich and poor. Again, everything is contradictory.
Resources:
Boris Groys. 2008. Art Power. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press