Sean Dwyer

5/15

WC: 307

“These New York roaches are working together with the people who make the spray. You buy a spray and they disappear. You tell your neighbor that you used such and such a brand and she uses it and they go away. In the meantime, they come back to your place and you try something else and they leave again and go to your neighbor and you tell her to try the other band and it goes on and on and the old roaches always return.” (Smart-Grosvenor 72)

“If you ask commercial seed companies why they are making tomato varieties that have lost all their flavor, the answer is very simple… They have focused all their energies on their customers. Who are their customers? The commercial growers. What does a grower get paid for? Yield, size, and appearance. They make more money for very large tomatoes than they do for small ones. The grower is not paid for flavor. So you have a fundamental disconnect between what growers want and what customers expect.” ( Estabrook 148/149 )

”The driver told my grandmother that he didn’t have to take people like her… Well, when he said that, I saw red. I thought of all the years my grandmother personally had put up with the whims of white folks and told the driver that this night he would go to Penn Station or I would go to my grave. He went. I grabbed the door handle and he pulled off and I pulled my legs up and I held on. People were screaming and I held on. I thought of Sam and Dave, just keep holding on. And I did. He stopped at Second Street and my grandmother got in. He said, “Who do you people think you are?” and I said, “We are.” (Smart-Grosvenor 86/87)

“However, the state trumped the rights of the Standing Rock Tribe once again – the North Dakota Environmental Protection Agency insisted that composting amounted to burying waste and would be considered illegal dumping.” (Deetz 3)

A theme from this week’s text is communal service for self-afflicting reasons. The roaches are the elephant in the room. Communal shunning of the unmentionables, a movement so united Plato is likely rolling in his cave. How people trick themselves they got rid of the pest of all pests with a chemical that satisfies the cockroach fury within themselves is reflected in the return of the roaches for fear of your neighbors not being as chemical-savvy as you persists more greatly than the roach. What’s a roach to a human anyway? This bug can live for a week without it’s head, humans can live for years without a head. The elephant nervously shift from one leg to another causing a thundering of the floorboards, inciting self reflection even amongst the roaches, and eventually the elephant can walk out of the crumbled house and start the return to the savanna.

As the second quote describes, the success of Tomatoland stems from the ability of the investors to adore their own ingenuity, for they are the customers, the investors, the managers, and the only people to enjoy the tomatoes they produce.

The quote from the Food First series shows that the roach persists. The worst nightmare of the roach is a mirror, and however clearly it pines to be sprayed, if you appeal to your neighbor who’s watering a dead bright green lawn with plastic flowers planted in plastic pots to understand the same artificial spray isn’t working, it won’t pay off as we learned from Standing Rock. Lessons can be learned from the iron fist of Vertemae; “I thought of Sam and Dave, just keep holding on. And I did.”. Then there was a moment the roach caught a glimpse of his reflection in the answer to his question; “Who do you people think you are?” – “We are.”