Changing the system

Courtesy of mapyourdinner.tumblr.com

With the mounting evidence that conventional agricultural production is unsustainable over the long term, people have been striving to create change in the food system through alternative food networks (AFNs). Intended as a response to the social and environmental injustices that are the result of the current dominate global food system, AFNs include everything from the organic and Fair Trade movements (and the institutionalized system of labeling these products that has gained momentum over the past decade, and which is also not without its flaws and valid criticisms) and Community Supported Agriculture organizations (CSAs), to the concepts of Farm to Table restaurants and “go local” campaigns.

Just as AFNs arouse out of criticisms of industrialized food production, they themselves have not been immune to thorough critiques, which are often well founded. Too often proponents of AFNs can lose sight of the forest for the trees, overlooking ways in which these movements can foster social and environmental injustices similar to the kinds they set out to solve in the first place. For example, the mainstreaming of the organic movement has resulted in the application of industrialized production methods to organic farming, resulting in the continued domination of large corporations in food production – exactly what the organic move purportedly set out to change in the first place.

Similarly, the increasing popularity of the local food movement – which encourages consumers to shop from locally-grown food sources as much as possible – mistakenly assumes that social and environmental justice issues are inherently characteristics of scale, and that local-scale food systems are inherently good for environmental and social justice. As a result, ways in which local-scale food systems can recreate social and environmental injustices, or when going local just becomes impractical and counter-intuitive on an environmental level (for example, the environmental impact of growing citrus fruit in Colorado in the dead of winter can outweigh that of importing it from a more temperate climate and then transporting it from the store to home in an environmentally-friendly way) can be overlooked in the name of adhering to the movement.

However, while these criticisms raise legitimate concerns that need to be taken into account, the critiques themselves can often fail to acknowledge the fundamental importance of alternative food movements in creating a stimulating social dialogue around food production and consumption – a dialogue that it is necessary to begin in order to bring about any lasting change in the current food system. Our relationship with our food and how we go about obtaining it inevitably shapes the world that we live in: it has been the guiding force in human evolution ever since our prehistoric ancestors climbed from the primordial ooze and became life forms needing to capture energy in some way. The story of humans and technology is similarly grounded in food, as the primary motivation in the development of the first tools and the central factor in the continuing development of technology throughout human history has been the drive to obtain food in a more secure way.

The desire to obtain food in a more predictable and steady manner than being subject to the cycles of dearth and plenty that characterize the natural world is the fundamental force that gives definition and shape to the relationship between humans and the natural world – it was the defining force throughout our past, and will continue to do so into the future. While Western thought tends to associate the dominance of capitalism with cities and urban areas, a closer examination of the evolution of capitalism into the dominant global economic system reveals its roots to be in agriculture. Changes in our relationship with food production has always led to sweeping social and cultural changes within a society, with agricultural production itself at the root of society, as ancient humans established more permanent settlements to tend their fields. In short, the ways in which we as a society go about securing our food will ultimately shape our social, cultural, and economic institutions, and our ways of valuing and viewing the natural world.

Society can go on without all the trappings of industrialized civilization – as big of an impact as our cars, smart phones, and fossil-fuel powered lifestyles have on the natural environment, none of these things are necessary for the continued existence of humans on the planet. Food, however, is. What AFNs fundamentally achieve is creating dialogue within our culture and society about how we produce our food and the types of food that we consume – which ultimately defines the relationship between humans and the natural world. These movements, at their core, identify the need for a drastic overhaul of the dominant global food system. They get people talking about how we approach food production, which is leading to much-needed change in the food system. And just as changes in how we go about obtaining our food has shaped our social, cultural, economic relations, as well as defined our relationship with the natural world throughout human history, current shifts within the food system will ultimately ripple out and result in resounding changes within society itself and how we impact the natural world.

MORE corn?

I was planning on writing this week about recent critiques of alternative food networks, examining either when going local borders on the absurd, or legitimate concerns about the racialized aspect of food re-localization projects in the US presenting social justice issues, when I came across the latest issue of National Geographic. After reading their latest article in a special eight-month series exploring how we can increase food production to feed a predicted global population of 9 billion people by 2050, I changed my mind.

The article by Joel K. Bourne, Jr. discusses the motivations behind recent land grabs in Africa by big corporations and foreign governments, proposing that the fertile land in the world’s hungriest continent – with the right investments and agricultural innovations – could potentially become the next global breadbasket. While I am not enough of an expert in African agricultural production and local food system structures to venture a detailed criticism of the article, it is the broad, implicit premises that are its heart that I want to examine here. After all, the ways in which we define our problems – whether personal, local, or global – ultimately dictates the kinds of solutions that we see as available.

Photo courtesy of Alliance for Natural Health Europe

Writing about food production and hunger in Africa while sitting in my well-stocked apartment in Boulder, Colorado and possessing the buying power to frequent local grocery stores, restaurants, or indulge in delivery should that food supply run out or – as more often happens – start to bore my tastes, is a bit like walking into a verbal minefield. One wrong step, and I risk venturing from grounded critique into self-righteous rhapsodizing, indulging opinions that could in reality leave others starving while being continuously assured of my own access to food. However, the tacit approach to food production and the unquestioned role of corporations in defining the global food system embedded in the piece involves me as a consumer in a country whose food system is defined by the view of agriculture and crop production presented, and it is some of these assumptions that I want to call into question.

While I agree with the article’s conclusion – that the current state of food production and access in Africa is unacceptable – I do not agree with how it blithely and unquestionably portrays boosting production of 16 “key crops” and lowering the cost of chemical inputs as the obvious solution to Africa’s nutritional woes. In a glossy two-page map with graphs and figures, National Geographic demonstrates where yields are falling far short of potential and by how much, with the 16 key crops listed in ascending order of perceived importance:

1. Rye
2. Rapeseed
3. Sugar beet
4. Sunflower
5. Soybean
6. Potato
7. Barley
8. Groundnut
9. Sugarcane
10. Millet
11. Wheat
12. Rice
13. Sorghum
14. Cassava
15. Oil Palm
16. Corn

What struck me about this list is how it is dominated by crops that are destined for either animal feed or to be turned into processed food and the lack of crops with any real nutritional significance. While there are crops on the list with nutritional content (such as millet, groundnuts, barley, and wheat), it is the inclusion of commodity crops that are key ingredients for the nutritionally-empty processed food that increasingly dominate the global food system that needs to be questioned.

Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Philimon Bulawayo (April 1, 2012 – ZIMBABWE)

Achieving corn production potential is often portrayed as crucial to alleviating hunger and to a readership in the US accustomed to not questioning the endless acres of the grass across the middle swath of their own country, the suggestion of more corn may seem like a logical solution. What more corn means in the reality of the current food system is more processed goods with corn as their primary ingredient – food not grown directly for human consumption, but that needs to pass through an intermediary who transforms it into the form in which it is consumed. The same is essentially true of soybeans, sugarbeets, and sugarcane.

Increased corn and soybean production also means increased livestock production in industrialized farming operations, where the crops are used as feed to fatten the animals in a shorter amount of time than grass despite not being part of their natural die. The result is unhealthy animals that require high levels of antibiotics, and methane and waste problems from the concentration of large numbers of livestock in confined living spaces and not as part of a natural order where their waste is regenerated back into the system.

Grain-fed cattle in industrial feedlot (photo courtesy crossfitfire.com).

The inclusion of these four crops in the list of key crops for alleviating hunger in Africa made it clear that the goal was not so much to provide people access to nutritional food in an environmentally sustainable way as to foster the creation of a new population of consumers, and a substantially sized one at that. The author addresses this focus on profit toward the end of the article – and the way in which his focus jumps around a bit throughout makes one wonder how much an editor may have played with the paragraphs and chopped sentences to achieve a different overall message than originally intended – but the tacit underlying message that readers are not supposed to even notice, let alone question, remains, and it is with this premise that I fundamentally disagree: that the continued dominance of multinational corporations in food production is not to be questioned, and the presence of heavily processed foods as a key and growing part of an increasingly homogenized global diet inevitable.

The importance of diversity

A friend of mine recently asked that I give him a tour of the grocery store through my eyes. This may seem like a strange request at first, but I understood what he was getting at: a trip to the grocery store is actually far more complex than just following your shopping list.The more you learn about what it takes for food to get to your plate — where it comes from, and the route that it takes to get there,– the more complicated the grocery store becomes. If you’re digging deeper into the origins and politics behind your food, the grocery store can become a very complicated place. The products that line the shelves are silent yet potent symbols of a revolution in food culture (and therefore cultural identity in general) that has taken place largely out of sight of the general public over the past few decades, while the production and packaging of the processed and prepared foods that are increasingly dominating our daily diets have hidden histories with sweeping implications for our health and the natural world.

Photo courtesy of CSinewsnow.com

Walking into a typical Western grocery store can often overwhelm the senses with a seemingly endless variety of food. The aisles are lined with a wide diversity of products, while the produce section often resembles a cornucopia with its artfully arranged stacks of cosmetically-flawless fruits and vegetables. Yet this apparent abundance of diversity is as misleading as the timed “thunderstorms” that keep the produce perpetually wet. Just as in reality the misting causes the produce to in fact rot faster – and not stay fresh, as the grocers often imply – the apparent abundance of options masks a drastic decline in agricultural diversity over the past hundred years.

Statistics on global agricultural diversity paint a picture of extraordinary loss. The wide array of food on the shelves covers up that fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of known edible plant varieties globally, only 150 to 200 are used by humans. The choice between a select number of fruits and vegetables at the store conceals that an estimated 75 percent of agricultural diversity has been lost since 1900, while three fourths of the world’s food is generated by only 12 plant and five animal species.

This chart shows the drastic reduction in agricultural biodiversity over the last 100 years.So, why does diversity matter? Understanding both the repercussions and root causes of agricultural biodiversity loss paints a vivid picture of the underlying flaws in the current global food system, and clearly demonstrates what is lost beneath the rows of packaged products and pyramids of fruit and veggies. This dramatic loss of diversity in such a short period of time has sweeping implications for both human and environmental health, and has serious implications for the genetic variety of crops that we’re leaving for future generations. Reduced agricultural diversity means not only fewer choices about what to eat – it also exposes the food system to pests and disease, and creates the types of biological and social conditions that invite food shortages and famines. (Courtesy Rural Advancement Foundation International).

On the environmental end, loss in agricultural diversity means loss in overall global biodiversity. While human activity is causing ever-increasing reductions in biodiversity on a global scale due to habitat loss, agricultural production is accelerating this loss through over-simplification. Farming involves converting formerly complex natural ecosystems into areas dominated by human choice and activity, as the diverse array of flora and fauna that occupy the landscape are replaced by varieties selected solely for human use. The ways in which we choose to cultivate the land and the types of crops that we choose to grow are what defines the new landscape composition, and how much biodiversity is lost — or gained — the result of our decisions.

Suburban rural divide

Western thought – and, as an extension, Western agriculture – tends to separate human-dominated landscapes from the natural world. The world is divided into the areas where people live (urban, suburban, or rural areas), areas where people produce what they need to live (i.e., agricultural and industrial sites), and areas left to nature – with the three being separate and distinct regions that only rarely overlap. Yet this distinction is only a mental construct, as no line between the human and the wild actually exists in the natural world. The choices that humans make when interacting with their surrounding environment often end up being a defining factor in the look, smell, taste, feel, and overall health of a landscape.

Local culinary traditions are intimately tied to local crop varieties, with cultural identity often closely linked to the landscape itself as the surrounding environment dictates what can and cannot be grown. The concept of a terroir comes from how different climatic, geographical, and geological characteristics of a region where a crop is grown are expressed in the plant’s genetics. Region-specific characteristics such as how soil chemistry influences overall taste influences taste of a food give flavor to local dishes, while farmers select which crops to cultivate based on, well, what people want for dinner.

This is where Western agriculture can become a bit chicken-and-egg. Western agriculture in general – and in the US specifically — specializes in monoculture crop production. What this means is that whereas farmers have traditionally cultivated polycultures — or a wide variety of different plants and animals, with many of them regionally specific — Western agriculture focuses on only one or two crops that are easily interchangeable and not impacted by the specific characteristics of where they are grown, otherwise known as commodity crops. The most common commodity crops produced in Western agriculture systems are corn and soybeans – crops that are generally not consumed as they are harvested, but are primarily processed into other products. Both corn and soybeans are primary ingredients in the vast majority of the processed goods that occupy the shelves of Western supermarket chains, and that have come to dominate the daily meals of so many people. Food is no longer closely tied to the region where it is grown and eaten, yet instead becomes something to be processed and packaged by a corporation, and then sold with a label. Local cultural culinary identities are lost, replaced by a shrinking number of items that are more closely identified with a marketing campaign than with a region.

What I can’t help but wonder while wandering the aisles of the supermarket, surrounded by brightly colored labels and plastic packaging, is how this usurpation of local food impacts people’s sense of cultural identity, and send of connection to the surrounding natural environment. Culture gives people an identity with something larger than themselves, while meals have served as a reason for people to gather with others from their household and surrounding community. I can’t help but think that the loss in agricultural biodiversity over the past hundred years isn’t just a part of a greater loss.

Korean kimchi crisis serves as reminder of loss of food culture in US (courtesy of Yearofplenty.org)

 

Invisible Ingredients

Photo courtesy of Alliance for Natural Health Europe

 

Food is a hot topic these days. From legitimate concerns over how it is produced and the resulting impacts on environmental and human health, to the rapid pace at which trendy new diets take hold and inspire niche restaurants and food products – what we eat and where our food comes from is increasingly accompanied by a why that can be as complicated as the route that many foods take to get to our plates. Over the last 100 years, farming practices and local food cultures in the US have changed in such a swift, dramatic fashion that it is often difficult to imagine how things could have been any other way…so much so that, for many people, questioning what’s on their plate rarely goes deeper than calorie counts and nutrition. Before delving too deeply into any one aspect of the myriad of complicated issues surrounding food, a rough outline of why it matters beyond personal health can help orient those who have never really wondered about the invisible implications behind the origins of what’s for dinner.

Food is one of our most basic needs and our single biggest impact on the natural environment. With half of all arable land globally used for agricultural production, what we choose to eat and how it is grown has enormous implications for biodiversity and overall environmental health on a global scale. Yet our choices about what to eat are subject to a number of external physical, economic, and social constraints – with some of them not as obvious as others. Cultural culinary traditions often dictate what is available within our communities and the types of meals that we serve in our homes, while individual financial situations determine what we can personally afford. More broadly, unspoken sociocultural beliefs about the relationship between humans and the natural world impacts how we approach agricultural production and consumption, while widely-accepted assumptions about the role of economic markets in structuring the food system have sweeping economic and social repercussions in rural communities that reverberate to society in general, ultimately shaping how people think about access to food.

It is no secret that the US has an unhealthy relationship with food. The home of the fast food burger where nothing is safe from the deep fryer, rapidly rising rates of obesity are often construed as the failure of individual decision making. Diet trends change as often as fall fashions, as individuals try to essentially create a new daily food culture for themselves. Yet while the general public tends to identify poor dietary habits with individual choice, a growing number of academics, writers, and social groups are starting to question the unseen forces behind what is available to put on the table at the local grocery store and the social culture created by fast food advertisements. The root of rising obesity rates is increasingly attributed not to individual decisions or genetics, but to the very structure of the food system itself and the way in which unhealthy eating habits are encouraged by the dominate players.

Yet breaking down that short description raises complicated questions about the various forces behind the concurrent changes in US food culture and agricultural production practices over the past hundred years. To view the current state of the global food system as a sort of natural economic and social succession — the inevitable path of technological advancements – is to obscure some of the deeper assumptions and implications embedded in our food culture, and to ignore the ways in which a society’s food culture and local and global levels of biodiversity and inextricably intertwined. Understanding some of the deeper issues behind what we eat can inform not only our health, but also the way in which we as a society have the biggest impact on the environment – through what we choose to eat, and how it is grown.