Michael Pollan Knight Professor of Journalism, UC Berkeley
Omnivore’s Dilemma
November 28, 2006
You have all paid the highest compliment you can to a writer, which is to say reading his work, and taking it seriously, and inviting him to come talk about it.
This is one of the great honors that I have been able be part of this campus community book project.
And also to participate in your community, and be welcomed into your community to be part of the dialogue about these issues.
And that it happened here is very important to me, and that it happened here, for a couple of reasons. This university, this community, is part of my education. I am not a scientist, I am not an expert, I am a writer. When I write about a subject that I haven’t written about before, I have to go out and educate myself. There are many people on this campus who were chief sources as I developed the ideas of this book.
The other reason that it is really exciting for me to be here in your community, is that you have such a vital local food community, and you have for a long time, longer than a lot of other places around this country.
This is the place where in many ways the future of food is being decided, so an opportunity to speak to you means a lot.
I salute the new Agricultural Sustainability Institute, I think it holds great promise.
In fact, the word in the middle of that title has inspired talk I am going to give.
I want to talk about the importance for our health, for our security and for our environment of developing local food systems and developing a truly sustainable agriculture, which we are a long way from.
Let me start out with that word, sustainability. It is not a very attractive word. It is kind of a pallid social sciency word, and much abused. But you know it really pays. I am a writer. One of the first things I do when I start a subject, I think about the words. What wisdom may be embedded in them. What wisdom may have been forgotten in the way they are used. There is a great line somewhere in Confucius: before you can begin make progress and think, you need a process, Confucius called the rectification of the names. I think we need a rectification of this word sustainability. So, what is it? What does it mean that some thing is unsustainable, let’s dwell on the negative for a little bit. It just doesn’t mean that it is good or bad, or we like it or we don’t like it. it means something very specific. Unsustainable means that something cannot go on the way it has been going on indefinitely. Because it is consuming or destroying the resources or conditions it depends on. So collapse or radical change is inevitable. We need to remind ourselves of that. There is much at stake here.
That system is a kind of zero sum game. Dependent on subtracting or destroying from people. In a way that can never be corrected. So what does that mean with respect to our food system? Because I would argue that our food system is unsustainable, our industrial food system. I use that term to really mean all the kind of food that shows up in our super markets, by and large, with a few exceptions, and the food that ends up in our fast food restaurants.
In the book, I tell the story of that food chain by looking at one crop. One of the great surprises for me in trying to follow back our food from a meal was that when it came to main stream industrial conventional food, I kept ending up, whenever I follow that hamburger, that soda, even those French fries, I kept ending up in the same place which is to say a farm field in the American Midwest where they were growing corn and soybeans. This was a real shock to me. I did not realize the extent to which these two plants out of all the hundreds of thousands of wonderful, edible plants there are in this planet that we have come to depend on for our food. Indeed today, 80% of our calories are coming from just four or five plants, I don’t know exactly how many come from corn and soy. I focused on corn because it was such an important building block of the fast food nation, I looked very closely at that whole corn industrial complex.
First I need to say, I have a great deal of respect for corn as a plant. Indeed, it has completely outwitted us at this point. It has gotten us to do a more for it than it does for us, because it is doing a lot of bad things to us.
Corn as a food is wonderful, but corn as an industrial raw material or a food product is another matter.
It has only one plant by virtue of its genus, and its ability to manipulate us, has conquered our land, our food system and all our food animals and has even conquered our bodies. We grow 12 billion bushels today that we transform into all manner of processed food. Feeding it to our animals, fractionating it, distilling and refining it into things like high fructose corn syrup. And it is the oversupply of corn that really is responsible for the fact that sweetness and added fat are so ubiquitous in our diet and in our bodies.
In effect with this plant, what I call a very unsustainable food system we have taken our food system off the sun, agriculture begins as a solar enterprise and hooked it into our fossil fuel economy in a way that is deeply unsustainable.
So, what does it mean to say that corn system is unsustainable. Well, start with energy, and I am not going to list all the ways it is unsustainable.
We used to, before the rise of industrial agriculture in the last century, we used to get 2 calories of food energy for every one calorie of fossil fuel energy that we invested in agriculture, driving tractors or what ever we were doing.
Now the way we eat today, ten calories of fossil fuel energy are required for every one calorie of food that we eat. We are using oil to grow corn, we are using corn to make oil substitutes, a particular scale of absurdity.
Our food system now accounts for, and the estimates vary from like 15 to 24 %, but the best one I’ve seen is
about 17% of our fossil fuel use is to feed ourselves. To give you some comparison, 18% goes to personal transportation, to driving around. So food is a very important part of the energy problem, a very important part of the climate change crisis. Indeed each of us Americans, eating the way we are, which is to say, a very high meat, highly processed diet are adding, simply by our eating decisions, four tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. It is not often talked about, as part of the energy dilemma. I think it was one of the real lacks in an otherwise terrific film by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth that he never really addressed the food part of the problem, but it is a large part of the problem.
It is one of the more tractable parts of the problem. Our trade in food is exploding right now. More and more food is traveling further and further. You have heard the statistic, the average item of food in your super market has traveled 1500 miles. We are, as an economist pointed out, we are selling sugar cookies to the Danes, and buying sugar cookies from the Danes, another absurdity. As he pointed out, it would be a lot more sustainable to simply swap recipes. I think it is a very good suggestion.
This can’t last. We know we are reaching the end of our oil supply. We cannot continue to eat it the way we are.
Pollution. There are many kinds of pollution associated with industrial agriculture. There is the pollution of Pesticides. All those 80 million acres of cornfields in this country. Most of it is grown with atrizine, a very toxic weed killer. That is in the water, in the cornbelt, that we know at concentrations as low as .1 part per billion, turns male frogs into hermaphrodites, chemically emasculates them. This is in the water supply all through out the cornbelt at much higher levels than that.
Fertilizer pollution. Nitrogen. We put way too much nitrogen which by the way comes from fossil fuels, mostly natural gas. That fertilizer runs off the corn fields of the American Midwest, and runs down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, where it has created a dead zone currently the size of New Jersey and growing. This won’t last. Our patience for this, I don’t think it will last.
Health. what about health? This food system of abundant cheap food. Our food system is providing lots of food but it is not doing what a food system needs to do. Which is to keep its population healthy. We are not healthy. We are overfed; we are fed in such a way that we are suffering from an epidemic of diabetes. That threatens to make the life span of the generation being born today shorter than that of their parents.
For the first time in American history, because of diabetes and many other chronic diseases as well.
This monoculture diet, when you are getting so many of your calories from a very small number of plants that you are essentially breaking down and creating into what appears to be this incredible diversity in the supermarket. But it is in fact corn calories or soy calories of one kind or another. You know we are omnivores. We know we need between 50 and 100 different chemicals, minerals, to be healthy, and you don’t get that from processed corn and soy. With the result that in the inner cities, in Oakland near where I live, there are children who live on fast food diets in West Oakland who come into clinics suffering from things like rickets, diseases that we thought we have conquered 100 years ago.
Why? Well, they are drinking more soda than milk, they have micro nutrient deficiencies because their diet is so monocultural.
Well, money? How about sustainability in terms of money? Cheap food it turns out is really, really expensive. We spend up to $25 billion a year to subsidize this food economy. 40% of the income in the American farm belt today comes from government payments from subsidy checks. Food is not really as cheap as it looks. We are all paying for it.
Food security, and I will talk more about this more later. But having such a concentrated food system raises enormous vulnerabilities to either accidental or deliberate contamination. We had an illustration of that with E. coli 157:H7 in spinach, just a few weeks ago. When you are washing the nation’s entire salad in one sink, more or less, in the Salinas Valley, at one company, when something goes wrong, and something will go wrong, even in the best run food plant, many, many people are affected, hundreds and hundreds of people are affected.
Lastly, in the last sense, and I haven’t talked about animal welfare, and I haven’t talked about labor. And there are many other ways that the system is unsustainable. It is unsustainable, I would argue and this speaks to my theme and my project, because it depends on ignorance. A system that depends on ignorance for its survival. Let me tell you what I mean by that. When people know what they are eating. When they know what they are eating how that hamburger was produced or that Chicken McNugget was produced, they lose their appetite for it.
People who read Fast Food Nation lost their appetite for fast food. When you look over the high walls of our
Industrial feed lots and see how the animals live and see how the animals die, You stop eating that food. So you see that that wall is very important to the survival of the system. But walls don’t last. We know that. We know that from the fall of communism. We know that sooner or later people will see, someone will show them, and when they do, they will turn away from this food system. It is unsustainable in the sense that it depends on our not knowing.
More and more people do know, more and more people are worrying about the food system. How do we know that? We can look at their consumer behavior. They are flocking to Whole Foods. They are flocking to the Farmers Markets, they are joining CSA’s (Community Supported Agriculture).
Whole Foods is now the fastest growing supermarket chain in the country. How incredible is that? Their growth is rapid. But you know what? Farmers Markets are growing even faster. They have doubled twice in the last ten years. We have no idea how many dollars are being spent there because a lot of people aren’t paying taxes. But we can guess. It has reached the billions. It is in many ways an underground food economy. It is a lot like the last days of the Soviet Union, where everybody was going around. At that point 50% of the food that the Russians were eating was coming through these very informal networks of small growers, so it was really under the radar but it became 50% of the economy. We obviously are not there yet.
So this hunger for alternatives. In my book after I looked at the whole industrial food supply, I decided I really wanted to look at the alternatives. I wanted to look at organic food. Very important alternative, also the fastest growing segment of the supermarket. When I started writing this book, it was under one percent, now it is hitting about three percent. I want to read to you a brief passage from the book. To leaven all the dark news. About what I call the literary genre that is on offer at Whole Foods, which I found very interesting. I don’t come out of sciences, I really come out an English department. So I called it supermarket pastoral. I just want to read you a page or two.
I enjoy shopping at Whole Foods nearly as much as I enjoy browsing a good book store, which come to think of it is probably no accident. Shopping at Whole Foods is a literary experience too. That is not to take anything away from the food.
You guys don’t have a Whole Foods in Davis? Right. Sacramento. They are coming.
That is not to take anything away from the food. Which is generally of high quality, much of it certified organic. I am going to make the finger sign of quotes, because a lot of this is in quotes.
Humanely raised or free range but that is the point. It is the evocative prose that makes this food really special. Elevating an egg or chicken breast, or a bag of arugula from the realm of ordinary protein and carbohydrates into a much headier experience. One with complex esthetic, emotional, and even political dimensions. Take the range fed sirloin steak, I recently eyed in a meat case. According to the brochure on the counter, it was formerly part of a steer that spent its days living in beautiful places, ranging from plant diverse high mountain meadows to thick aspen groves and miles of sagebrush filled flats. Now a steak like that has got to taste better than one from Safeway but the only accompanying information comes in the form of a number, the price I mean, which you can bet will be considerably less. But I am evidently not the only shopper willing to pay more for a good story. With the growth of organics and mounting concerns about the wholesomeness of industrial food, storied food is showing up in supermarkets everywhere these days.
But it is Whole Foods that consistently offers the most cutting edge grocery list. On a recent visit, I filled my shopping cart with eggs from cage free vegetarian hens, milk from cows that live free from unnecessary fear and distress, wild salmon caught by Native Americans in Yakatak Alaska, population 833. And heirloom tomatoes from Capay Farms, at $4.99 a pound, one of the early pioneers of the organic movement.
The organic broiler I picked up even had a name, one familiar to most of you, I am sure you.
Rosie, who turned out to be a sustainably farmed free range chicken from Petaluma Poultry, whose farming methods strive to create harmonious relationships in nature sustaining the health of all creatures in the natural world. OK, not the most meaningful sentence, but at least their hearts are in the right place. And there is that word sustaining.
In several corners of the store I was actually forced to choose between subtly competing stories, for example, some of the organic milk in the milk case was ultrapasteurized, an extra processing step that was presented as a boon to the consumer because it extends shelf life. But then another more local dairy boasted about the fact that they had said no to ultrapasteurized implying their product was fresher, less processed, and therefore more organic. This was the dairy that talked about cows living free from distress, something I was beginning to feel a bit of myself at this point. This particular dairy’s label had a lot to say about the bovine lifestyle. It’s Holsteins were provided with an appropriate environment, including shelter and a comfortable resting area, sufficient space, proper facilities, and the company of their own kind. I really love that. Do you know any dairy that doesn’t offer that to their cows? As if they would have to be integrated or something. All this sounded pretty great until I read the story of another dairy selling raw milk completely unprocessed, whose cows graze green pastures all year long.
Which made me wonder whether the first dairy’s idea for a cow included as I had assumed, a pasture. All of a sudden the absence from their story of that word seemed weirdly conspicuous. As the literary critics would say, the writers seemed to be eliding the whole notion of cows and grass. Indeed the longer I shopped in Whole Foods, the more I thought that this is the place where the skills of a literary critic might come in handy, those and perhaps also an investigative journalist. Those of you that have read the book know that I did some of that investigative journalism. Although I don’t want to dress it up with that word, so let’s just call it journalism.
I went to visit Rosie and the organic free range sustainable chicken. I went to visit some of the cows, organic cows, and I was kind of surprised and disappointed. To find that organic is in many ways in danger of and beginning to repeat many of the mistakes of the industrial food chain. It is lapsing closer and closer to monoculture, and with animals it is already there. Rosie lives with 20,000 other organic free range chickens in a big shed, not at all like the farm depicted on the label. It is a better product than many chickens, they have a few more inches of leg room. They get organic feed, no pesticides in the feed, and they don’t get antibiotics. And they are not fed hormones. Do they really free range? I was very disappointed to see that when I stepped into this long shed, 100 yards long and 20,000 birds and I said so What about the free ranging?
I was going to say farm hands, but these aren’t really farms. The cage hand said There’s the door right there and there is a door at the other end. Yeah, but it is closed. We don’t open the door until the birds are five weeks old. We are really afraid they are going to get sick, because they don’t get any antibiotics.
Which is very interesting. It shows you that doing organic agriculture on an industrial scale is actually more precarious than industrial agriculture because you don’t have the tools you need to be growing a monoculture of animals in close confinement.
We don’t open the door until they are five weeks old. How long do the birds live? Seven weeks. That is when I realized that the free range thing is not so much of a lifestyle for these chickens as it is a two week vacation option. And when they do open the door, they don’t go outside, the water is inside, the feed is inside, the flock is inside, they have never been outside.
That free range yard which does exist is a conceit. A literary conceit for us, much like our front lawn, kind of symbolic space that nobody actually uses. There are now organic feedlots, there are now organic factory farms. There are organic cows. Many of them from labels that you probably buy and think are real special, and they are not getting pastured while they are milking. And that seems to me a real shame. A real declension from the ideal of organic.
Food miles. Organic is becoming just as processed as anything else. We are now moving toward an era, I have just heard about organic pizza at Pizza Hut. How do we feel about that? It is a mixed bag. It means many more acres of organic wheat and many more acres organic tomato. And organic Coca-Cola, I can make an argument for. More acres of organic cornfields not doused with atrizine. But organic Coca-Cola? Do we really want to go there? I don’t know, you can argue it both ways. Organic food in the super market is now traveling further than conventional food. More than 1500 miles.
The whole kind of regional distribution system is repeating itself in organics. If you buy local Washington tulips at the Whole Foods in Seattle, those tulips have first traveled down to California to a regional distribution center, then come back up to Seattle, even though they were grown a few miles away. So you see the kind of economic system is repeating itself. The future of organics is global. WalMart will get into organics or about to and they are sourcing their food to China. There are lots of questions about organics from China. How organic are they?
Stoney Field Farms Yogurt already, again one of the pioneers, a really good company in some ways,
But now they are sourcing Organic milk powder from New Zealand, because there is not enough organic milk in this country, they are sourcing strawberries from China, apple puree from the Philippines and blueberries from Canada. I don’t think that is the image the consumer has. There are good and bad things about that. It is very nice that our food dollars are helping take care of land in China, and the Philippines and New Zealand, but I don’t think that is why a lot of us buy organic. I think our goal is to take care of land a little bit closer to home.
After my exploration of industrial organic, as I was forced to call it, I went looking for something more sustainable. I found something really interesting. I want to describe a farm I spent some time at. I think we need to be cheered up. Models are very important. We need good models. You can ask me whether this farm can be scaled up and you can ask me whether it works in California. And those are legitimate questions. But the fact that it exists, I think it can help us define what we mean by this word sustainable.
The farm, and if you have read the book you now a fair amount about it, although I want to stress some other things about it is Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farms in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I found it because I was looking for somebody who would give me some really salty quotes about the organic empire. And I had heard that Joel Salatin was that person, that he is a very strident critic of the organic today.
I called him up, and I got all my quotes and he was fierce in his condemnation of Whole Foods and the organic empire. I had heard that he grew these amazing pasture chickens. I was hoping at the end of this conversation that I could get him to send me one, and I was writing an article at that time about organics for the New York Times. Usually, if you ask somebody, they will send you a review steak or a review chicken. So at the end of my conversation, after I had collected all my salty quotes I said I hear you grow these amazing chickens and I was wondering if you could ship me one.
Sorry I can’t do that. I figured he wasn’t set up for shipping, I can send the Fed Ex guy, and he can come with a Styrofoam box, and all you have to do is drop it in. And I can send you a check. He said, no, You don’t get it. I don’t believe it is organic, sustainable if you will to Fed Ex meat across the country. That was one of my more embarrassing moments as a journalist. I had staffed this guy, this avatar of local foods, to send me a chicken by Fed Ex. So he said basically if I wanted to try his chicken I had to come down to Swope where he lived and pick it up myself. Which I subsequently did. I learned more about his farm, and decided I wanted to spend a week working there.
I had what my wife calls My Paris Hilton adventure where I went to work for Joel as a farm hand And worked as hard as I have worked in my life, and the harder than anything else I did for this book. Because I happened to go the week of the summer solstice, which has got really long days and it is not when you want to be on a farm. We were getting up at five o’clock in the morning.
Joel describes himself evangelical Christian conservative environmentalist lunatic farmer. Part of the evangelical part is that there is no caffeine and no alcohol on this farm, so it was a really long week. I was sleeping in a trailer, in his mother’s trailer, in a scaled down trailer room. Everything was scaled down, including the bed. The bed was like five feet long and I am a little over six feet, So it was a very long week, but I learned a lot, and I saw something as thrilling as anything I had seen in all my years writing about nature and all my years writing about our relationship with the natural world. And I won’t go into great detail and if you want to learn more, there is more in the book, or I can take your questions later.
Just to summarize this farm: It is a polyculture, as the name suggests. He has a hundred acres of grass, and he grows beef, pork, broilers, eggs, turkeys, rabbits, and he has six species. They grow in this very intricate symbiotic system. Every animal is contributing some eco-system service to another. A hundred acres of grass, 400 acres of wood lots. Very hilly land. Not very good for row crops, but very good for grass. One of the first questions I asked Joel, What kind of farmer are you? Are you a rancher, a chicken farmer, are you an egg farmer? He said, No, I am a grass farmer.
That is very striking to me. We don’t eat grass. There is no market in grass; there is a little market in hay. How can you be a grass farmer? He explained to me that is the basis of this ecosystem he has created. He is modeling these relationships on nature, the relationships of animals in nature. Just to give you one example, and there are several of these. They are all kind of wonderful. The relation of his beef and his chickens, his laying hens. He does grass fed beef, and he has a herd, seventy five animals or so. They spend one day in a paddock and they graze it really completely, when you put that many animals in a quarter acre, they graze it all down completely. Then at the end of the day he moves them to another paddock. What allows this to happen is this very light, cheap electronic fencing, which I think is the most important sustainable agriculture technology for animals agriculture. I could carry a quarter acre paddock on my shoulder and set it up myself in ten minutes, it is really remarkable stuff. They would graze down that pasture, and then we would build another one right next to it. He would then open the door…
You hear about moving the cattle, and you need dogs, and chewing tobacco, a lot of trucks and a lot of screaming, and it wasn’t like that at all. They knew the drill. They did it every day. He was less like a cowboy than a Maitre d’, he kind of opened the door, And the cattle would move from one to another
They were so happy to get the next pasture because there was all that fresh green grass and the end of the day is when it is sweetest because it has been collecting sugar all day and that wonderful contented sound of cows ripping the grass and ruminating. It was a great end of the day scene.
Then he has his chickens. He waits three days is very interesting. He calls it his hen mobile, and it looks like a ramshackle prairie schooner, he has made it himself, it is not an elegant piece of technology. He lowers the gangplank, and three hundred laying hens come streaming down the gangplank, and they fan out over the pasture. They go right for the cow paddies. And what they want to do is eat the larva, the maggots out of the cow paddies, and the reason he has waited three days is to grow those maggots as big and as juicy as he can, but if he waited any longer, they would hatch and he would have flies everywhere.
By understanding the life cycle of this parasite, he is able to grow the important protein source for his chickens. They eat all of the flies, they take care of his fly problem. He calls the hens his sanitation crew.
And they do these other things, in the process of digging out these larva, they spread the manure. They fertilize the paddocks with the very rich nitrogen manure themselves, and then he knows exactly how long they can be there before the nitrogen load is too high, and then he moves them to the next paddock. Six weeks later he has this flush grass in a blaze of growth, and he can either cut it for hay or he can bring in the cows again. It is a really exciting relationship because it is based on the relationship of birds and ruminants in nature. Birds are always following ruminants and cleaning up after them.
To really appreciate it, we have to bear down, and remember I said he is a grass farmer, and look at the grass plant itself. Just think about one of those grass plants in one of those paddocks. What is happening is when a grass plant is sheered by a ruminant, it does something very interesting. It wants to keep its root mass in rough balance with its leaf mass. It is called the root shoot ratio. So what it does is it sheds roots, to balance out, and when it sheds the roots, it kind of cauterizes them and they die, then they are set upon by all the life living in the soil, the earthworms, the protozoa, the bacteria, the viruses, the fungi. And they digest those roots.
And when they are done digesting it, that is soil, that is compost. That is how soil is built, it is built from the bottom up. That is how the great top soil of the prairies that pulsing of the pasture. He is actually creating soil. What does that mean? What that means is that at the end of the year, I will tell you how much he takes off this land: 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 10,00 broilers, 12,000 turkeys, 1,000 rabbits, 35,000 dozen eggs, off of this hundred acres. At the end of the year, there is more biodiversity, not less, more fertility, not less. More soil, not less. The significance of that is: This is not a zero sum system. In our heads all of us are stuck in this idea, that for us to get what we want from nature, nature must be diminished. It is a process of subtraction. He is suggesting it need not be that way, a sustainable, a truly sustainable system can actually improve the soil, improve biodiversity, leave the land better than before we removed our food from it.
There is one example. There are other people doing this. It is as heartening as anything I have seen
Makes you question the basic framework that we are in this tragic zero sum relationship with the natural world. Maybe we need not be, and I think that is the ultimate goal of sustainable agriculture.
One of the things about Joel that is very important is that he only sells locally, he would not sell anything in the mail for me. I want to say a few words in favor of local food economies. We are told today that it is sentimental, we are told it is reactionary to go back to local foods, small farms, that kind of agriculture.
The future is in globalized economy, where we get our milk powder from New Zealand, organic food from China, and everything is produced wherever it can be produced most cheaply, and shipped to where it can be sold most dearly. This is the dream of the globalizers, that we should be putting our land, our people, to a higher use than agriculture, as if there were any such thing.
To fight this is a rear guard action, is nostalgia. Now, There are reasons in support of local food, and you know them, that might strike the unsentimental as soft headed. Let’s try out a few.
We like the idea of keeping farmers and their wisdom in our communities.
We like the idea of keeping land near us in production, in food rather than in houses and strip malls.
We want to defend the land that we love.
We like idea of eating food in season picked at the peak of its taste and nutritional value.
We like what happens socially at the farmers market which is really emerging as the new public square in many of our towns, and I know that is true here. A wonderful arena where city meets country, where people politic and pass out petitions, and schooze. Compare that to what happens in your super market. Somebody did a study and found that there are ten times as many conversations at the farmers market as you do at the supermarket. I don’t think we need a sociologist to tell us that.
I think we like how the farmers markets or CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) lets us reconnect through these plants and animals and farmers to the natural world. Think of what our children learn. They learn that carrot is not a glossy orange bullet that comes in a plastic bag, but it is actually a root. Which was news to my son.
I am fully prepared to defend local food on those sentimental grounds, because I actually think they are important. I would point out that these relationships that I am describing are a set of non zero sum relationships, there is a lot more added, this is about a lot more than an exchange of money for food.
But let me move the argument on to another ground, a hardheaded unsentimental ground for a second. Let me suggest that it is the globalizers of food, the free traders of food who are the real sentimentalists. Who are, and Wendall Berry has made this point brilliantly, in a piece called The Total Economy. It is they who are acting on a faith for which there is no justification. Not unlike the Soviet Communists, he wrote, who were the last great destroyers of the local food economies. They tell us we need to sacrifice things we like here and now, landscapes, relationships, local enterprises, downtowns for the promise of future prosperity that globalization will bring. We must as Lenin said, break a few eggs to make an omelet. But tell me, what could be more unrealistic, more soft headed than to propose we should destroy things that we love, that we have now, that we treasure in the present for the uncertain promise of some future benefit of cheaper food. Let us stick with the eggs. Let us keep them from cracking. Let me suggest that there is nothing more hardheaded or realistic than building and defending local food economy. Indeed, to do so is not a matter of sentiment but of critical importance to national security and public health. Let me explain what I mean.
Energy: this global food economy, this promise of growing it wherever you can and moving it wherever it will be paid for is going to depend on cheap energy. It does already. Not to mention international peace and security from terrorism. We will not reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy, or confront the issue of climate change, without dealing with an industrialized globalized economy, without cutting some of the energy out of that system.
Sovereignty: do we really want to lose control of our food system and our destiny around food the way we have lost control of our destiny around oil. I don’t think that people want to go there if they think about it at all. But make no mistake, to find ourselves dependent on foreign sources of food is precisely where the globalizers want us.
National security, well, our government knows better than we eaters the risk of a highly centralized food system. There was a very interesting moment, post 9/11. Where people looked at the food system for just a second and then closed that door. Tommy Thompson, when he retired from Health and Human Services, he was asked what had surprised him. He said, for the life of me I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do. The reason it would be so easy to do, he was responding to this 2003 GAO study, that found that our food system because it is so highly centralized is subject to both deliberate and accidental contamination. So what is the government doing to deal with this threat? Well, absolutely nothing. You would think the country genuinely concerned about the security of its food system, the first thing they would do is decentralize. We are doing nothing in that direction. We as consumers are but the government is doing nothing.
Public health, and as I said, we have just had an example of how precarious the highly centralized food system can be. It is not to say that you don’t have problems in a local food system. You can have E. coli in your farmers market too. But when that happens, it will not be a national story, It will not affect thousands of people. It will not close down spinach across the country. Although it is kind of interesting to see that spinach was not closed down in the farmers market. At least in my market in Berkeley spinach was still doing quite brisk sales. Why? Because people there put their faith not in regulations or what the FDA tells them, but in relationships, not technology.
I think that all these reasons are why we are seeing local food economies booming right now.
Yes, when the government won’t protect our land, our communities, our local economies, we have to do it ourselves, as consumers-citizens. And, we will, we can build the local food economy simply by getting out of the super markets, and voting with our forks and we can do it very easily in this area, much more easily here than in many parts of the country.
To do so though, we are talking about a new kind of consumer, you know another word that needs some rectification. It is really a ugly word, even uglier than sustainable. I have always hated that identity. To be treated by the marketplace as a consumer. It conjures this selfish creature prowling the isles looking for good deals. Someone who is diminishing and consuming, diminishing the world by his or her decisions. Subtracting from it. But imagine a different concept of the consumer, one that incorporates the values of the citizen, and even the species in which the shopper recognizes his or her obligations to a commonwealth as a citizen does, and even to a biotic community, as Aldo Leopold said. We can shop for value in that debased McDonalds’ term, of the value meal or we can shop for values, our values. We can redefine the consumer as a creator of new food chains.
It is true, to do this takes more work and we can talk about it later. Shopping, foraging for food, cooking again because you will not find anything microwaveable at the farmers market. And, it is more expensive, a very important part of the dilemma we are in. When you pay the real sustainable cost of your food, it will be more expensive. We need to spend more money on food. True not everybody can, but many of us can, most of the people in this room can. We are spending less than ten percent of our income on food. That is less than any people in the history of the planet, any people anywhere on earth. Ten percent, less than, when I was a kid it was 18 percent. It has fallen. Where is all that money going? Think of what we weren’t buying back then. Cell phones. We didn’t pay for television in 1960. Entertainment is sucking up a lot of that money. We will have to elevate the importance of food in our lives and in our culture to make us feel good about spending more on food.
We need a new consumer who really understands what Wendall Berry famously said, that eating is an agricultural act, an ecological act and political act as well. We have a precious vote here, our food dollars. In fact, we have three of them a day. If you think about it, in how many other areas of your life can you make such an affirmative vote? We have more control over this than so much in our lives. Not every time. People are not going to vote right for food every single time. But at least once a day. One economist said, if people spend ten dollars a week on local food it would be a revolution. We can help create the world we want to live in one delicious bite at a time.
Before I finish, I want to make one more point. We can vote with our forks and that is very important. But we also need to vote with our votes. I just want to say a quick word about the Farm Bill. So much of the system I have been describing, so much of the industrial food system, is the result not the result of nature or the free market but of a set of policies, that are enshrined in this bill erroneously called the Farm Bill. It is boring, it is obscure, it is complicated, I am not going into it tonight, but attention must be paid. These are the rules of the game. And they get reset every five or seven years, and they are getting reset, and they are getting set next year, 2007. These rules determine what sort of agriculture your tax dollars will support
Corn and soy beans or local vegetables? Feed lot meat or organic production? You have to let your senators and congressmen know that you are paying attention, so they don’t trade their votes, any more because that is essentially what they are doing, outside of the farm states. Don’t even let them call it a farm bill. It is a food bill and it is your fight.
