Introduction
- What would a just food system look like?
- Must talk about reforming our diet and our land, agriculture and the environment, clean energy, water supply…
- Also labor laws, welfare of animals and food workers, income inequality, racism, immigration
- Any talk of food will entail talk of human rights, climate change, justice
Part I: The Birth of Growing
1. The Food-Brain Feedback Loop
- While many animals use tools, humans have uniquely mastered ability to make them
- Use and control of fire → technology of cooking = one of major technological developments of our species, along with language
- Cooking → far more flexibility around food, fostered cooperation
- Optimal foraging theory **→ eat food that requires least energy and provides max calories
- Omnivores like us → wider potential variety of habitats, dietary flexibility **
- Agriculture → sense of ownership over produced food → laws and government to protect this
- Was the era of civilization brought about by agriculture worth it?
- Yes, it enabled population growth, technological advancements, but also injustice, poverty, disease, slavery, and war
2. Soil and Civilization
- Quality and maintenance of soil health determines resilience of food systems, and thus civilizations
- Methods of planting to replenish nutrients (esp N): fallowing, planting cover crops (ex. alfalfa, legumes, which host N-fixing microbes), rotating crops, fertilizing
- Constant pressure to produce more from the land to support growing populations, but doing so hurt soil health, decreasing productivity…
- Lead to need for central organization to develop irrigation infrastructure, enforce property laws → social classes, slavery
- Enabled surpluses for things like building pyramids
- Until the Common Era, Asian agriculture (dominated by rice, more plant-based) = more sustainable, permanent
- In the Americas:
- Some regions (PNW) had enough natural abundance to support complex societies w/o agriculture
- People in rainforests → systems mimicking levels of canopy— milpa
- Cultivation of world-changing crops of potatoes (by the Incan) and maize (by the Mayans, in milpa)
- Maize was ideal crop, but didn’t provide adequate nutrition → nixtamilization (treating with ash, lime) increased nutrient bioavailability; cultivation with beans and squash (Three Sisters) → complete protein, replenish soil
- Eventually soil erosion could not support growing populations → civilization collapse
3. Agriculture Goes Global
- Pressure for more food/land → imperialism, colonization, starting with Greek and Roman empires
- After Crusades, feudal elite relied more on trade for income → enclosure of the commons, making peasants dependent on land & its productivity
- Lots of land used for livestock, but not to feed peasants
- Monoculture stressed land further, loss of fertility → Europe looked beyond its borders
- Age of Exploration driven by need for new trade routes to get spices from Asia when old ones closed by Ottomans
- Discovery of Americas lead to trade of sugar and slaves fueling European demand for wealthy
- Sugarcane (orig from New Guinea) = labor and resource-intensive crop, quickly depletes soil → rapid need for new land, entrenchment of new system of slavery
- “Columbian Exchange” was extremely biased toward Europeans: Americas had diversity of crops that grew well on unproductive land
- European expansion across the continent wreaked havoc on environment and people alike
- Replaced sustainable agricultural practices with monoculture, invasive species; enforces concepts on land ownership & possession
4. Creating Famine
- Rise of agriculture → famines more widespread, as a result of imperialism and colonization demanding not food for people, but goods for market
- Hunger, food security → more questions of politics, inequality, abusive power, wealth than of underproduction
- Esp for the past few centuries, could have enough food if health of people & soil were priorities
- British trade policy undermined systems of food security & stability → more frequent and severe famines
- Forced Indian farmers → monoculture of cotton without guaranteed supply → more susceptible to Él Niño, loss of food reserves
- Similar trends in China, but with tea and then opium
- In Africa, also replaced life-sustaining crops with luxury goods (cacao, coffee, peanuts); disrupting local trade networks that supported resilience with global trade
5. The American Way of Farming
Food drives history, and soil drives food.
- Yield and output, not quality, were defined success for of agricultural cash economy & trade
- Western reductionism (Descartes) → any system can be understood by analyzing its individual parts
- Applied to agriculture → ignored components of plant/soil health that didn’t fit the formula: all plants need is N, K, P; all the other elements abs microbes in soil were irrelevant
- Reliance on fertilizer (starting w guano) → adding external nutrients to soil instead of developing closed, sustainable systems
- American heartland → some of most fertile land on Earth, most profitable use for Eur immigrants = wheat (then soy, corn) and meat
- Surplus of grains → used instead of grazing for livestock feed (near easier than grain to transport, too)
- Roots of income inequality = federal “donation” of land to white men in homesteading acts in 1860s
- American economy in 1890 almost a vertically-integrated colony: extracting labor and resources from within
- Beginnings of Big Ag building networks of grain elevators
- Driving force to this day of feedback loop: agricultural surpluses → falling prices → increase production
- Goals of American agriculture = increase surplus & create capital, whatever the cost to people and resources
Part II: The Twentieth Century
6. The Farm as Factory
- After 1860, combination of gasoline power, mass-produced steel, and tractor to break soil → rapid growth in production
- Tractor also opened up 1/5 of all crop land previously used for draft animals
- Revolution in systems of manufacturing with interchangeable parts (of actual product and human jobs), assembly lines
- Industrial agriculture → extreme costs to land, exploitation of workers and animals
- WWI won in part because of wheat: both Br and Ger reliant on imported grain, fertilizer, etc., and Ger was much easier to blockade
- Demand of war → surging grain prices in America; production fueled by new synthetic fertilizers, pesticides
- Post war, surpluses remained → government push for farmers to standardize practices, focus on monoculture cash crops
- Small farms lost to debt and taxes and remaining ones tied financially to equipment, chemical, seed producer, and bankers (who all make more money today from providing credit than from actual sales)
7. Dust and Depression
-
Key example of genocidal food policy = Stalin’s Five Year Plans— 4 key elements (Graziosi)
1) Policy executed with goal of breaking peasantry
2) Famine was not intentional, but actively manipulated once it began
3) Hunger used as form of punishment and terror
4) Policy → genocidal in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, vs Kazakh nonads
- Beginning of trend of food being used as internal weapon vs rebellious citizens (Sen): in a series of famines from 1940 on, food availability had no correlation with onset of famine— but political freedom did
- Limited democracy in America may have been critical to preventing more widespread hunger here
- Plight of Plains farmers in 1920s: Dust Bowl (really from return to normal weather after unusual rain, not the converse), Great Depression → farms failing widely
- Policy response to support income → paid farmers to reduce acreage, stop planting once certain production levels hit (set price floors to replicate economy of when population increase outstripped production)
- Also funded programs to improve farming techniques, some soil conservation— but still not addressing root problems (no pun intended!)
- New Deal disproportionately excluded people of color from govt protections
- CA → grows half of America’s fruits and veggies, largest dairy-producer— all dependent on irrigation
- Profitable crops like stone fruit, nuts, vegetables = labor intensive → depend on exploitation of seasonal migrants
- Bracero Program = agreement btw MX and US to enable this— no protection for workers, continued (illegally) once program expired
- Diversity of crops in the state → more difficult to mechanize, and also to distribute… enter:
8. Food and the Brand
- Surpluses of cattle → rise of the burger and cheese as products was somewhat inevitable
- Industry’s response to excess supply = imaginative marketing campaigns for dairy touting necessity and health benefits (untrue ones), making more cheese when surplus remained
- Kraft → invention of American “cheese,” going well with the burger— but still needed..
- Ketchup: originally British attempt to replicate Asian fish sauces, became American way to use up unusable parts of tomato, often full of chemical preservatives
- Heinz teamed up with Teddy R to try to ban use of these chemicals and take over the ketchup scene (made his ketchup preservative-free by adding tons of sugar) → didn’t quite get them banned, but got law passed requiring all ingredients to be listed → his ketchup dominated
- Rise of ultra-processed foods, canning, freezers and refrigeration, supermarkets
9. Vitamania and “the Farm Problem”
- Reductionist view of nutrition overlooks the fact that brown rice > white rice + thiamine
- Vitamin craze lasts to this day: fortified foods, pills
- Supported by govt regulation, big ag & food corporations marketed white bread as pure, added vitamins to compensate for nutritional defects
- American soldiers during WWII uniquely well fed vs others, and esp in context of famines across other regions
- Interdependence of farming and fossil fuels (tractors, transport, processing) → dominance of petrofood industry
- Shift from diversity open-pollinated plants to use of few varieties of hybrid seeds (esp with corn), which had to be repurchased each season → drove commercialization of farms even further
- Hybrids much less resilient, not adaptive to environment, but more productive
- Lead to super-surpluses of grains, getting rid of which = “the farm problem”
- Used for political ends to support market development through Marshall Plan, etc. to open export markets (enabling “dumping”) and further promote surplus production
10. Soy, Chicken, and Cholesterol
- Soy = nitrogen-fixing, nutritious, potential to contribute to world health if grown sustainably, but instead used as animal feed
- Post WWII → true mass production of animals, led by chicken: 1/2 all arable land in 1970s America planted with grain to feed animals
- Until then, chickens (despite having best conversion ratio of land animals for feed → meat) mainly used for eggs
- Integration of chicken-producing process under Jewell, Tyson; efficiency enabled by use of antibiotics, converted chickens into marketable products— paragon = McNugget (story intersects here with culture and gender roles at the time)
- Skyrocketing fast food industry masqueraded as “ec development for minority neighborhoods,” actually govt subsidies for fast food companies (and in turn, Big Ag)
- Didn’t benefit cities or minorities at all (kept teenagers exempt from min wage, terrible nutritionally)
- In parallel, rise of ultra-processed snack foods, capitalizing on cravings for salt, sugar, and fat
- Completely enabled by USDA: didn’t set any upper limits on recommendations, ignored sugar entirely
- Epidemic of CV disease from atherosclerosis
- Despite challenges of studies (can’t do RCTs with food), eventual connections with LDL, HDL, kinds of fats, etc. revealed
11. Force-Feeding Junk
- Business + govt continued to invent terrible uses for the best farmland in the world: producing corn to make ethanol (terrible inefficient); HFCS industry
- Intentional ignorance of role of sugar in CHD, putting all blame on fat
- Marketing initiatives → shift from breastfeeding to formula, not just in America, despite all the reasons this is stupid
- Advertising directed at children → cheaper— selling kids imaginary friends like Tony the Tiger
11. The So-Called Green Revolution
- Complexity around egalitarian rhetoric of West and East re: food sovereignty:
- Mao → collectivization gives land, tools, livestock to peasants without rent payments… but then forced urban migration leading to mass famine
- US → pushed industrial ag onto developing countries, but only offered machines, chemicals, and seeds, not actual aid in returning to pre-colonial food-producing autonomy
- Was the Green Revolution (new high-yielding seeds, fertilizers, pesticides) really that great? Short answer… no.
- Did not end hunger— increased yields, but not all as a result of GR, and when it was (ex. more wheat), at the expense of more nutritious crops
- Remains PR spin for American ag industry to sell its products
- Biggest drop in hunger = China, where there was no GR, mainly bc biggest ever decline in poverty
- Who knows how sustainable agriculture would be doing today if America had backed it like they did industrial methods? Even with far fewer resources today, small/poor farmers produce most of world’s food
- By 1980s, big farms, supermarkets, fast food and the like expanded as small businesses closed; exploitative trade of surplus grain and products like HFCS out of country (ex. MX) → huge cost to environment, public health, livelihoods of farmers
- Pesticides ← → genetically-modified seeds: both a massive disappointment, the former leading to cancer & environmental wreckage
Part III: Change
13. The Resistance
- Advocates of returning to “biodynamic” methods
- Rachel Carson vs DDT
- Advocates for black farmers, against hunger (Black Panthers)
- USDA finally started releasing guidelines & trying (reductionist-ly) to ID dangerous elements of diet; language heavily influenced by industry to just address saturated fat, ignoring sugar..
- Very weak regulations around health claims
- “Organic” codified in most narrow way possible, includes monocultures → another PR tool for Big Ag
14. Where We’re At
- Agriculture → huge impact on climate for all the reasons (incl things like land use for growing corn for ethanol, food waste at many points in supply chain)
- What does climate crisis mean for agriculture? Changes to climate (hotter, more rain when it does rain), freshwater shortages, changes to atmospheric composition affecting photosynthesis
- Marriage of monoculture + industrial agriculture at the heart of many issues…
- Chronic diseases from poor diet, via fast food, supermarkets, advertising; disproportionately affecting the poor
- Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) → unethical to animals, awful labor conditions, produce tons of waste, essentially unregulated by govt, antibiotic crisis
- Industrial fishing = similarly inefficient, wasteful, indiscriminate
- Aquaculture also inefficient (farmed tuna has even worse conversion ratio than beef)
- Labor in all food-related industries is exploitative, especially brutal on farms (mostly done by immigrants)
15. The Way Forward
- Agroecology = “producing food in harmony with nature and its inhabitants”
- Involves more ecological agricultural techniques as well as political/multicultural pluralist movements toward social justice
- Development of such a system = 1) cut back on industrial methods like toxic chemicals and fertilizers, 2) replace with alternative techniques like compost, cover crops, etc., 3) shorten supply chain, 4) make food system sustainable and equitable for all
- Change happens in small ways:
- Urban gardens won’t replace rural farms, but can bring understanding of food systems to urban eaters, brings fresh food to communities lacking it, distributes power
- More transparent labeling and regulation around advertising ultra-processed foods, implementing things like a soda tax (starting to happen abroad)
- Integrating food/meals into education
- Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) → use from-the-farm waste derived from cow manure as fertilizer
- New certifications like Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) to guide purchasers (in many cities now, including Cincy)
- More about scaling these sorts of programs out rather than up, replicating small and medium scale systems around the world
Conclusion: We Are All Eaters
- Technology certainly has a role in revolutionizing our food system, but cannot alone fix flawed relship between food, people, and the planet
- Change cannot just be driven from eaters & consumer choice— must involve the industry, policy
- Need both technology and ecology, systemic and individual, macro and micro change
(Selected) Selected Readings
- Wendell Berry— The Unsettling of America
- Jahi Chappell— Beginning to End Hunger
- Bruce Kraig— A Rich and Fertile Land