Food Values

Maybe I should take it as an omen that the draft I began and hoped to post yesterday disappeared, but I want to continue with ideas from Diet for A Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappe, who excitedly wrote about the food revolution she saw emerging in the early 1990's. I was busy with children and college, so I don't recall any great food revolution, and I'm not entirely convinced that the revolution grew or was sustained. I think for there to be a true food revolution, we Americans will have to rethink our values surrounding food.

For example, it seems that Americans, in general, don't want to spend a lot for food--we don't value food and farmers (not agribusinesses, but farmers). Americans, in general, want to spend money on things, maybe because they are tangible and food is gone once it's consumed. Hans Herren, president and CEO of Millenium Institute, spoke of "cheap food" during the Washington Post Live: The Future of Food Conference earlier this month. Follow the link to see video clips of speakers and panels. I quote Herren, whose institute's mission is to manage economy, environment, and sustainability for the benefit of all: "This idea that it's a God-given right for cheap food has to go. ... We have to produce more foods in different places, by different people. We have to deal with externalities which will take political courage, which I haven't seen here today."

The externalities he speaks of are the hidden costs to individual health and the environment, and access to food. I couldn't agree more with his entire statement. It will take courage and a re-vision of our values. It will take what Lappe calls citizen democracy, which she says is values-driven problem solving and empowerment through action, our action.

"Thus, citizen democracy is not about learning to give up one's interests for the sake of others. It is about learning to see one's self-interests embedded in others' interests." (Lappe xxxv)

I think that everyone could agree clean water, access to good food, food safety, a healthy environment, and a decent wage are in everyone's interest. Apply that to food and food production, and we can see that producing food in a way that protects the integrity of the environment and the food itself, as well as protecting those who grow, harvest, and eat that food, is also in everyone's best interest.

Believe me, I haven't--and may never--reach the point where my values around food keep me from buying coffee and wine, flour (though looking at farm subsidies in Alabama, it seems we grow wheat in the state), lemons, and the occasional exotic ingredient. But I can say with all honesty that my "food values" continue to evolve, and I'm willing to invest my dollars and cents toward those values.

When my children were growing up, I spent money on good foods--fruits, milk, vegetables, grains. There wasn't a lot of money to spend, and snack food, trips to McDonald's, sweetened cereals, and pop were rare treats. Ask them; these items were so rare, the girls say they were "deprived" of them. I've always believed in spending money on healthy food first and everything else second.

About six years ago after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, I began to see that industrial farming wasn't good for me, and it wasn't good for nature (include the environment and the animals that wound up on my plate). I quit eating meat, and I bought eggs at Dayspring because they came from a small farm in Tallapoosa County.

The next "stage of evolution" happened gradually as I learned about agribusiness (Monsanto, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland, and their ilk) and how their practices endangered the environment, people's health, and access to food by patenting and controlling the seed used for growing food. I learned about Randle Farms in Auburn two to three years ago, and I began participating in the farm's Consumer Supported Agriculture. Randle Farms patterns its practices after Polyface Farms, which is featured in The Omnivore's Dilemma. I liked that I was able to find a source of vegetables, fruits, eggs, and meat that was produced with respect to the animal and the land AND that supported a local farming family, not agribusiness. It is a little more expensive, and I'm fortunate that I can participate in the CSA. Perhaps more people would be able to access good, healthy, local food if farm subsidies didn't go almost exclusively to commodity crops (which are among the first crops to be genetically engineered).

Now, Anthony and I are trying to grow some of our own food. The garden is looking good so far. Beets can be harvested in just a few days and potatoes in a week or two; we've already been picking tomatoes. I'm eyeing a patch of soil to start asparagus next year because I love asparagus, but I just can't buy something that is shipped from Peru, produced by God-knows-what methods, when I know it can be grown in my region.

My little family alone isn't going to solve all the issues associated with industrial vs. sustainable food production, but that won't stop us from doing our part. As our oldest daughter says, "If everyone would quit saying they can't change everything and just DO something, things would change."

Of Reading and Relationship

I haven't been able to write for more than a week, and in that time I've read and listened to more news about the destructive practices of Monsanto, the projected consequences of the demise of honeybees, and more calls for increased organic food production practices. So much to write about, so little time to prepare and write! That will change soon.

Those will be future topics, but today I'll share a bit about a book I recently began reading Diet for a Small Planet, a book I had heard about from Audobon Magazine's list of the top ten must-reads in food writing. After reading the first chapter, I knew I had to share what I was reading. Despite being published initially 40 years ago, and last published 20 years ago in an anniversary edition, the book continues to connect with issues and problems that concerns us about food today. The author, Frances Moore Lappe, makes two initial statements in her introductory pages: first, "There is no away. ...everything is connected" (xli); second, "we are defined by relationships" (xxix); and third, "...but for me, the issue of Diet for a Small Planet is about abundance, not scarcity. The issue is how we use that abundance" (12).

I'll keep coming back to these ideas as I talk about her book and in future posts related to this and other topics. When she wrote "there is no away," she was talking about the falsity of thinking that we can produce nuclear waste, for example, and put the radioactive waste away somewhere--there is no place to put it away safely with 100 percent confidence.

To broaden that idea, we cannot escape the consequences of our actions, not in our personal relationships, not in our relationship to the growing and tampering of our food. Policy can push farmers into producing more and more crops to the detriment of the soil, and we cannot escape the infertility and erosion of that soil brought about by unsustainable farming practices. Just as the decision to tamper with nature and evolution in force feeding cattle grain and antibiotics has led to the consequence of antibiotic resistance in strains of staph that now infects much of our commercially grown meat and the subsequent evolution of "super bugs," both of which have health consequences for consumers as well as the animals produced for food. Or consider in the same light the policies and health issues surrounding the "deconstruction" of corn to make high fructose corn syrup. Type 2 diabetes should come to mind as the natural consequence, not to mention the problems associated with Monsanto and genetically modified crops (of which corn tops that list).

And what of relationship? Somewhere man began to see himself as ruler over nature, superior to nature. There has been a blurring of the relationships between man, animal, and the earth--water, air, and soil, and all its creatures. Are we, collectively, thinking we can use and abuse these relationships yet still be smart enough, or science will be good enough, to make the subsequent problems go away? What of our relationships to other human beings and their ability to feed themselves? There are any number of cases we can find where corporations and countries have taken over farmland from independent farmers to produce food for export and reducing a country's ability to feed itself. Haiti should come to mind.

Joe Collins and Frances Moore Lappe founded The Institute for Food and Development Policy to address issues around hunger and the injustices that cause hunger. Follow the links and look around; you'll find news that won't appear on Fox News, or likely any other news network. This Food First link will connect you to the Institute's blog. When Lappe began looking into issues of hunger decades ago, she felt a responsibility to do something about and so joined forces with her co-author from another book, Collins, to create the institute and make a difference. Not everyone can make a difference in that way, but I think that by being more knowledgeable about how food gets to our table, and by voting with our consumer power, we can all make a difference collectively.