Slow Food Nation

[Guest guest]

It turns out that Jean Anthèlme Brillat-Savarin was right in 1825

when he wrote in his magnum opus, The Physiology of Taste, that " the

destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed. " If

you think this aphorism exaggerates the importance of food, consider

that today almost 4 billion people worldwide depend on the

agricultural sector for their livelihood. Food is destiny, all right;

every decision we make about food has personal and global

repercussions. By now it is generally conceded that the food we eat

could actually be making us sick, but we still haven't acknowledged

the full consequences -- environmental, political, cultural, social

and ethical -- of our national diet.

 

These consequences include soil depletion, water and air pollution,

the loss of family farms and rural communities, and even global

warming. (Inconveniently, Al Gore's otherwise invaluable documentary

An Inconvenient Truth has disappointingly little to say about how

industrial food contributes to climate change.) When we pledge our

dietary allegiance to a fast-food nation, there are also grave

consequences to the health of our civil society and our national

character. When we eat fast-food meals alone in our cars, we swallow

the values and assumptions of the corporations that manufacture them.

According to these values, eating is no more important than fueling

up, and should be done quickly and anonymously. Since food will

always be cheap, and resources abundant, it's OK to waste. Feedlot

beef, french fries and Coke are actually good for you. It doesn't

matter where food comes from, or how fresh it is, because

standardized consistency is more important than diversified quality.

Finally, hard work -- work that requires concentration, application

and honesty, such as cooking for your family -- is seen as drudgery,

of no commercial value and to be avoided at all costs. There are more

important things to do.

 

It's no wonder our national attention span is so short: We get

hammered with the message that everything in our lives should be

fast, cheap and easy -- especially food. So conditioned are we to

believe that food should be almost free that even the rich, who pay a

tinier fraction of their incomes for food than has ever been paid

before in human history, grumble at the price of an organic peach --

a peach grown for flavor and picked, perfectly ripe, by a local

farmer who is taking care of the land and paying his workers a fair

wage! And yet, as the writer and farmer David Mas Masumoto recently

pointed out, pound for pound, peaches that good still cost less than

Twinkies. When we claim that eating well is an elitist preoccupation,

we create a smokescreen that obscures the fundamental role our food

decisions have in shaping the world. The reason that eating well in

this country costs more than eating poorly is that we have a set of

agricultural policies that subsidize fast food and make fresh,

wholesome foods, which receive no government support, seem expensive.

Organic foods seem elitist only because industrial food is

artificially cheap, with its real costs being charged to the public

purse, the public health and the environment.

 

The contributors to this forum have been asked to name just one thing

that could be done to fix the food system. What they propose are

solutions that arise out of what I think of as " slow food values, "

which run counter to the assumptions of fast-food marketing. To me,

these are the values of the family meal, which teaches us, among

other things, that the pleasures of the table are a social as well as

a private good. At the table we learn moderation, conversation,

tolerance, generosity and conviviality; these are civic virtues. The

pleasures of the table also beget responsibilities -- to one another,

to the animals we eat, to the land and to the people who work it. It

follows that food that is healthy in every way will cost us more, in

time and money, than we pay now. But when we have learned what the

real costs of food are, and relearned the real rewards of eating, we

will have laid a foundation for not just a healthier food system but

a healthier twenty-first-century democracy. -- Alice Waters

 

Michael Pollan

 

Every five years or so the President of the United States signs an

obscure piece of legislation that determines what happens on a couple

of hundred million acres of private land in America, what sort of

food Americans eat (and how much it costs) and, as a result, the

health of our population. In a nation consecrated to the idea of

private property and free enterprise, you would not think any piece

of legislation could have such far-reaching effects, especially one

about which so few of us -- even the most politically aware -- know

anything. But in fact the American food system is a game played

according to a precise set of rules that are written by the federal

government with virtually no input from anyone beyond a handful of

farm-state legislators. Nothing could do more to reform America's

food system -- and by doing so improve the condition of America's

environment and public health -- than if the rest of us were suddenly

to weigh in.

 

The farm bill determines what our kids eat for lunch in school every

day. Right now, the school lunch program is designed not around the

goal of children's health but to help dispose of surplus agricultural

commodities, especially cheap feedlot beef and dairy products, both

high in fat.

 

The farm bill writes the regulatory rules governing the production of

meat in this country, determining whether the meat we eat comes from

sprawling, brutal, polluting factory farms and the big four

meatpackers (which control 80 percent of the market) or from local

farms.

 

Most important, the farm bill determines what crops the government

will support -- and in turn what kinds of foods will be plentiful and

cheap. Today that means, by and large, corn and soybeans. These two

crops are the building blocks of the fast-food nation: A McDonald's

meal (and most of the processed food in your supermarket) consists of

clever arrangements of corn and soybeans -- the corn providing the

added sugars, the soy providing the added fat, and both providing the

feed for the animals. These crop subsidies (which are designed to

encourage overproduction rather than to help farmers by supporting

prices) are the reason that the cheapest calories in an American

supermarket are precisely the unhealthiest. An American shopping for

food on a budget soon discovers that a dollar buys hundreds more

calories in the snack food or soda aisle than it does in the produce

section. Why? Because the farm bill supports the growing of corn but

not the growing of fresh carrots. In the midst of a national epidemic

of diabetes and obesity our government is, in effect, subsidizing the

production of high-fructose corn syrup.

 

This absurdity would not persist if more voters realized that the

farm bill is not a parochial piece of legislation concerning only the

interests of farmers. Today, because so few of us realize we have a

dog in this fight, our legislators feel free to leave deliberations

over the farm bill to the farm states, very often trading away their

votes on agricultural policy for votes on issues that matter more to

their constituents. But what could matter more than the health of our

children and the health of our land?

 

Perhaps the problem begins with the fact that this legislation is

commonly called " the farm bill " -- how many people these days even

know a farmer or care about agriculture? Yet we all eat. So perhaps

that's where we should start, now that the debate over the 2007 farm

bill is about to be joined. This time around let's call it " the food

bill " and put our legislators on notice that this is about us and

we're paying attention.

 

Peter Singer

 

There is one very simple thing that everyone can do to fix the food

system. Don't buy factory-farm products.

 

Once, the animals we raised went out and gathered things we could not

or would not eat. Cows ate grass, chickens pecked at worms or seeds.

Now the animals are brought together and we grow food for them. We

use synthetic fertilizers and oil-powered tractors to grow corn or

soybeans. Then we truck it to the animals so they can eat it.

 

When we feed grains and soybeans to animals, we lose most of their

nutritional value. The animals use it to keep their bodies warm and

to develop bones and other body parts that we cannot eat. Pig farms

use six pounds of grain for every pound of boneless meat we get from

them. For cattle in feedlots, the ratio is 13:1. Even for chickens,

the least inefficient factory-farmed meat, the ratio is 3:1.

 

Most Americans think the best thing they could do to cut their

personal contributions to global warming is to swap their family car

for a fuel-efficient hybrid like the Toyota Prius. Gidon Eshel and

Pamela Martin of the University of Chicago have calculated that

typical meat-eating Americans would reduce their emissions even more

if they switched to a vegan diet. Factory farming is not sustainable.

It is also the biggest system of cruelty to animals ever devised. In

the United States alone, every year nearly 10 billion animals live

out their entire lives confined indoors. Hens are jammed into wire

cages, five or six of them in a space that would be too small for

even one hen to be able to spread her wings. Twenty thousand chickens

are raised in a single shed, completely covering its floor. Pregnant

sows are kept in crates too narrow for them to turn around, and too

small for them to walk a few steps. Veal calves are similarly

confined, and deliberately kept anemic.

 

This is not an ethically defensible system of food production. But in

the United States -- unlike in Europe -- the political process seems

powerless to constrain it. The best way to fight back is to stop

buying its products. Going vegetarian is a good option, and going

vegan, better still. But if you continue to eat animal products, at

least boycott factory farms.

 

Winona LaDuke

 

It's Manoominike Giizis, or the Wild Rice Making Moon, here on the

White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota. The sound of a canoe

moving through the wild rice beds on the Crow Wing or Rice lakes, the

sound of laughter, the smell of wood-parched wild rice and the sound

of a traditional drum at the celebration for the wild rice harvest

links a traditional Anishinaabeg or Ojibwe people to a thousand years

of culture and the ecosystem of a lake in a new millennium. This

cultural relationship to food -- manoomin, or wild rice -- represents

an essential part of what we need to do to repair the food system: We

need to recover relationship.

 

Wild rice is the only North American grain, and today the Ojibwe are

in a pitched battle to keep it from getting genetically engineered

and patented. A similar battle is under way in Hawaii between Native

Hawaiians and the University of Hawaii, which recently agreed to tear

up patents on taro, a food sacred to Native Hawaiians. At one

point " agriculture " was about the culture of food. Losing that

culture -- in favor of an American cultural monocrop, joined with an

agricultural monocrop -- puts us in a perilous state, threatening

sustainability and our relationship to the natural world.

 

In the Ojibwe struggle to " keep it wild, " we have found ourselves in

an international movement of Slow Food and food sovereignty activists

and communities who are seeking the same -- the recovery or

sustaining of relationship as a basic element of our humanity and as

a critical strategy. In the Wild Rice Making Moon of the North

Country, we will continue our traditions, and we will look across our

lakes to the rice farmers of the rest of the world, to the taro

farmers of the Pacific and to other communities working to protect

their seeds for future generations, and we will know that this is how

we insure that those generations will have what they need to be

human, to be Anishinaabeg.

 

Vandana Shiva

 

Humanity has eaten more than 80,000 plant species through its

evolution. More than 3,000 have been used consistently. However, we

now rely on just eight crops to provide 75 percent of the world's

food. With genetic engineering, production has narrowed to three

crops: corn, soya, canola. Monocultures are destroying biodiversity,

our health and the quality and diversity of food.

 

In 1998 India's indigenous edible oils made from mustard, coconut,

sesame, linseed and groundnut processed in artisanal cold-press mills

were banned, using " food safety " as an excuse. The restrictions on

import of soya oil were simultaneously removed. Ten million farmers'

livelihoods were threatened. One million oil mills in villages were

closed. And millions of tons of artificially cheap GMO soya oil

continue to be dumped on India. Women from the slums of Delhi came

out in a movement to reject soya and bring back mustard oil. " Sarson

bachao, soyabean bhagao " (save the mustard, drive away the soyabean)

was the women's call from the streets of Delhi. We did succeed in

bringing back mustard through our " sarson satyagraha " (non-

cooperation with the ban on mustard oil).

 

I was recently in the Amazon, where the same companies that dumped

soya on India -- Cargill and ADM -- are destroying the Amazon to grow

soya. Millions of acres of the Amazon rainforest -- the lung, liver

and heart of the global climate system -- are being burned to grow

soya for export. Cargill has built an illegal port at Santarém in

Brazil and is driving the expansion of soya in the Amazon rainforest.

Armed gangs take over the forest and use slaves to cultivate soya.

When people like Sister Dorothy Stang oppose the destruction of the

forests and the violence against people, they are assassinated.

 

People in Brazil and India are being threatened to promote a

monoculture that benefits agribusiness. A billion people are without

food because industrial monocultures robbed them of their livelihoods

in agriculture and their food entitlements. Another 1.7 billion are

suffering from obesity and food-related diseases. Monocultures lead

to malnutrition -- for those who are underfed as well as those who

are overfed. In depending on monocultures, the food system is being

made increasingly dependent on fossil fuels -- for synthetic

fertilizers, for running giant machinery and for long-distance

transport, which adds " food miles. "

 

Moving beyond monocultures has become an imperative for repairing the

food system. Biodiverse small farms have higher productivity and

generate higher incomes for farmers. And biodiverse diets provide

more nutrition and better taste. Bringing back biodiversity to our

farms goes hand in hand with bringing back small farmers on the land.

Corporate control thrives on monocultures. Citizens' food freedom

depends on biodiversity.

 

Jim Hightower

 

In the very short span of about fifty years, we've allowed our

politicians to do something remarkably stupid: turn America's food-

policy decisions over to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and economists.

These are people who could not run a watermelon stand if we gave them

the melons and had the Highway Patrol flag down the customers for

them -- yet, they have taken charge of the decisions that direct

everything from how and where food is grown to what our children eat

in school.

 

As a result, America's food system (and much of the world's) has been

industrialized, conglomeratized and globalized. This is food we're

talking about, not widgets! Food, by its very nature, is meant to be

agrarian, small-scale and local.

 

But the Powers That Be have turned the production of our edibles away

from the high art of cooperating with nature into a high-cost system

of always trying to overwhelm nature. They actually torture food --

applying massive doses of pesticides, sex hormones, antibiotics,

genetically manipulated organisms, artificial flavorings and color,

chemical preservatives, ripening gas, irradiation...and so awfully

much more. The attitude of agribusiness is that if brute force isn't

working, you're probably just not using enough of it.

 

More fundamentally, these short-cut con artists have perverted the

very concept of food. Rather than being both a process and product

that nurtures us (in body and spirit) and nurtures our communities,

food is approached by agribusiness as just another commodity that has

no higher purpose than to fatten corporate profits.

 

There's our challenge. It's not a particular policy or agency that

must be changed but the most basic attitude of policy-makers. And the

only way we're going to get that done is for you and me to become the

policy-makers, taking charge of every aspect of our food system --

from farm to fork.

 

The good news is that this " good food " movement is already well under

way and gaining strength every day. It receives little media

coverage, but consumers in practically every city, town and

neighborhood across America are reconnecting with local farmers and

artisans to de-industrialize, de-conglomeratize, de-globalize -- de-

Wal-Martize -- their food systems.

 

Of course, the Powers That Be sneer at these efforts, saying they

can't succeed. But, as a friend of mine who is one of the successful

pioneers in this burgeoning movement puts it: " Those who say it can't

be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. "

 

Look around wherever you are and you'll find local farmers,

consumers, chefs, marketers, gardeners, environmentalists, workers,

churches, co-ops, community organizers and just plain folks who are

doing it. These are the Powers That Ought to Be -- and I think they

will be. Join them!

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/41131/

 

Alice Waters is the founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant and director

of the Chez Panisse Foundation in Berkeley, California.