What's in a name?

Another topic we've looked at this week has been organic food. In his quest to trace an organic meal to its source in Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan discovers that the line between industrial and organic agriculture has been blurred; large scale organic production has come to mimic the modes of conventional production while staking a claim on the soul of organic. What started as a much larger philosophy of living in the 1960s has been reduced down in many cases to nothing more than input substitution: natural instead of chemical fertilizers and pest and weed control (where what is considered "natural" may not be any better than its conventional counterpart).

For those who are die-hard organic consumers, this information is probably not new to them. So why do they continue buying organics? And why do those who know relatively little about organics buy them in the first place? A big reason is concern over pesticide residue in food. Research has found that although some organic foods can still end up with pesticide residue from cross-contamination or other sources, far fewer organic foods have such residue and those that do have far less of it than their conventional counterparts. Of course, concern for the environment is also a big reason. Pollan notes that despite the contradiction inherent in the term "industrial organics," Earthbound Organic alone has kept 270,000 pounds of pesticides and 8 million pounds of petrochemical fertilizer from being applied to 25,000 acres in California.

A major point that we didn't have time to address is class is that, as with the points I raised in my last post about industrial meat production, perhaps the most important concern of all is a mistrust of companies who wield a great deal of power and profit the most from conventional methods of production. I will write about this more in future posts, as it's a theme we will revisit again and again throughout the semester, but one that warrants at least brief mention now as well.

The Meat of the Matter

This week we've covered a lot of ground regarding conventional and alternative modes of agricultural production. First we read from Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation about meat production in chapters that took us from a South Dakota cattle ranch, to a Colorado feedlot, to one of the country's largest slaughterhouses. The questions these readings raised for students centered around gains and costs of efficiency-centered food production, whether people are willing to pay more for sustainably-produced food (and what that term means to begin with), where responsibility lies (with consumers, producers, the government, or elsewhere), and whether technology will provide solutions to whatever problems arise out of our current system.

The discussion that ensued in class was lively and class was over before we could address all of the questions students raised. My main response to the reading and the discussion that followed is that the purpose of these readings--and my intention for the course overall--is to have us take a step back from our role as individuals and look at the larger social structure within which we carry out our daily lives. In this particular context, we're talking about food, but the questions we raise can be (and no doubt have been) adapted to almost any situation. What is the role of the individual consumer in our food system? How are our food choices shaped by that system, and how do we in turn shape it when we buy food? It is impossible to isolate and examine any single actor or component without looking at the larger social context within which it is operating. This no doubt complicates things and makes it harder to come to simple conclusions, but these are complex issues and have no easy answers.

The readings by Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser are meant to raise concerns about the externalities that arise out of a singular focus on efficiency, concentration and consolidation within the food system, and our increasing reliance on technology to solve social problems. Particularly with the latter two, a serious implication of these situations is that we centralize power into the hands of the few and rely on others far removed from ourselves to act in our best interests. How's that going for us so far? Clearly, it depends on who you ask. One of the things I love most about teaching is learning from the variety of responses to questions such as these.

Where it all (or at least over a quarter of it) begins

One of the purposes of this class is to recognize the disconnect that exists in most peoples' minds between the food we eat and where it comes from. This week we begin bridging that disconnect by looking at where it all starts: the modern American farm. We're reading the first three chapters of Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma, which highlight the centrality of corn in our industrial food system. As Pollan notes, with few exceptions, "every edible item in the supermarket is a link in a food chain that begins with a particular plant growing in a specific patch of soil" (p. 17). For over a quarter of those items, the first link in that chain is a corn field in the American Midwest. In addition to being a primary source of feed for industrial meat (the consequences of which we cover later this week), it's in most of the unpronounceable items on processed food ingredient lists and, of course, in ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup, which appears in everything from bread to pasta sauce to breakfast cereal. Perhaps even more surprising are the non-food items that contain corn, including (among many others) cosmetics, disposable diapers, trash bags, batteries--even the coating that gives glossy magazine covers their shine.

Pollan's point is that all of these uses for corn have been invented to provide an outlet for the corn surpluses that have arisen out of agricultural policies from the 1960s to the present. In a nutshell, the structure of corn subsidies encourages farmers to grow more and more corn, even though the market price of corn is lower than the cost of growing it. Such intensive corn production requires dependence on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and other inputs that are costly to both farmers and the environment. While farmers operate at increasingly narrower profit margins, corporations that sell them inputs and buy, process, and distribute their raw output benefit the most financially. In terms of the environment, one of the most egregious effects of this system of production is the Gulf of Mexico's hypoxic dead zone, which is a result of run-off from agriculture and other sources into the Mississippi River. (For a good overview, see the National Geographic story "Fish Free Zone" here.)

The following pictures provide a visual overview of the processes that Michael Pollan writes about in the three chapters summarized above:

An Iowa corn field:

A grain elevator (photo courtesy of New York Times):

Corn leaving a grain elevator by rail (courtesy of Iowa Department of Transportation):