Quotes about Food supply

I N T RODUCTION

OUR NATIONAL EATING DISORDERSR

What should we have for dinner?

This book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly simple question. Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a simple question could ever have gotten so complicated. As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety. Somehow this most elemental of activities—figuring out what to eat—has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

For me the absurdity of the situation became inescapable in the fall of 2002, when one of the most ancient and venerable staples of human life abruptly disappeared from the American dinner table. I’m talking of course about bread. Virtually overnight, Americans changed the way the way they eat. A collective spasm of what can only be described as carbophobia seized the country, supplanting an era of national lipophobia dating to the Carter administration. The latter was when, in 1977, a Senate committee had issued a set of “dietary goals” warning beefloving Americans to lay off the red meat. And so we dutifully had, until now.

What set off the sea change? It appears to have been a perfect media storm of diet books, scientific studies, and one timely magazine article.  The new diet books, many of them inspired by the formerly discredited Dr. Robert C. Atkins, brought Americans the welcome news that they could eat more meat and lose weight just so long as they laid off the bread and pasta. These high-protein, low-carb diets found support in a handful of new epidemiological studies suggesting that the nutritional orthodoxy that had held sway in America since the 1970s might be wrong. It was not, as official opinion claimed, fat that made us fat, but the carbohydrates we’d been eating precisely in order to stay slim. So conditions were ripe for a swing of the dietary pendulum when, in the summer of 2002, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story on the new research entitled “What if Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat?”  Within months, supermarket shelves were restocked and menus rewritten to reflect the new nutritional wisdom.  The blamelessness of steak restored, two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to man—bread and pasta—acquired a moral stain that promptly bankrupted dozens of bakeries and noodle firms and ruined an untold number of perfectly good meals.

So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation’s “dietary goals”—or, for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the “food pyramid.” A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars or food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with

medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat.

Nor would such a culture be shocked to discover that there are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and, lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are.  We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

Another theme, or premise really, is that the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world. Daily, our eating turns nature into culture, transforming the body of the world into our bodies and minds. Agriculture has done more to reshape the natural world than anything else we humans do, both its landscapes and the composition of its flora and fauna. Our eating also constitutes a relationship with dozens of other species—plants, animals, and fungi— with which we have coevolved to the point where our fates are deeply entwined. Many of these species have evolved expressly to gratify our desires, in the intricate dance of domestication that has allowed us and them to prosper together as we could never have prospered apart.  But our relationships with the wild species we eat—from the mushrooms we pick in the forest to the yeasts that leaven our bread—are no less compelling, and far more mysterious. Eating puts us in touch with all that we share with the other animals, and all that sets us apart. It defines us.

What is perhaps most troubling, and sad, about industrial eating is how thoroughly it obscures all these relationships and connections.  To go from the chicken (Gallus gallus) to the Chicken McNugget is to leave this world in a journey of forgetting that could hardly be more costly, not only in terms of the animal’s pain but in our pleasure, too. But forgetting, or not knowing in the first place, is what the industrial food chain is all about, the principal reason it is so opaque, for if we could see what lies on the far side of the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture, we would surely change the way we eat.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world—and what is to become of it.  To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound

like a burden, but in practice few things in life afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world: this book is probably not for them; there are things in it that will ruin their appetite. But in the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kind of pleasures that are only deepened by knowing.

Beginning in the fifties and sixties, the flood tide of cheap corn made it profitable to fatten cattle on feedlots instead of on grass, and to raise chickens in giant factories rather than in farmyards.  Iowa livestock farmers couldn’t compete with the factory- farmed animals their own cheap corn had helped spawn, so the chickens and cattle disappeared from the farm. and with them the pastures and hay fields and fences.  In their place the farmers  planted more of the one crop they could grow more of than anything else:  corn.  And whenever the price of corn slipped they planted a little more of it, to cover expenses and stay even.  By the 1980s the diversified family farm was history in Iowa, and corn was king.

[Fritz Haber and the fixing of Nitrogen allowing synthetic fertilizer to be developed]

            Liberated from the old biological constraints. The farm could now be managed on industrial principles, as a factory transforming inputs of raw material – chemical fertilizer – into outputs of corn.  Since the farm no longer needs to generate and conserve its own fertility by maintaining a diversity of species, synthetic fertilizer opens the way to monoculture, allowing the farmer to bring the factory’s economies of scale and mechanical efficiency to nature.  If, as sometimes has been said, the discovery of agriculture represented the first fall of man from the state of nature, then the discovery of synthetic fertility is surely a second and precipitous fall.  Fixing nitrogen allowed the food chain to turn from the logic of biology and embrace the logic of industry.  Instead of eating exclusively from the sun, humanity now began to sip petroleum.

This biological absurdity, characteristic of all CAFO’s, is compounded in the cattle feed yard by a second absurdity.  Here animals exquisitely adapted by natural selection to live on grass must be adapted by us – at considerable cost to their health, to the health of the land, and ultimately to the health of their  eaters – to live on corn, for no other reason than it offers the cheapest calories around and because the great pile must be consumed.  This is why I decided to follow the trail of industrial corn through a single steer rather than, say, a chicken or a pig, which can get by just fine on a diet of grain:  The short, unhappy life of a corn-fed feedlot steer represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.

[Arrival at the CAFO – Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation for a cow]

            The feed mill’s pulsing din is the sound of two giant steel rollers turning against one another twelve hours a day, crushing steamed corn kernels into warm fragrant flakes.  (Flaking the corn makes it easier for cattle to digest it.)  This was the only feed ingredient I sampled, and it wasn’t half bad; not as crisp as Kellogg’s flake, but with a cornier flavor.  I passed on the other ingredients:  the liquefied fat (which on today’s menu is beef tallow, trucked in from one of the nearby slaughter-houses), and the protein supplement, a sticky brown goop consisting of molasses and urea.  The urea is a form of synthetic nitrogen made from natural gas, similar to the fertilizer spread on George Naylor’s [one of the people visited by the author to research this book] fields.

            Before being put on this highly concentrated diet, new arrivals to the feed yard are treated to a few days of fresh long-stemmed hay.  (They don’t eat on the long ride and can lose up to one hundred pounds, so their rumens need to be carefully restarted.)  Over the next several weeks they gradually step up to a daily ration of thirty-two pounds of feed, three quarters of which is corn – nearly half a bushel a day.

            What got corn onto the menu in this and almost every other American feedlot is price, of course, but also USDA policy, which for decades has sought to help move the mountain of surplus corn by passing as much of it as possible through the digestive tracts of food animals, who can convert it into protein.

            We’ve come to think of “corn-fed” as some kind of old-fashioned virtue, which it may well be when you’re referring to Midwestern children, but feeding large quantities of corn to cows for the greater part of their lives is a practice neither particularly old nor virtuous.  Its chief advantage is that cows fed corn, a compact source of caloric energy, get fat quickly; their flesh also marbles well, giving it a taste and texture American consumers have come to like.  Yet this corn-fed meat is demonstrably less healthy for us, since it contains more saturated fat and less omega-3 fatty acids than the meat of animals fed grass.  A growing body of evidence suggests that many of the health problems associated with eating beef are really problems with corn-fed beef.  (Modern-day-hunter-gatherers who subsist on wild meat don’t have our rates of heart disease.)  In the same way ruminants are ill adapted to eating corn,  humans in turn may be poorly adapted to eating ruminants that eat corn.

            Yet the USDA’s grading system has been designed to reward marbling (a more appealing term than “intramuscular fat,” which is what it is) and thus the feeding of corn to cattle.  Indeed, corn has become so deeply ingrained in the whole system of producing beef in America that whenever I raised any questions about it among ranchers or feedlot operators or animal scientists, people looked at me as if I’d just arrived from another planet.  (Or perhaps from Argentina, where excellent steaks are produced on nothing but grass.)

            The economic logic behind corn is unassailable, and on a factory farm there is no other kind.  Calories are calories, and corn is the cheapest, most convenient source of calories on the market.  Of course, it was the same industrial logic – protein is protein – that made feeding rendered cow parts back to cows seem like a sensible thing to do, until scientists figured out that this practice was spreading bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), most commonly known as mad cow disease.  Rendered bovine meat and bonemeal represented the cheapest, most convenient way of satisfying a cow’s protein requirement (never mind these animals were herbivores by evolution) and so appeared on the daily menus of Poky and most other feed yards until the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the practice in 1997.

... One of the most troubling things about factory farms is how cavalierly they flout these evolutionary rules, forcing animals to overcome deeply ingrained aversions.  We make them trade their instincts for antibiotics.

            Though the industrial logic that made feeding cattle to cattle seem like a good idea has been thrown into doubt by mad cow disease, I was surprised to learn it hadn’t been discarded.  The FDA ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants makes an exception for blood products and fat; my steer will probably dine on beef tallow recycled from the very slaughterhouse he’s headed to in June.  (“Fat is fat,” the feedlot manager shrugged, when I raised an eyebrow.)  Though Poky doesn’t do it, the rules still permit feedlots to feed nonruminant animal protein to ruminants.  Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding, feces, and discarded bits of feed) are accepted cattle feeds, as are chicken, fish, and pig meal.  Some public health experts worry that since the bovine meat and bonemeal that cows used to eat is now being fed to chickens, pigs, and fish, infectious prions could find their way back into cattle when they’re fed the proteins of the animals that have been eating them.

In fact, there are lots of good reasons to complicate your product – or, as the industry prefers to say, to “add value” to it.  Processing food can add months, even years, to its shelf life, allowing you to market globally.  Complicating your product also allows you to capture more of the money a consumer spends on food.  Of a dollar spent on a whole food such as eggs, $0.40 finds its way back to the farmer.  By comparison, George Naylor will see only $0.04 of every dollar spent on corn sweeteners; ADM and Coca-Cola and General Mills capture most of the rest.  (Every farmer I’d ever met eventually gets around to telling the story about the food industry executive who declared, “There’s money to be made in food, unless you’re trying to grow it.”)  When Tyson food scientists devised the chicken nugget in 1983, a cheap bulk commodity – chicken – overnight became a high-value-added product, and most of the money Americans spend on chicken moved from the farmer’s pocket to the processor’s.

Corn is not the only source of cheap energy in the supermarket – much of the fat added to processed foods comes from soybeans – but it is by far the most important.  As George Naylor said, growing corn is the most efficient way to get energy – calories – from an acre of Iowa farmland.  That corn-made calorie can find its way into our bodies in the form of an animal fat, a sugar, or a starch, such is the protean nature of carbon in that big kernel.  But as productive and protean as the corn plant is, finally it is a set of human choices that have made these molecules quite as cheap as they have become: a quarter of a century of farm policies designed to encourage the overproduction of this crop and hardly any other.  Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots.  While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

[Using a spectrometer to track the corn carbon]  ...Dawson and his colleague Stefania Mambelli prepared an analysis showing roughly how much of the carbon in the various McDonald’s menu items came from corn, and plotted them on a graph.  The sodas came out on top, not surprising since they consist of little else than corn sweetener, but virtually everything else we ate revealed a high proportion of corn, too.  In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal:  soda (100% corn), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).  What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater.  But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala.

... Corn’s triumph is the direct result of its overproduction, and that has been a disaster for the people who grow it.  Growing corn and nothing but corn has also exacted a toll on the farmer’s soil, the quality of the local water and the overall health of his community, the biodiversity of his landscape, and the health of all those creatures living on or downstream from it.  And not only those creatures, for cheap corn has also changed, and much for the worse, the lives of several billion food animals, animals that would not be living on factory farms if not for the ocean of corn on which these animal cities float.

...A one-pound box of prewashed lettuce contains 80 calories of food energy.  According to Cornell ecologist David Pimentel, growing, chilling, washing, packaging, and transporting that box of organic salad to a plate on the East Coast takes more than 4,600 calories of fossil fuel energy, or 57 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of food.  (These figures would be about 4% higher if the salad were grown conventionally.)

... This is one of the larger ironies of growing organic food in an industrial system:  It is even more precarious than a conventional industrial system.  But the federal rules say an organic chicken should have “access to the outdoors,” and Supermarket Pastoral imagines it, so Petaluma Poultry provides the doors and the yard and everyone keeps their fingers crossed.

            It would appear Petaluma’s farm managers have nothing to worry about.  Since the food and water and flock remain inside the shed, and since the little doors remain shut until the birds are at least five weeks old and well settled in their habits, the chickens apparently see no reason to venture out into what must seem to them an unfamiliar and terrifying world.  Since the birds are slaughtered at seven weeks, free range turns out to be not so much a lifestyle for these chickens as a two-week vacation option.

Studies show that organically grown crops produce more of the things (ascorbic acid, lycopenes, resveratrol, flavonols in general, etc) that our bodies need and also have less toxic residue.  Science is still catching up with this.  J. Agric. Food. Chem. Vol. 51, no. 5, 2003.

Obviously there is much more to be learned about the relationship of soil to plant, animals, and health, and it would be a mistake to lean too heavily on any one study.  It would also be a mistake to assume the word “organic” on a label automatically signifies healthfulness, especially when that label appears on heavily processed and long-distance foods that have probably had much of their nutritional value, not to mention flavor, beaten out of them long before they arrive on our tables.

            The better for what?  Question about my organic meal can of course be answered in a much less selfish way:  Is it better for the environment?  Better for the farmers who grew it?  Better for public health?  For the taxpayer?  The answer to all three questions is an (almost) unqualified yes.  To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmer’s bloodstream, no nitrogen run off or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written.  If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it extracted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain.

            And yet, and yet... an industrial organic meal such as mine does leave deep footprints on our world.  The lot of the workers who harvested the vegetables and gathered up Rosie for slaughter is not appreciably different from those on nonorganic factory farms.  The chickens lived only marginally better lives than their conventional counterparts; in the end a CAFO is a CAFO, whether the food served in it is organic or not.  As for the cows that produced the milk in our ice cream, they may well have spent time outdoors in an actual pasture (Stonyfield buys most – though not all – of its milk from small dairy farmers), but the organic label guarantees no such thing.  And while the organic farms I visited don’t receive direct government payments, they do receive other subsidies from taxpayers, notably subsidized water and electricity in California.  The two-hundred-thousand-square-foot refrigerated processing plant where my salad was washed pays half as much for its electricity as it would were Earthbound not classified as a “farm enterprise.”

            But perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as it’s conventional counterpart.  Asparagus traveling in a 747 from Argentina; blackberries trucked up from Mexico; a salad chilled to thirty-six degrees from the moment it was picked in Arizona (where Earthbound moves its entire operation every winter) to the moment I walk it out the doors of my Whole Foods.  The food industry burns nearly a fifth of all the petroleum consumed in the United States (about as much as automobiles do).  Today it takes between seven and ten calories of fossil fuel energy to deliver one calorie of food energy to an American plate.  And while it is true that organic farmers don’t spread fertilizers made from natural gas or spray pesticides made from petroleum, industrial organic farmers often wind up burning more diesel fuel than their conventional counterparts: in trucking bulky loads of compost across the countryside and weeding their fields, a particularly energy intensive process involving extra irrigation (to germinate the weeds before planting) and extra cultivation.  All told, growing food organically uses about a third less fossil fuel than growing it conventionally, according to David Pimentel, though that savings disappears if the compost is not produced on site or nearby.

            Yet growing the food is the least of it:  only a fifth of the total energy used to feed us is consumed on the farm; the rest is spent processing the food and moving it around.  At least in terms of the fuel burned to get it from the farm to my table, there’s little reason to think my Cascadian Farm TV dinner or Earthbound Farm spring mix salad is any more sustainable than a conventional TV dinner or salad would have been.

            Well, at least we didn’t eat it in the car.

            So is an industrial organic food chain finally a contradiction in terms?  It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it is.  Of course it is possible to live with contradictions, at least for a time, and sometimes it is necessary or worthwhile.  But we ought at least face up to the cost of our compromises.  The inspiration for organic was to find a way to feed ourselves more in keeping with the logic of nature, to build a food system that looked more like an ecosystem that would draw it’s fertility and energy from the sun.  To feed ourselves otherwise was “unsustainable,” a word that’s been so abused we’re apt to forget what it very specifically means:  Sooner or later it must collapse.  To a remarkable extent, farmers succeeded in creating the new food chain on their farms; the trouble began when they encountered the expectations of the supermarket.  As in so many other realms, nature’s logic has proven no match for the logic of capitalism, one in which cheap energy has always been a given.  And so, today, the organic food industry finds itself in a most unexpected, uncomfortable, and, yes, unsustainable position:  floating on a sinking sea of petroleum.

It isn’t hard to see why there isn’t much institutional support for the sort of low-capital, thought-intensive farming Joel Salatin practices:  He buys next to nothing.  When a livestock farmer is willing to “practice complexity” – to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to – he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals.  He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn’t designed to eat.  This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system:  health.

I was struck by the fact that for Joel abjuring agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals is not so mush a goal of his farming, as it so often is in organic agriculture, as it is an indication that his farm is functioning well.  “In nature health is the default,” he pointed out.  “Most of the time pests and disease are just nature’s way of telling the farmer he’s doing something wrong.”

In Joel’s view, that reformation begins with people going o the trouble and expense of buying directly from farmers they know – “relationship marketing,” as he calls it.  He believes the only meaningful guarantee of integrity is when buyers and sellers can look one another in the eye, something few of us ever take the trouble to do.  “Don’t you find it odd that people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

A tension has always existed  between the capitalist imperative to maximize efficiency at any cost and the moral imperatives of culture, which historically have served as a counterweight to the moral blindness of the market.  This is another example of the cultural contradictions of capitalism – the tendency over time for the economic impulse to erode the moral underpinnings of society.  Mercy toward the animals in our care is one such casualty.

The day after my steak-and-Singer dinner at the palm I found myself on a plane flying from Atlanta to Denver.  A couple of hours into the flight the pilot, who hadn’t uttered word one until now, came on the public address system to announce, apropos of nothing, that we were passing over Liberal, Kansas.  This was the first, last, and only landmark on our flight path that the pilot deigned to mention, which seemed very odd, given its obscurity to everyone on the plane but me.  For Liberal, Kansas, happens to be the town where my steer, very possibly that very day, was being slaughtered.  I’m not a superstitious person, but this struck me as a most eerie coincidence.  I could only wonder what was going on just then, thirty thousand feet below me, on the kill floor of the National Beef Plant, where steer number 534 had his date with the stunner.
            I could only wonder because the company had refused to let me see.  When I visited the plant earlier that spring I was shown everything but the kill floor.  I watched steers being unloaded from trailers into corrals and then led up a ramp and through a blue door.  What happened on the other side of the blue door I had to reconstruct from accounts of others who had been allowed to go there.   ...

Sometimes I think that all it would take to clarify our feelings about eating meat, and in the process begin to redeem animal agriculture, would be to simply pass a law requiring all the sheet-metal walls of all the CAFOs, and even the concrete walls of slaughterhouses, to be replaced by glass.  If there’s any new right we need to establish, maybe this is the one: the right, I mean, to look.  No doubt the sight of some of these places would turn many people into vegetarians.  Many others would look elsewhere for their meat, to farmers willing to raise and kill their animals transparently.  Such farms exist; so do a handful of small processing plants willing to let customers onto the kill floor, including one – Lorentz Meats, in Cannon Falls, Minnesota – that is so confident of their treatment of animals that they have walled their abattoir in glass.

            The industrialization – and brutalization – of animals in America is a relatively new, evitable, and local phenomenon:  No other country raises and slaughters its food animals quite as intensively or as brutally as we do.  No other people in history has lived at quite so great remove from the animals they eat.  Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do.  Tail docking and sow crates and beak clipping would disappear overnight, and the days of slaughtering four hundred head of cattle an hour would promptly come to an end – for who could stand the sight?  Yes, meat would get more expensive.  We’d probably eat a lot less of it, too, but maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve.