Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

We Are What We Eat
By Jamey Lionette, South End Press. Posted December 10, 2007.
Mass production of food is ruining our health, environment, and taste buds.
How did this happen?

The following is an excerpt from Manifestos on the Future of Food and Seed
edited by Vandana Shiva (South End, 2007).
http://www.alternet.org/story/69262/

I am not a scientist, journalist, or other specialist. I sell food. I help
run a family-owned and operated neighborhood market and café that buys
and sells predominantly local, clean, and sustainable food. I cannot speak
about the reality of our food supply around most of the world. I can only
can speak of what is happening in the first world, where, unfortunately,
only the privileged elite can choose to put real food on their dinner
tables.

Lately it seems every mass media newspaper or magazine, from the New York
Times to Rolling Stone, has an article digging into the true filth that
most food in the U.S. really is. Some people are actually questioning mass
produced and monoculture organic food. Even Time magazine proclaimed "Local
Is the New Organic" on its cover. Everywhere I turn people tell me that
there is a new wind in the U.S.; that people are now concerned about eating
local, clean, and sustainable food. From my vantage point in the market,
behind the counter, I just don't see it. Yes, in Massachusetts there are
more farms today than in the last 20 or so years, but fewer total acres
than ever recorded. Farmers markets are becoming popular or perhaps trendy.
Chain supermarkets are "listening to their customers" and capitalizing on
cheap "organic" food. But the chain-supermarket owners are some of the same
people who screwed up our food supply in the first place. How can we trust
them?

Outdoor food markets are a mainstay in most cultures in the world and were
once a given in our culture. Now most people go there to shop for the
luxury food treats (locally grown food) and get their staples at the
supermarket. I think that because of the Depression (when there was no
money to spend on food) and World War II (when there was rationing and
everyone was focused on the war effort) Americans lost their taste-buds.
Along came the mass-produced foods of the 1950s at cheap prices.
Supermarkets were a "progressive" thing, as suburban living was
progressive. Rural culture and production was frowned upon as old-fashioned
and primitive. Food from all over the world suddenly became available and
at prices lower than local food. Protecting America's foreign interest, the
beginning of what we now call globalization, became a new form of
colonialism. Foreign resources, raw materials as well as labor, were now
easily exploitable by the nation's new superpower status. As the economy
grew, money filtered down to the managerial and to some of the working
class and was coupled with an influx of cheap products made cheaply and
available to most classes of the U.S. Consumerism took off. Our food
changed as well, especially with faster transport and technologies trickery
to extend the shelf life of food. Seasonal produce became available year
round; exotic food (such as bananas and oranges in Boston) became readily
available and affordable. Everything was cheaper, the shopping was more
convenient, and exotic foods became staples in our diet. Small and local
farms shut down or were forced into monoculture farming. A disconnect
sprouted between our diets and our food sources. An orange, once a special
and rare treat, became an everyday commodity.

Supermarkets are part of mainstream America's identity. Working-class
people have little choice but to shop at conventional supermarkets.
Middle-class people can shop at places like Whole Foods and appease their
consciences with the notion that that food is safer and tastier than
conventional supermarket food. And those of the flat earth society --
middle- and upper-class people who do not believe that their climate is
changing, that a global market is a bad thing, or that our food systems are
in trouble -- favor the conventional supermarket. However, both
conventional and progressive supermarkets operate on the same model:
mass-produced foods, made cheaply, and sold at cheap prices.

Supermarkets sell commodities. They buy mass-produced food from big
business. This model of efficiency, which mirrored the production of things
like automobiles and VCRs, is what created the mess our food supply is in.
Efficient ordering and deliveries, no seasonal variety of stock, little to
no blemishes (whether natural or from human error), significant quantities
-- enough to keep all those shelves constantly filled with whatever the
customer might want. I describe this model as "I want what I want when I
want it," and it goes against everything about food that is local, clean,
and sustainable. It cannot be done at a mass level. [...]

People first bought cheap food because they either did not have enough
money or felt like they were beating the system by spending less than they
budgeted for food that week. Over time our budgets became based on the
price of cheap food, so that now, during the rare moment of seeing real
food, the price tag appears exorbitant. Our wages and salaries, our rent
and utilities, all are tied to our cheaply priced food.

Many people who can actually afford local, clean, sustainable food buy it
only when it is trendy, sold at boutique shops, or for a special occasion.
Those from the class which struggles to afford mass-produced food certainly
cannot afford the real price of food in the U.S.. One often-overlooked
agent of gentrification and, after rent increases, one of the best ways to
ruin a neighborhood is by shopping at chain supermarkets. Local
neighborhood markets close or survive by becoming convenience stores.
Farmers' markets become a trendy place to buy a few novelty items: "Oooh
look at this peach. I bought it from a farmer!" Once the small markets are
gone, only supermarkets are left. We are so out of touch with the struggle
to get food, because of how much cheap food is available in the country,
that we do not see a pattern of destruction.

The more we buy mass-produced foods, the more it empowers agro-business and
the fewer farms there will be. The more we shop at supermarkets, the fewer
neighborhood markets there will be. Already we are almost trapped by
agro-business and its sales outlets. Soon, there will be no escape. As it
stands right now, only a privileged few can afford real, clean, and
sustainable food; soon, even the privileged will have little access to such
food. The fewer local farms we have, the more expensive their food becomes
and the more difficult it is for local farms to feed the local population.
Once the farms are gone, only mass-produced food is left.

Hadley, Massachusetts, is known as having the best asparagus in the world.
Though just an hour or so outside of Boston, it is near impossible to find
asparagus grown in Hadley in Boston. Futures of the asparagus are sold;
mostly to France and Japan, I am told. Instead of a wonderful spring
vegetable for a local dish, Hadley asparagus has become a boutique item for
other parts of the world. Yet in spring, summer, winter, or fall, asparagus
flown in from Peru is half the price of in-season asparagus grown on a
family farm in New England. And I must admit it seems a bit shameful to
complain about such a situation in the U.S., when so many peoples around
the world local resources have been diverted to produce food for Americans.

The late summer is tomato season in New England. The glory of a local
tomato salad on a warm summer night in Boston is something which we can
only enjoy a couple of months a year. The flavor of our farmers' tomatoes
are spectacular. Especially when bought at a local shop or farmers' market,
where we actually speak with the people involved in harvesting and
distributing our food, people who are part of our community. These tomatoes
were not sprayed with anything; the soil was not ruined by chemicals or
monoculture farming. These tomatoes traveled only a few dozen miles and
were grown outside, thus using only a little energy and creating little
pollution. The farmer, part of our community, was deservedly paid and did
not exploit anyone or the land. No one was ripped off during the whole
transaction, and the tomatoes were available to everyone in Boston during
the late summer months.

Yet the rest of the year we still expect to have fresh tomatoes available,
and they are called for in many dishes. Fresh tomatoes are considered
year-round staples. There is never any questioning tomatoes in March, their
integrity or their source. We have become used to hydroponic tomatoes flown
in from Mexico or Holland. Instead of focusing our efforts on bringing in
tomatoes year-round to Boston, we should focus making the Northeast
corridor able to feed itself now and in the future. At the very least,
these factory-grown tomatoes do make our local tomatoes taste even more
wonderful. We are so used to the mealy, flavorless (or artificially
flavored) hydro-tomato that when we taste a real one, it seems so special.
This is one reason why local farmers are not perceived as the people who
raise our food, but as the producers of specialty items.

Another reason farmers are considered purveyors of specialty foods is their
prices. Let us end the idea right now that local, clean, and sustainable
foods result in a high profit for the producer and the retailer -- trust
me, there is absolutely no money in sustainable food. When food is handled
as sustenance -- not as a commodity -- there is little profit to be had.
That is why real food is so rare and so hard to come by now. The perverted
twist is that it would seem logical that food transported for days around
the world would cost more than something fresh and local. But quite the
opposite is true. Nobody considers what the true price of real food is.
Nobody is outraged that what most working-class people can afford, and even
the middle class can afford, is nothing more than mass-produced, cheapened
food.

There are, of course, the Whole Foods, Wal-Marts, Trader Joes, and other
chain supermarkets trying to sell organic foods. Everyone knows these
places are cheaper than local markets and farmers' markets, but rarely do
people think about how supermarkets work. People are generally aware of the
smaller mark-up chain supermarkets can afford, as compared with an
independent neighborhood market, as well as all the corporate capital and
funding behind them. But few often think about what is involved in
producing enough of a particular food for every shelf of their hundreds or
thousands of outlets across the region or country. You can't see the
devastating effects of monoculture farming in the sterile and lifeless
supermarket. The food looks so perfect and seems so abundant. And with such
cheap prices, why ask questions? Sustainable farming does not have the
ability to be mass produced; it cannot be sold at the level of a chain
supermarkets. Corners must be cut to keep costs low, production must
increase to fill the shelves, the laws of nature must be beaten by science
to allow for year round production, and if the weather cannot yet be
defeated, then the product should be mass-produced and imported from
another part of the world.

***

Listen, Thanksgiving 2006: Whole Foods Boston was selling a "fully pastured
naturally raised" turkey for $1.99/lb. That is painfully cheap. Was it
trying to compete with the half-dozen small town turkey farmers still left
in Massachusetts or the handful of farmers selling turkeys to their regular
customers at the farmers' markets or through community-supported
agriculture (CSA)? Probably not. Such consumers of locally raised food
still have an appreciation for the tradition of buying a turkey from the
same place every year or still get pleasure from buying their turkeys
directly from their friend, the farmer, or a neighborhood shop. Whole Foods
was trying to compete with the other big supermarkets, who sell cheap food.

Whole Foods (and the supermarkets imitating it) will be the death of the
movement for clean, local, and fair food for many reasons, but this is an
important one. By dropping the price so low, and using claims and slogans
designed not by farmers but by slick salespeople, it has set the
expectation that clean food can be as cheap as, or just slightly more
expensive than, filthy food. Many people could afford to make the jump from
Butterball to a Whole Food bird and, with that jump, assume that the bird
was safer, more sustainable, and cleaner. So now any farmer charging a real
price is seen as greedy or overpriced. Like Wal-Mart's cheap organic, Whole
Foods has cheapened (in integrity, as well as price) naturally raised meats
and clean food. It lowers the bar by allowing cheap mass-production and
corner-cutting, all to sell cheap food that you think is something it is
not. There is tokenistic buying of local food and various labels to suggest
a certain quality to the consumer. Because we have so few local farms left,
it is easy for a chain supermarket to buy some local food and appear to be
supportive of local farms. For most people, this is the easy and convenient
way to feel as though they are doing the right thing. But it was the
supermarket in the first place that helped reduce the number of farms and
transformed our understanding of what local farms are.

Organic food is by no means synonymous with clean food. What should we
expect, considering a food supply which is mass-produced will be shipped
all over the world? And how did the E. coli get into the spinach? Nobody
knows. The apparatus is too big. We are concerned, but we are overwhelmed
and more importantly completely removed from our food; we have no idea how
to eat locally. I am sure nearly half of Boston goes months without ever
eating a single bite of local food.

Are people buying store-brand organics duped or misled? Not exactly. The
argument for mass-produced organic food is that at least it is a lesser of
two evils. I would agree that mass-produced organic or mass-produced
naturally raised is not as bad as mass-produced conventional food, but it
is still bad. Are we content with eating bad food? Where is the outrage at
choosing between bad and worse? Within the first world, on a day-to-day
basis, there is barely a struggle to obtain food. But obtaining clean food
is a struggle. And to complicate matters are savvy marketing and confusing
legal and nonlegal claims. Do the research on what the USDA allows for the
claim "free-range" or "organic." They are by no means what you would
expect. To be labeled free-range, the law states only that once a bird is
old enough to safely venture outside (fair enough, small chicks are at risk
outside to predators, weather, diseases, etc.) that they can be kept inside
as long as they have access to the outdoors. Often this means a small hole
in the wall leading to a small, lifeless patch of land, which the bird
never bothers going out to. And for organic -- just a few hours outdoors
(not necessarily free of a cage) and nothing but USDA certified organic
feed. Great, but that feed may not be what that animal wants to eat at all.
Mass-produced food and monoculture farming does nothing good for the land.
It burns it up. It is not sustainable. Organic or conventional -- if it is
produced in favor of profit over sustainability it cannot last forever.
[...]

***

This is our society. A society that has no interest in banning feedlots or
the excessive/exclusive feeding of grains, hormones, animal by-products,
and antibiotics to cows and seemingly covers up any connection with these
practices to E. coli. Worse, our health officials and beef industry leaders
come up with a chemical injection to kill possible E. coli and dabble in
using pro-biotic injections to make our food "safe." What did you expect?
These are the same people who actually believed that forcing cows to be
cannibals in confined quarters-which gave us mad-cow disease-for the sake
of cheap beef and high profits was not a bad idea. If you could witness how
most of our food is produced, you would not eat it; you would be outraged.
We are so far removed from our food.

People think that by washing the vegetable with water that all the
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