Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

the upchuck rebellion
by jim hightower with susan demarco
This article is adapted from their new book, Swim Against The Currents:
Even a Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow (Wiley, 2008)
http://www.edibleboston.net/content/pages/articles/spring08/pdfs/edibleNation.pdf

Right now, we’re in the midst of a dramatic revolt over something
that touches each of our lives every day in the most basic way: dinner!
During the last 50 years, control over America’s food policies quietly
shifted from farmers and consumers to corporate executives, shortsighted
bureaucrats, 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 customers for them. Yet they took charge
of the decisions that direct everything from how food is grown and
processed to what our children eat in school.

They were not good deciders, because their interests are not ours.
Agricorps don’t see food as a juicy, luscious, nutritious product of
nature, but as a profit center to be conglomeratized, industrialized
and globalized. We’re not talking about the making of some computer
gadget here, but about our dinner! The natural state of food
production is that it’s small-scale, agrarian and local. This is because
plants and animals are living creatures. Economies of scale are
achieved at a surprisingly small level, with both productivity and
quality being enhanced by the ability of farmers and artisans to be
personally involved with their crops and livestock.

But the agribusiness powers perverted agriculture production from
the high art and science of cooperating with nature into a high-cost,
high-tech process of overwhelming nature.

To say that they take shortcuts with food in their mad dash for profits
understates reality. Let’s be blunt: they torture food! They apply
massive doses of pesticides and artificial fertilizers to these living 
organisms.

They inject animals with antibiotics and sex hormones.
They turn lab technicians loose to alter the very DNA of organisms,
manufacturing mutant “Frankenfoods.” They force grass-eating cows
to become carnivores and even cannibals. They blast fruits and veggies
with ripening gas and zap them with radiation. They dose the
finished foodstuffs with assorted sugars, artificial flavorings, trans
fats and chemical preservatives. What we’re left with is “food” that has
lost all connection to our good earth and America’s well-being.
In an interview with a USDA official in the early ‘70s, DeMarco
commented that the off-season supermarket “tomatoes” she’d tried
had no taste and (other than shape) bore no relationship to the luscious
tomatoes she’d grown up with in New Jersey. The official—in
a sincere, life-moves-on tone—dismissed this concern as a minor
drawback: “Your children will never know the difference.”
Wrong. Even as he spoke, people were paying more attention, getting
more concerned, and asking more questions than the aloof
agribusiness power brokers could possibly imagine. Even as early as
1971, a food awakening was already beginning to take hold. De-
Marco and I were in touch with this emerging movement through
our work in the 1970s as co-directors of a public interest group with the 
unwieldy name of Agribusiness Accountability Project. In addition
to research and writing, we did a lot of speaking in cities around
the country. Some of our friends were baffled that we were going
into urban areas to raise what they assumed were farm issues: “Why
are you talking about agriculture?”

We weren’t. We were talking about power. We asked consumerminded
audiences, “If you can’t even control what’s in your dinner,
what can you control? Who decided to take the flavor out of tomatoes?
Why are breakfast cereal prices so high? Who says it’s ‘necessary’
to dump eight billion pounds of pesticides every year on America’s
croplands, with poisons contaminating the strawberries you give your
kids as a treat?”

We were also talking about the emergence of a fledgling populist political
alliance that had enormous potential to upset the best-laid
plans of the food giants. Discussion of economic structure is usually
snore-out-loud boring, but we found that people quickly got into it
(and easily “got it”) when we merely held up a box of Wheaties or a
can of Campbell’s soup, products that most people in the ‘70s had in
their kitchens. We then described what these packages held for:
Farmers: On average, only 18¢ of the consumer’s food dollar goes to
the farmer (there’s less than a nickel’s worth of wheat in Wheaties.
The box costs more).

Farm Workers: You could double the miserly wages they are paid
and not raise the price of a can of soup even a penny.
Environment: Saturating fields with pesticides every year is literally
killing the soil and has contaminated nearly half of America’s groundwater.
Energy:With centralized agribusiness, the typical food product travels
15 hundred miles to get to your supermarket, wasting massive
amounts of fuel.

Consumers: A handful of conglomerates monopolize every aspect
of the food economy, leaving consumers overcharged at the cash register
and shortchanged on quality.

Let’s see—farmers, labor, environmentalists and consumers. Gosh
. . . that’s most of us! The Powers That Be work diligently to keep us
divided, but if we could come together in a movement that involved
us all, something big could happen.

And it is happening. Accelerating from the ’70s, all parts of the
movement have had their individual upchuck moments over the way
the corporatized, industrialized, globalized food system is working,
and they have been rebelling against it. Movements, however, don’t
spring forth full-grown. Each part has to develop in its own way. In
this case, the various parties had practically no connection, no awareness
that all were seeking a better system. Although they had no central leaders, 
no road map or plan, they’ve gradually found their way by finding one another.

Up from The Grassroots…The result is an alternative
food economy that has begun to flourish and a proud movement
that is surging in popularity:

There are some 8,000 organic farmers today, producing everything
from wheat to meat (and thousands more farmers are making the
transition to organic).

Sales of organic food topped $16.7 billion in 2006 and are increasing
at about 20 percent a year—10 times the rate of other foods.
About 40 percent of American shoppers regularly buy some organic
foods.

Sales of organic beer (O, progress!) rose 40 percent in 2005. Such
entrepreneurial leaders as Morgan Wolaver, the maker of a terrific
line of organic brews sold under the Wolaver label, have established
an expanding niche for beers made with organic ingredients. (Public
disclosure: I have done extensive consumer research into the quality
of his suds, although I am not under the influence as I write this.)

Direct sales from local farmers to consumers are booming through
some 4,000 vibrant farmers markets in practically every city.
Food co-ops (once the rather funky domain of hippies) are thriving,
with about 300 of them across the country, totaling $750 million a
year in business and providing another way around the corporate
system for local farmers, food artisans, and consumers.

All levels of eateries—from white-tablecloth restaurants to Dot’s
Diner—not only feature organic foods on their menus, but also
pride themselves on having locally produced, seasonal ingredients.
Such major wholesalers as Sysco, practically all supermarket chains,
and giants such as Costco and even Wal-Mart now realize that the demand
is so strong that they have to carry some organic foods.

Oh, and those kids who the USDA official declared “will never
know the difference”? They’ve been in the lead of this movement
from the start. In the ‘70s, it was college kids who became the
founders of food co-ops, organic farms, and other enterprising efforts
to get around that hard tomato. In the ‘80s and the ‘90s, it was young
moms who asked, “What’s in this stuff I’m feeding my kids?” and
searched out better alternatives.

And today it’s the kids and the grandkids of all of the previously
mentioned kids who are helping to push good food into that last
refuge of awful “mystery meats” and prepackaged fat bombs: the
school cafeteria! The farm-to-cafeteria movement has received little
coverage by the national media establishment, but it is spreading
across the country. More than 400 school districts and 200 university
cafeterias now build their daily menus around fresh, mostly organic
ingredients bought from local farmers and food makers.

Also, prodded by the example of Alice Waters—the pioneering visionary
and a tireless promoter of America’s “good food” movement—
many of the youngsters in these schools now grow some of
their own food, as well as help to prepare and serve it, as part of a
spreading “edible schoolyard” program. Some are even adopting a
concept called “edible classroom,” where food is used as an integral
part of the curriculum, providing a tangible (and tasty) way to teach
history, science, math, geometry and other topics.

Just as good food springs from well-tended ground, so has this grassroots
movement. No one in a position of power—political or economic—
made any of these improvements happen. In a remarkably
short time, ordinary Americans informed themselves, organized and
acted to assert their own values over those of the corporate structure.
Family by family, business by business, they have changed not only
the market but also the culture. By taking charge of what goes on
their plates, people are beginning to take charge of their lives.