When you look calmly and rationally at the world’s food system today, there are many reasons to feel depressed. Everywhere, farmers are being driven off the land. Agribusiness companies wield more power than at any other time in history. The supermarkets have more power. Wal-Mart has more power, squeezing producers harder and paying employees even less than many supermarkets do. The same fast-food chains sell the same food worldwide. Soda companies aggressively target children in schools. Meat-packing companies mistreat their livestock, overuse antibiotics and growth hormones, abuse their workers, pollute rivers and streams, sell meat tainted with fecal material and harmful bacteria. Farm-raised salmon are often contaminated with pesticide residues, while wild salmon are vanishing from the seas. And then there’s mad cow disease, avian flu, and genetically modified foods. The wealthy, industrialized nations dump subsidized grain on the poorer, less developed ones, destroying fragile rural economies and creating famines. Modern industrialized agriculture depends upon cheap petroleum, and we’re running out of that. A clear look at what’s happening today is bound to overwhelm you with doom and gloom.
Some of the best things in life, however, have nothing to do with cool, calm reason. To make real change, you need other qualities, like anger, passion, and that most illogical human trait: hope. Things are bad, all right — but things didn’t have to turn out this way. The more time I spend investigating how we produce and distribute our food, the more I realize that none of these problems was inevitable. Today’s food system was not the inescapable result of free market forces, natural law, technological advance, or the triumph of modernity. Indeed, the “free market” had little to do with determining how and why certain foods are now produced. For years the American fast food industry has benefited from government subsidies, government-funded road construction (so essential for all those drive-throughs), and minimum wage policies that keep labour costs low. Right now in the United States more than half the money earned by corn farmers comes directly from taxpayers. This cheap, subsidized corn becomes cheap animal feed, lowering the cost of meat. And there’s nothing inevitable about how the U.S. Congress frames its farm bills. Every year the large agribusiness firms and corporate farmers get what they want, family farmers get squeezed, and ordinary consumers pay the bill.
About a dozen agribusiness companies now control most of the food that Americans eat. And the powerful oligopolies that dominate nearly every commodity market are a violation of free market principles, not their fulfillment. If America’s antitrust laws were enforced today the way they were fifty years ago, during the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, most of our leading agribusiness companies would be dismantled. Eisenhower, hardly a left-wing activist, strongly believed in the importance of competition — and during his first year in office boldly launched an antitrust campaign against the nation’s five biggest oil companies. For the past twenty-five years, government policy has encouraged unprecedented centralization and consolidation. In 1970, the four largest meat-packing companies controlled about 20 percent of the American beef market. Today the four largest control more than 80 percent. Tyson Foods — the largest producer of both chicken and beef — is now the biggest meat-packing company the world has ever seen. Its market power has huge implications for farmers, ranchers, workers, and consumers — in the United States and Canada. Fate and the free market were not the guiding forces that brought us unchecked corporate power. Every step of the way, important choices were made by politicians, chief executives, and unwitting consumers. Different choices can still be made.
In 1959, the year I was born, people of colour in much of the United States were forbidden to use the same public toilets as white people or to sleep at the same hotels. The Soviet Union oppressed its own citizens and ruled half of Europe. Blacks in South Africa were treated like serfs. In 1959, if you’d predicted that Nelson Mandela would one day be elected president of a free, multiracial South Africa, people would have said you were out of your mind. In my lifetime, I’ve seen segregation, the Berlin Wall, and apartheid vanish from the Earth. So I refuse to believe that the way we feed ourselves today must endure forever. Our current system won’t last because it can’t last. It is not sustainable. This centralized, industrialized agricultural system has been in place for just a few decades — and look at the destruction it has already caused. Look at the harm it has inflicted upon consumers, livestock, and the environment. In the final analysis, our fast, cheap food costs too much.
Yet amid the daily litany of depressing headlines, there are reasons to be cheerful. People who are well-informed about food issues — largely members of the educated, upper middle class — are changing their eating habits. They are buying organic, free-range, locally produced foods. They are rejecting fast food and supporting the Slow Food movement. They don’t want anything to do with the highly processed, freeze-dried, chemical-laden foods that most people still consume. This is hardly a widespread revolution — but it could be the start of one. Change has to begin somewhere, and, like the abolition movement of the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the twentieth, the drive to get rid of bad food has begun mainly among the wealthy and well-educated. As awareness of the problem spreads, so will anger and disgust. Some day government policy will stop subsidizing the wrong foods and make healthy food affordable for the poor.
In Germany mad cow disease opened people’s eyes. You could hardly find a nation more dedicated to reason, more obsessed with efficiency, technology, and the cool ethos of the engineer. Yet the German response to mad cow disease rejected all of that. After years of distortions and cover-ups by German agricultural officials, Renate Kuenast, a member of the Green Party, became minister of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Consumer Protection in 2001. “Things will no longer be the way they are,” Kuenast declared, introducing a fundamentally new approach to food policy. The German government is now officially committed to the de-industrialization of agriculture. It vows to make 20 percent of German farmland organic within a decade. It has enacted the world’s first animal bill of rights. If Germany can head down this path, so can the rest of the world.
The essays in this book suggest new agricultural technologies and new business models. Some may prove important; others, a complete waste of time. You may agree with some of the arguments made in these pages, and vehemently disagree with others. All of them, however, present us with the opportunity to make choices.
How we get our food today is by no means the only way to get it. Uniformity and conformity, a blind faith in science, a narrow measure of profit and loss, a demand for total, absolute control — these are the central values of the current food system. A new one will emerge from an opposing set. The change won’t just happen, though. People will have to make it happen. Passionate anger at the way things are must replace the sense of doom and gloom. Championing the right foods, instead of the wrong ones, won’t require martyrdom or violent uprising. But it will need activists to oppose the reigning food giants in the courts, the legislatures, the schools, and the realm of public opinion. Consumers can play an important role, too, just by buying foods that have been produced the right way, by supporting local farmers and ranchers. That won’t take much sacrifice. To paraphrase the great Alice Waters: this revolution tastes good.