The University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism recently hosted a symposium on food and the environment. For several days the issues surrounding just what happens in getting food to the table bounced around inside Berkeley classrooms. One evening Orville Schell, professor and dean of the journalism school, invited a few of the symposium participants to a panel discussion that was, happily, open to the public. Among the panelists were
Mark Hertsgaard,
Eric Schlosser,
Michael Pollan,
and Alice Waters.
Mr. Schell got the discussion going by asking about the viability of alternatives to industrial agriculture.
Michael Pollan:
Are the alternatives to factory food viable? Organic agriculture is the healthiest segment of the American food system, growing at 20% a year in a market that is growing at only 3% a year. But we really don't know how well these alternatives can do. The system of agriculture we have is a result of policy decisions, the most obvioius which is subsidies. 40% of farm income is government subsidies. None of that money goes to organic agriculture.
Also, the question assumes that the factory food model is viable. I looked up the biological definition of viable which is 'able to live and grow.' And I would submit that there are some serious questions of whether or not the factory food system will be able to live and grow long-term. There are some serious structural problems. I'll offer one example. We have a crisis of pollinators right now. The honey bees are sick. The proximate cause is a mite, but the deeper cause is the vast monocultures that we need the bees to pollinate. The local bee population can't handle it so migrant bees must be brought in to pollinate the crops. The bees travel all over and bring diseases with them.
So agriculture is not a factory. It's not just a system of inputs and outputs. It is built into an ecological context and that context is just as important as the inputs and outputs. Monoculture is not the way nature does business. It's very precarious. A huge, concentrated food system is vulnerable to blight; and to terrorism as well.
Mark Hertsgaard:
I would like to put the question of viability into a global context. Food is one of those issues that show how great the divide is between our country and the rest of the world. We are focused, and rightly so, on the safety and the tastiness of our food, but it is important to remember these considerations would seem like a luxury to the majority of people who live on this planet. Most are focused on getting enough food for the day.
The world population is now about six billion. Two billion go to bed hungry many nights of the week. That’s one in every three people. Imagine, that means either you or the person sitting on either side of you, one of you is going to bed hungry tonight. And another 1 billion are chronically hungry. And by chronically hungry I mean one breath of bad luck away from death. I had a chance to see this up close in the southern Sudan. I was in a relief camp, but it was more like a starvation zone. One morning I was by the hospital, which was just a tent, and I saw a young man having a wound treated. It was a tropical ulcer, which is caused by vitamin deficiencies. It extended from his ankle halfway to his knee. It was an open wound gushing pus and blood. He did not wimper once when the bandages were removed. He was not, however, given any of the iron pills that were in short supply because his condition was not considered serious enough. And this is a reality for an awful lot of people around the world, one out of six.
You will hear industry advocates say that this is precisely why we need the factory model. Without the “green revolution” of the 1970’s and 1980’s that drastically increased yields of grains, we probably would have seen millions of people, especially in India and China, die of starvation. And now we are seeing the same argument replayed with genetic engineering. Those who paid attention to the Summit in Johannesburg are reminded of Secretary of State Colin Powell scolding the leaders of Zambia for refusing to accept genetically modified grain from the U.S. Do we know GM food is safe? It’s much too early to say what this experiment is going to mean. This is the same achilles heel of the “Green Revolution”--we are increasing yields in the short-term but poisoning the land in the long term.
But the down side of the "green revolution" is not just the ecological effect but the economic and political effect as well. Industrialized agriculture is biased toward the rich--people with the capital, property, and equipment to access the economies of scale made possible by the "green revolution." The yields are greater but the distribution is much more unequal. Remember, famine is generally a function of poverty, not scarcity. And the decisions we make, especially here in America because we drive the system, these decisions are going to have life and death impacts on a lot of people we will never see for many decades out into the future, so we had better think about them very carefully indeed.
This is our dilema. We are six billion people. There is a strong argument to continue with the industrialized method of farming, but that very approach is what is undermining our long-term ability to feed ourselves.
Eric Schlosser
But the decision-making process has been effectively removed from the people. Earlier today a presenter from the food industry shared a statistic that, stay with me, stated that there are now 10 agribusiness companies that control 90% of the food in the world. Is that sustainable? Was that inevitable?
There is a great amount of talk in the industry about the inevitability of this system. And all that talk of inevitability lends credence to the industry’s point of view that it’s ok to have 10 corporations control 90% of our food. And there is nothing inevitable about it. Very conscious decisions have led to this corporate control of agriculture. These decisions had to do with anti-trust enforcement, government subsidies and what farmers got those subsidies, which environmental laws would be enforced or not enforced, worker safety laws, and food safety laws. This was not the inevitable unfolding of some great plan of history. This happened because very powerful groups made it happen.
There is also the idea that this food is cheap. It’s only cheap if it is measured in the way that it is measured now. When you look at all the external costs (and my area of expertise is livestock production and the rise of these gigantic, intensive livestock operations) like the agricultural runoff, increase of food borne illness, increase of worker injuries, health costs of obesity, then suddenly the food becomes much more expensive.
And the idea that no alternative exists is something that the industry would like us to believe and I’m afraid it's a sign of our provinciality. There’s a lot of other countries--western, industrialized countries--that do not operate the system the way we do. Regarding beef, no one in the world processes beef like we do. We have 13 slaughterhouses that produce most of the meat for 280 million Americans. In New Zealand they have small, very technically advanced slaughterhouses that produce very clean meat. In Europe and in Scandinavia there are all kinds of examples of alternatives. Unfortunately our system will continue until we work to make it change.
Orville: So what are the ingredients for change?
Michael Pollan
The consumer has an amazing amount of power. Corporations are remarkably vulnerable to consumer action. McDonald’s was buying genetically modified potatoes. When the word got out McDonald’s started getting phone calls from consumers. The potential for a public relations disaster was enough for them to stop. Because McDonald’s buys 7% of the nation’s potatoes, when they stopped buying, the market for Monsanto’s “NewLeaf” genetically modified seed flopped.
So the way we vote with our food dollars has enormous structural effects. Let’s think of ourselves not as consumers but consumer-citizens. We are citizens in the produce aisle as well as consumers. And the votes we cast as consumer-citizens are the most important votes we can cast.
Eric Schlosser
If the government would simply impose limits on pathogen loads in meat it would transform the industry. But right now the government is being controlled by industry. Companies are shipping meat that is completely laden with salmonella and are allowed to do it.
Alice Waters
I think people don’t understand all the consequences of the decisions that they make about food. We understand the environmental issues and the consequences to our own health, but I feel there is a real set of values that come with the way we eat. 85% of children in the U.S. today do not sit down and share a meal together with their family. That dinner table was where we connected with each other and passed on our values to our children. That’s not happening anymore. I think this contributes to a sense of aimlessness and disconnectedness felt by many young people today.
Michael Pollan
In fact General Mills has done numerous studies of the eating habits of Americans. They set up video cameras in family homes to document eating behavior. They did this because they discovered that what people say about what they eat and what they eat are often different. So they set up these cameras and discovered that in fact these families who said they eat meals together don't. Instead, everyone would drift into the kitchen, make something, and go on their way. And this was seen by General Mills as a wonderful marketing opportunity! They designed meals that can be safely microwaved by eight-year-olds.
. . . perhaps it’s time for change in the food chain.
 Managing Editor’s notes:
Go to http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2002/09/13_food.html to listen to the discussion in its entirety.
Note on the Asparagus photos--although asparagus is typically harvested in the spring, there can be a second harvest in the fall. So, enjoy it, when you can--fresh and in season.
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