Conscious Choice: Taking the Links Out of the Food Chain

March 1996

Taking the Links Out of the Food Chain

How to return to a more holistic way of eating

by Emily Esterson

My housemate is estranged from food. Her idea of a balanced meal is a meat-vegetable-starch combo packaged in a non-recyclable, non-post-consumer waste box, served up in a nifty plastic tray with a "sanitary" plastic covering. Her sole beverage is Diet Coke, and breakfast is a stop at the local fast food restaurant. She is a classic example of what Wendell Barry calls the industrial eater.

"Patrons of the food industry," Wendell Berry said in his essay, The Pleasures of Eating, "have tended to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent.... The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical — in short, a victim. When food is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous."

Dangerous, perhaps, because the links in the food chain have gotten a lot longer. Back before the invention of the modern food industry, we ate what we grew. It was as simple as that. These days, our food travels from pesticide-laden industrial farm, to processor, to packager, to trucking facility, to warehouse, to supermarket. Along the way, various harmful wastes are added to our food which ultimately result in environmental degradation — and our own. They range from pesticide residues to industrial waste, to the use of and later the emission of fossil fuels, to packaging tossed in the landfill.

As Berry says, "[Consumers] ignore certain critical questions about the quality and cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported and what did the transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging and advertising add to the cost? How did the processing affect quality or nutritional value?"

Despite my admonitions about her health and the health of the planet, my housemate continues to consume a diet of non-food foods. I try to explain to her that she is feeding an already greedy industrial food production system, one which most certainly does not have her, or the planet’s, best interests at heart. The question remains, however: how does one return to a more natural, holistic food system?

The United States of Advertising
The debate raging in my kitchen is a symptom, perhaps, of how far some Americans have gotten from the notion of "food."

According to a recent study in The Griffin Report on Food Marketing, the top ten edible items purchased at supermarkets included several iterations of Coke and Pepsi, mayonnaise, canned tuna fish and Budweiser. The order of the ten items varied by region, but for the most part, the items remained pretty much the same throughout the United States. "The food companies," says Michael Colby, executive director for the advocacy group Food & Water Inc., "act as if we were born with an inherent desire to drink Coca-Cola. So, evidently, do we.

"The supermarket industry has a fixation on false simplicity, constantly throwing new things at us to make our lives easier. That’s making us more and more distant from things that should matter in our lives most — particularly our relationship with food," he says. Indeed, when we’ve ruined our environment and our health, will our lives still be easier?

Welcome to the United States of Advertising. The unfortunate truth is that most food companies are not interested in the health of consumers or the planet. they are merely businesses, interested in volume dollars, cutting costs, diversifying product lines, pleasing shareholders and getting more of the consumer’s hard-earned dollar. Yet they manage, somehow, to convince most of America that the food they are growing with chemicals and packaging in paper and plastic is exactly what we need.

Untangling the Food Chain
However, the good news is that consumers are beginning to realize that some of the items that agri-business has offered up to consumers have not been so good for us. When FDA approved rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) for use in dairy cows, the public responded with boycotts and proposed labeling laws — and sales of organic dairy products rocketed 125 percent between 1993 and 1994. Sales of organic foods in general rose 22 percent that same year — signs that organic food is becoming more mainstream. "Ten years ago, agri-business could barely contain their contempt for organics. They thought you couldn’t make any money selling it and it was so far off the mainstream, which depends on efficiency and monoculture," says Margaret Mellon, director of agriculture and technology for the Union of Concerned Scientists. The increasing interest, and mainstreaming of organics is perhaps the first step to returning to a more natural, holistic food system.

Indeed, the increasing number natural foods markets is making it easier for consumers to eat healthier for the planet. "It’s really important to have the convenience of natural products grocery stores," Mellon says. "They have a real emphasis on understanding what goes into food — the process — which represents a whole new philosophy that is commercially viable."

Pesticide Peril
Here is what the food companies don’t tell us: That the food in most manufactured products comes from factory farms, where pesticides are de rigeur. In fact, pesticide use has increased 3,300 percent since World War II, when agro-chemical farming first became popular.

The amount of food pesticides used on U.S. food escalated from 300 million pounds in 1960 to 800 million pounds in 1993. And we know (based on animal testing) that 71 of the 300 pesticides commonly used on foods are known or probable human carcinogens.

Animals, too, are not exempt from chemical treatment. Most farm animals are confined in such unnatural environments that farmers use antibiotics to keep rampant diseases at bay. These antibiotics eventually end up in our food. "What major supermarkets and food companies are extracting from consumers is an illusion of choice," Colby says. "But we’re paying for it."

The Local Link
While eating organic foods and shopping at the natural products store may be the first step to holistic eating, even more drastic measures are necessary. "For consumers, the issue goes far beyond pure food safety. There’s a relationship from local farmers to the ecosystem and wildlife," Colby of Food & Water says. The group’s latest campaign, which targets supermarkets, reflects an trend in food politics. And it would, theoretically, reform the entire agri-business-run food chain as we know it.

Most important, it brings control of the food system back to the local farmer. Colby says, "We’re targeting top supermarkets with a message of‘What are you doing to get toxic foods out of your market? What are you doing to foster relationships with local farmers and local communities? What are you giving back to local agriculture?’"

Indeed, local control of agriculture is key to finding our way back down to the bottom of the chain, where our food is actually grown rather than manufactured, and where the power of the advertising dollar has been diffused. Groups like FarmAid, which supports family farmers, have begun to advocate sustainable, organic agriculture as key to survival of the family farm. According to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, 85 percent of organic farmers are family farmers.

Several pioneers, like Kansas farmer Paul Johnson, have been working to increase the use of locally and sustainably produced food by large institutions such as hospitals and schools. "If we want farmers to stay on the land, we’ve got to cut out the middle person," he says. "Companies like Sysco are taking the lion’s share of the food dollar from the American farmer."

Yet the link between local farming and organic agriculture is at best tenuous. Industry experts like Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, say that organics have recently made the leap from a "movement" with strong ethical roots, to an industry, with food companies increasingly seeing dollar signs associated with the word "organic." And, with the global food economy in the hands of about 200,000 farmers, agri-business has a strong hold over food producers who may want to convert to organics.

Add in the fact that government regulatory agencies are conspicuously in bed with agri-business, and you get legislation that doesn’t exactly favor the small, chemical-free family farm operation. Congress’ deregulatory frenzy may further damage our food supply by lowering pesticide controls and removing important environmental safeguards. That’s why it’s even more important today to retain the strong environmental ethics behind organics by supporting a local organic agriculture system.

Agricultural economists say that by the year 2,000 five percent of the agricultural economy will be organic — up four percent from where we are today. But that means, Scowcroft says, that 95 percent will still be agro-chemical. "The idea of buying locally is maturing," he says. "The consumer who searches out organics, specifically locally, helps the roots of the organic economy grow deeper. It’s very hard to switch lifestyles, especially when you look at prices. But the adjustments that you make have far more impact on the organic economy than you would expect. By eating organic, Scowcroft says, "You are becoming an evolutionary activist."

Learning To Love A Potato
Local farming and an increasing movement toward community supported agriculture (an estimated 400 CSAs are now in existence) fosters local stewardship of the earth, sustainable agriculture and a shift toward crop diversification. Community-supported agriculture is indeed the next link down in the chain from eating whole organic foods from the health food store. CSA members buy shares in a season’s harvest and receive fresh organic vegetables for the season. The benefits include lower prices for organic foods, and support of a local organic farmer or a coop of family farmers.

CSAs also practice diversified agriculture; they provide a variety of crops — thereby helping to solve one of agri-business’ most damaging habits, monoculture farming. Environmental experts have begun to recognize the importance of CSAs as part of the grand scheme, and even the Association of American Catholic Dioceses recently funded a six year program called the Church Land project, which encourages local parishes to set up community supported agriculture projects. "The CSAs are fostering diversified agriculture and giving people a taste for locally grown food," says Sandra LaBlanc, communication director for the National Catholic Rural Life Conference. "We’ve become so dependent on a huge food system that we’ve forgotten what its like to eat regionally." Some of the parishes even give out recipes for locally grown produce.

So some progress is being made. But ultimately what all of this means to us, should we decide to step down the food chain, is that we will have to develop new eating habits. Instead of corn in January and strawberries in December, we’ll have to make do with corn in September and squash and potatoes in winter. We may have to give up some culinary luxuries to achieve a healthier planet.

Ultimately, the choices we make — even the little choices, such as buying whole, organic foods and asking our grocer to stock organic produce and support local farmers — can make a big impact in the big picture. "Vote with your fork every day," Cummins says. "For too long we’ve been talking about changing our diets for health reasons. Now we need to stop isolating food and agriculture issues from the state of our planet."

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