The Politics of Food and the Historian's Work: Where the Twain Shall Meet, Part 3 of 3

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Want to hear something even sadder? I’ve not even finished writing this new book, and I’ve already been accused of being a mouthpiece for Corporate Food.

I’m not. I’m a historian who has chosen to write about a complicated, contentious issue. (Again, I was more or less oblivious to this “food fight” until I was well into the project.) I don’t know where the “story” will go.

Why? Because I’m still researching its contents and, like any historian, I let the facts guide me toward clarity and understanding. But I doubt it will be a “story” one that either side wants to hear. It’ll be too complex. It won’t toe the party line. It won’t conform to the mythology that is the underpinning of both sides’ arguments.

Hey, that’s the nature of real life: it’s complicated and it almost never fits into the either/or, black/white scenario that we’d like it to. That’s also the curse, and the blessing, of the historian’s work.

All this leads to an obvious question: When I’m finished with the book, will I have an opinion about the “food fight”?

Answer: Certainly. By then I’ll know something about the issues, ideas, and events that led to this moment in American history, and I’ll have enough facts to make an informed judgment about this debate and to take a stance on it.

Put another way, I’ll be a more educated, informed citizen. With luck, you’ll read my book and you, too, will have enough information to make your own judgment. And you, too, will be a more informed citizen. At least that’s my hope.

The Politics of Food and the Historian's Work: When the Twain Shall Meet, Part 2 of 3

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three 

Frankly, it’s painful to watch this conflict unfold. The issues involved are extraordinarily complex, they are global in nature, and involve the lives of billions of people. Unfortunately, that complexity is obscured by the way in which the public debate is taking place.

On one side are committed, passionate grassroots activists, many of whom are focused on what they regard as a "food crisis," for which they propose various solutions.  (*1)

On the other side are people who produce the food. They're hindered in part by their own diversity: There is no single “farm” voice, no single “producer” voice, and as a result it’s hard for food producers to present a coherent defense of the attack on it. (*2)

On one side is a vehement offense ("modern farming is evil and so is corporate food"), on the other a disorganized, bewildered defense ("we're feeding the people of the world! how can we be evil?"), all of it spiced with hefty doses of glib, ignorant chatter that insult one side or the other. (*3)

Lost, and nearly invisible, in the middle are the hundreds of thousands of people --- chemists, biologists, agronomists, economists, etc. --- who have been studying issues of sustainability, global food production, and the like for decades. (I get the distinct impression that many of the antagonists on both sides are blissfully unaware of the history of the "sustainability" issue.)

These are people working in public and private institutions, working with farmers and food manufacturers alike. (Much of their research, it should be noted, is, in this country, taxpayer-funded.) Unfortunately, much of what they have to say is lost amidst the noise.

Result? The public discussion over the modern food system has become so politicized, and its participants so polarized, that people who learn that I'm writing a book about the history of meat assume that I must be "working" for one side or the other. That I intend to either defend big corporations, or write a diatribe against “factory meat.”

Not true. My “agenda” is simple: to explore what it means to be an American. “Meat” is simply a vehicle for doing so.

That’s it. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end of my agenda. I’m not out to “get” one side or the other. I’m not assuming that one side is right and the other side is wrong.

I’m only  interested in exploring the long view of the big picture. I’m trying to figure out “what happened” and why in hopes of furthering my understanding of who we are as a people and a nation. It’s what I did with my other three books. It’s what I do. It's what other historians do.

Sadly, some people don’t believe that. To this day, many “beer geeks” believe that one of the “corporate brewers” paid me to write the beer book. That’s not true, but since I didn’t toe the “party line” on the subject of beer (Big Beer is evil. Small Beer is saintly), it follows that I MUST be in the pay of the corporations.

Next: Where the historian and the debate finally meet

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*1: The phrase “food crisis” is itself interesting. It’s a loaded term --- akin to “pro choice” and “pro life” --- that is used to commandeer and define the terms of the debate.

*2: You’re thinking, “Wait! The “food establishment” is big corporations. Surely they can defend themselves.” Easier said than done. Big food corporations, for example, simply ignore the assault as not worth their time, leaving the troops on the ground --- farmers --- to defend themselves. Or, more typically, they aim toward more "ecologically correct" foods by mining all that research being carried out in universities and other laboratories.

*3: For a prime example, see this essay by Nicholas Kristof in a recent issue of the New York Times. It's been awhile since I've read anything quite so inane. No surprise, the many of the nation's hardworking farmers took offense.

The Politics of Food and the Historian's Work: When the Twain Shall Meet, Part 1 (*1)

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three  This three-part rumination is prompted by a comment from Tim Beauchamp, who blogs at Open Fermenter and who I follow on Twitter. (He provides excellent Twitter content, by the way. None of this “I’m at the grocery store now” crap from him!) For some reason, today he complimented me in a tweet and ended with:

She may be the Upton Sinclair Jr. of today. (*2)

I was touched by his sweet words in the rest of his tweet (modesty prevents me from including those), but --- I gotta say something about the “Upton Sinclair” business. (Tim, this is NOT an attack on you. No way, no how.) He inadvertently hit a nerve. And proved a point that I’ve been wanting to comment on:

That the current “food fight” has become so heated, so contentious that people assume that because I’m writing about meat, I must have an agenda.

So, Tim, thanks for prompting me to get busy writing a blog series that I’d been putting off. (The next beer’s on me.)

I’ve mentioned before, I’m writing a history of meat in modern America (c. 1870-1990). I spend most of my days digging through primary materials, hunting for information, trying to figure out “what happened” and then writing about what I learn.

But as part of my research, I’m also learning as much as I can about current agricultural issues, our existing food system, government food policies, and the like. That’s been an eye-opener. I had no idea how politicized these topics were.

Sure, I knew there were recurrent debates over, for example, farm subsidies. Over food tariffs and export quotes. Yes, I knew about the conflict unfolding here in the midwest over land use: Should large feedlots be allowed to exist? What kinds of controls ought to regulate their wastes? How can we reconcile the rights of homeowners with farmers?

I was, however, more-or-less oblivious to the other food fight: The one between the nation’s food producers --- farmers and manufacturers --- and the people who want to dismantle the existing food production system and replace it with one that is more “sustainable” (preferably more “organic”). (*3)

Next: My "agenda" __________

*1: No pun intended. Honest.

*2: Upton Sinclair was a committed socialist whose intent with The Jungle was the reveal the misery of factory working conditions. As he himself said (and I'm paraphrasing), he aimed for the nation's heart and accidentally hit its stomach.

*3: More accurately: I wasn't completely oblivious to the issues or the debate, but I sure didn't know how, um, heated it had become.

"Mad Men," "Far From Heaven," and the Nature of Social Change

Frank Rich has a terrific essay in today's Times op-ed section. (Well, okay, he writes for that section most Sundays, and most of the time his essay's are terrific).

The short version, if you don't want to read the whole thing, is this: Forget Woodstock. If you want to find an era of social and cultural upheaval, and one that, in many ways, mirrors our own season/era of discontent/uncertainty, look at the early 1960s, the same era explored in the AMC series "Mad Men." (The third season of which debuts tonight.) (*1) I

agree. "Mad Men" is fascinating on many levels, but what's most interesting is seeing an era of immense turbulence play out in the confines of a Madison Avenue ad agency. As Rich points out, we know what's about to happen to these men and women; we know bra burning, war demonstrations, and the Stonewall riots lie just ahead.

But these characters are, of course, completely unaware of that.

Which was precisely what I found so fascinating about the film "Far From Heaven." When the film came out in 2002, reviewers mostly focused on the film's "authenticity" and the costumes, and the way the film's "look" mirrored that of the technicolor glossies of the 1950s.

As far as I was concerned, they completely missed the point of a brilliant film (which, as a result, didn't get the attention it deservered). This was a film about how eras of profound social and cultural are born. If I remember correctly, the film is set in 1958. I

won't bore you with the synopsis (you can read that for yourself), but the plot revolves around the characters' struggles' with racial, sexual, and personal issues. In the course of the film, they they make decisions about how to resolve those issues. They opt for change rather than misery because the change makes more moral sense than the status quo.

Put another way, the tensions they're experiencing seem to them to be the result of moral values that no longer seem to make sense. Or, as Yeats put it "The center cannot hold." They have NO idea that in another decade, their small decisions will produce events like Stonewall and Woodstock. Bra burnings and the march on Washington.

That's how change begins: Ordinary people of the kind portrayed in the film make small, seemingly insignificant, decisions about how to live their lives. Then others, unconnected to them and living in other places, do the same. And as thousands and then millions of people make the same kinds of choices, well --- from decisions and choices come change: Stonewall. Selma. Woodstock War protests.

So . . . my words of wisdom on a Sunday afternoon. And now? Back to work.

______________

*1: I got hooked on "Mad Men" after a friend told me about it. I bought the first season on dvd, but managed to get my act together to record the second season when AMC re-aired it this past spring. So I"m caught up and plan to record the third season as it happens. That's the plan anyway.

Wal-Mart Accelerates Move Toward "Ecological Intelligence"

A few weeks ago, I wrote a series of blog entries about Daniel Goleman's new book Ecological Intelligence.  

One of his main points, and the jumping-off place for my reflections on it, was his argument that it's possible to create product barcodes that tell consumers the true "ecological" cost of any given product. Only that, he argues, will prod consumers to begin thinking and acting green on the scale necessary to change the trajectory of climate change and ecological decline.

Apparently Wal-Mart agrees. The company announced that it will begin requiring all of its suppliers to include a full ecological history/cost analysis for all of its products, and in a form that consumers can use while they're standing in the store deciding what to buy.

The full report is in today's Wall Street Journal, but it's a subscription-only report, so I found this abbreviated version from another online sources here and here.

As Thomas Friedman point out in The World Is Flat, Wal-Mart isn't a store so much as it is a goods-delivery system, the largest one in the world. If it's prepared to demand that suppliers provide point-of-sale information on ecological costs/benefits/pricing, then we've taken one giant step toward the kind of "consumer revolution" that Goleman suggests is necessary.

Hey! I finally worked (an admittedly oblique) reference to the moon landing (fortieth anniversary coming right up) into my blog.

Historical Context for the Debate Over "Local" Food, Part 2 of 2

Part One

Now here we are in 2009, and people who are [justifiably] discontented with the nation’s food supply system want to return to "local" food production.  But that desire may, indeed, likely will, produce conflicts, big ones, and over more than just urban hen houses.

Consider the variant of that conflict that has been playing out for years in the midwest.  In the mid-twentieth century, meat packing moved out of the "stockyard cities," like Chicago, and into more isolated rural packing factories. Iowa, where I live, for example, is dotted with these packing plants, as are other midwestern states.

The rationale for these isolated packing facilities is that they are near or adjacent to the huge feedlots that provide the livestock for the plant. The proximity of the one to the other, and the relatively low cost of rural land are two factors that allow packers to produce meat with a low retail price --- ground beef, for example, that costs about two dollars a pound at the store.

But as home ownership rates have soared, especially since the 1980s, developers have converted more "farmland" to housing developments. Many of those developments sit just a few miles from giant feedlots, large packing houses, or, most often, both.

Result? Conflict: Homeowners want their 2500-square-foot houses, but when the wind is right, they’re reminded that just a few miles away stands a massive hog feedlot or beef packing plant. They demand that the meat operations move --- although no one can agree on just where those ought to go.

No surprise, of course, homeowners who complain about the proximity of these facilities are also the first to complain when the price of meat rises. They don’t seem to understand that those giant, rural operations, plus taxpayers’ agricultural subsidies, are what allow us to enjoy low-priced filets and bacon.

So --- the idea of "local food" is great, and I think many Americans would agree that the nation’s food system needs some, uh, readjustment. But if history is any judge, getting from here to there won’t be easy.

But hey! It’ll be fascinating to watch and take part in. You can tell your grandchildren: "I was there during the great food wars of the early 21st century."

In any case, there are many, many blogs, websites, and twitter users who are busy debating the logistics, ethics, and business of a "new" food system. If you're interested, seek them out and join the discussion.