Historian. Author. Ranter. Idea Junkie.
This a blog. Sort of. I rarely use it anymore.
Indeed, nitwittery may end up sending me screaming right over the edge. Or maybe today I just like the word "nitwittery."
In any case, breathless excitement today in the "profood" world over a new report that livestock (read: cattle) and therefore meat-eaters are to blame for all the world's woes.
But please, see this for a more balanced, nuanced view.
Guess which version is gonna set the world afire?
As you may have noticed, posts have been few/far between because I'm immersed in writing the new book (and my poor brain has balked at being spread so thin). But I can't let this go past unnoticed. "This" being a post over at Sam Fromartz's ChewsWise blog. (*1)
Although the blog is Fromartz's, this particular blog entry was written by Lisa M. Hamilton, who is the author of Deeply Rooted.
A bit of background: The midwest has had an exceptionally wet October. Here in Iowa, October was one of the wettest months on record. This is bad news for farmers because they can't harvest crops in wet weather. When the weather stays wet and the crops stay in the ground, they run the risk of losing those crops.
According to Hamilton, the problem is not the weather, but that modern farming
relies on a precise set of conditions: cheap fuel, ample water, stable climate . . .
The implication is that, bare minimum, this "unstable" weather has caused the system to go haywire.
Really? Weather is by nature (no pun intended) unstable and generally cyclical. Has this been a wet fall? Yep. Has it happened before? Yep. Is there a chance that soon we'll have a too-dry summer, which will also wreak havoc in the fields? Yep.
Because that's what weather does. That's what weather always does: it runs in cycles. I can rattle off examples of disastrous crop years past, when farmers scrambled to figure out how to cope with too much rain, too little rain, rain at the wrong time.
Moreover, she shows a short-sighted knowledge of the history of crop breeding. She writes that
Rather than focus solely on yield or specific items such as drought-tolerance or herbicide resistance, we need varieties that can flex along with whatever conditions they encounter.
I don't think Hamilton understands that for the past two centuries, American farmers have bred corn and wheat varieties for climate, soil, terrain, and just about anything else you can think of that might affect it, including drought and excessive moisture.
Yes, you read that correctly: several centuries.
American farmers today use herbicides and pesticides and various patented seeds. But those tools are just contemporary examples of the long, long history of crop experimentation and manipulation. For two centuries, farmers have designed crops that will "flex with whatever conditions they encounter" --- precisely because they encountered different sets of conditions.
Of course crop breeding isn't perfect, and farmers have no choice but to aim at averages: What is the climate in, say, South Carolina, usually like? What kinds of wheat will grow in Kansas? In general, what kind of climate can we expect in Iowa? How can I make a variety of corn or wheat that will grow well in most years?
Farmers can't, however, manage cycles of weather that happen, well, cyclically. No, I'm not saying there's not a climate crisis. I'm saying, based on fifty-plus years of living in the midwest, that weather follows clear and regular cycles. Farmers know that. They expect it. They plan accordingly. But they can't nail the mark every time. They can't adjust corn varieties fast enough to adjust to short-term weather patterns or even odd patterns like the one we're experiencing this year. Nor, obviously, can they know when the cycle will shift, at least not with any great precision.
Put another way, I suspect many people will blame this result's of this year's (likely) bad harvest on "corporate" and "industrial" farming --- and they'll do so because they haven't taken the time to look at the long view of the big picture of farming's history.
I reiterate what I've said here before: I'm not anti-good food. I'm not pro-"Corporate Farming." I am, however, a supporter of clear thinking, reason, and knowledge. And I tend to be a Ranty McPanty when it comes to ill-informed "information." Hamilton's essay, which is otherwise well-written, is yet another example of gross generalization and hasty thinking that marks so much of what's being tossed around these days in the name of the "food crisis."
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*1: Sam is the author of Organic, Inc., a superb book that has not gotten the attention it deserves, especially not from the "locavore/profood" community.
There's really not much new under the sun, as evidenced by this article. (Warning: If you're squeamish, you may want to take a pass.)
Nineteenth-century Americans routinely sold, bought, and ate "bob veal." Many people regarded it as a delicacy; others were horrified at the idea. In either case, outrage over the notion of "bob veal" surfaced with yawn-inducing regularity. As it has, apparently, right in the here and now of the twenty-first century.
And it's not just bob veal that got Americans cranked up. Every so often, someone would launch a crusade about slaughterhouse cruelty, about its impact on animals and humans. Etc.
Remember the uproar in early 2008 about "inhumane" practices at a California slaughterhouse? (I commented on it at the time. You can read that here and here.) As I noted then, there's nothing new there. Dig around in nineteenth century newspapers, you'll find hundreds of examples of that same story.
It all comes down to choices: If you want meat, well, there's a price to pay. And there's no way to produce affordable meat without, well, skinning a few calves. (Yes, for those who are wondering, I do eat meat.)
Tip o' the mug to Chris Raines for pointing me toward this story. He blogs here. Follow him on Twitter, too: @ITweetMeat.
This is the kind of crap that drives me batty. The other day I was reading something (can't remember now what it was) that led me to The Kitchen Garden Network. According to the site's "About" page, the people at KGN are focused on
the politics and economic forces that influence what reaches the food outlets where we shop for what we eat.
Okay. Fine. If they'd stopped there, I wouldn't have had the urge to bang my head against the wall. Instead, the site's founder goes on to note that
Up until the 1970’s a large portion of our food came from local sources . . . ’ Roadside stands, farmer’s markets, local co-ops and the like were a given. Organic produce had not yet become commonly available. By the 1980’s everything changed. The political climate altered the agricultural landscape in many dramatic and detrimental ways. Many farmers went out of business and farms began to be sold off at a rapid pace.
Oh. Ohhhh..... My aching head. Where should I start to correct the errors? (*1)
Should I begin by changing "1970s" to "1870"? Or explain that prior to the 1970s, few Americans bought their food at "roadside stands, farmer's markets [or] local co-ops"? Or dissect the claim that somehow in the 1980s, "everything changed"?
Or just explain that when I read stuff such uninformed nonsense, first I cringe, and then I worry? Because the current debate about food is being fueled by this kind of inane, inaccurate "information." Worse, substantive discussion about the global food system, climate change, and the like is in danger of being derailed by a lack of insight, context, and history.
It drives historians like me crazy. And frankly, it scares the crap out of me. (If too many cooks ruin the soup, too many ignorant minds and chattering mouths destroy the debate.) So --- maybe I should choose door number three and get back to work on my current project. Because the "food fight" needs a historian's input.
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*1: Mind you, I'm not picking on the people at Kitchen Garden Network. I could have used dozens of other, similar examples. This one just happened to be handy.
If I weren't so hellbent, obsessed, and otherwise focused on finishing this chapter, I'd come up with a response to the (mostly idiotic) "food" edition of last Sunday's New York Times magazine. Or I'd say something about this, this, or this (the last one is a bit unnerving in its, um, nannystate-ism).
But . . . I am hellbent, obsessed, and otherwise focused on finishing this chapter. So I won't. Read the stuff for yourself and, I dunno, talk amongst yourselves.
Put another way: people who shop at Sam’s Club for “inexpensive” meat are saving nothing. They could buy fresh beef at their local grocery store and pay the same price. They only need to add the labor of shaping the meat into burgers.
But many Americans, maybe even most of us, don’t think that way. We’d rather shop for a “bargain,” even if that bargain is wrapped in expensive three-color printed cardboard and a lot of plastic. (I’m assuming the meat itself was shrink-wrapped in plastic before being placed in its cardboard container.) Cargill knows that Americans love bargains and that they love convenience. (“Look! Someone else has already shaped this meat into patties. Whew! I don’t have to do that job.”)
But Cargill also knows that Americans rarely want to pay the true price for convenience; that is, the price of labor and materials that make "convenience" possible. Still, that's what Americans want and so that's what Cargill provides: “convenient” meat at the same price as in the grocery store.
But the only way to do that --- I repeat: the ONLY WAY TO DO THAT --- is by cutting costs on the product. Where to cut the price? By cobbling together enough “ground beef” from whichever vendor will sell its wastes to Cargill. Put another way: When someone picks up a package of pre-formed hamburgers at Sam’s Club and looks at the price, do they honestly believe they’re getting high-quality meat? Any person with any kind of intelligence --- any kind of intelligence --- would have to know that packaged meat that costs the same as unpackage fresh meat isn’t the same meat.
My point is this: Cargill is selling what Americans want to buy. I am saddened by the story of what happened to this young woman. I don’t blame her for being angry. (*1)
Americans need to stop lying to themselves about their food. We want inexpensive food, but we don’t want to pay full price. It’s too easy to blame greedy corporate bastards and/or farmers and/of the government. Or all three. My guess is that if Americans actually started paying for high-quality, safe food, and the price of hamburger rose to its real price --- somewhere between $15 and $20 dollars a pound --- the screaming over that situation would drown out the moaning we’re hearing over this tale of woe in the New York Times.
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*1: It is a measure of both her youth and her anger that her response to what happened is, literally, “Why me?” (Her words, quoted in the news story.) The implication is that it would have been okay if it had happened to someone else.
Website of Maureen Ogle, author and historian. Books include Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer; In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America; and Key West: History of An Island of Dreams.
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