No Neutrality Allowed

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This is am image of Kyle David Kipp The meat book is still about ten months away from publication, and already, thanks to Pink Slime, it's another version of the beer book. Not that I'm surprised. Disheartened, but not surprised.

Let me explain: When the beer book came out, I was criticized by many in the craft beer community because I had not written an all-out attack on the "big" brewers. Critics assumed that I MUST be on the big brewers' "side." (As if there were sides to be taken....) And, worse, that I'd been paid by a big brewer to write the book. (Nothing could have been further from the truth.)

I didn't write Ambitious Brew in order to "take sides." I wrote the book because I thought the history of beer in America would enrich my understanding of what it means to be an American. Period. End of story. It never occurred to me to "take sides."

So, too, the meat book: I wrote it because I didn't know anything about meat, its place in American society, how it's made or why. I spent researching the book, and, no surprise, I learned a great deal about meat and its place in American history and society.

When the Pink Slime uproar began, I thought that  knowledge could add to our understanding of Pink Slime. In my mind, the PS uproar smacked of conclusion-jumping and fear-mongering, and I hoped that if people had some facts, they might slow down and rethink the conclusions to which they'd jumped.

Silly me. (Stupid me?) The pro-PS crowd immediately concluded I was "one of them," and the anti-PS crowd concluded that I was a shill for Big Ag and Corporate America.

Neither is true --- but the food "debate" is so mired in hostility that neutrality is (apparently) not an option.

Live. Learn.

Making Meat, the Writer's Pitfall, and Online Interaction With Readers

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Finally, a good example of the way website/online interaction can inform a writer's work! (*1)

A couple of days ago, I commented on a New York Times op-ed piece about land use and meat supply. You can read my comment here, but what’s relevant is the point I made about farm land: Farmers compete with city folks for land. What’s farmland now may, in ten years, contain houses or office buildings, a shift in land use typically identified as “urban sprawl.”

A person identifying herself as Louisa commented on that blog entry. Here is her comment:

Not quite…it’s not land vs. urban spaces, which are actually pretty efficient, but land vs. SUBurban spaces, with all the sprawl that entails. I live in a small town surrounded by farmland. Every year, more farmland is bought up by developers to turn into another grossly oversized subdivision filled with 4,000 sq ft houses- whose owners then turn around and lobby for nuisance laws that are aimed at, among other things, farm smells and sounds. After moving out into the country because it’s “so picturesque.” So yes, we do need to have the conversation about what kind of agricultural system we want. But we also need to have a conversation about what kind of living space we want, and whether we want to do more to protect farmland from becoming suburban sprawl.

I am grateful that Louisa took the time to read and comment (more grateful than she probably knows!), but as important, her comment reminded me that I need to beware of the writer’s pitfall: Don’t assume readers know what you mean. I’ve spent so many years working on the meat book that I tend to write/think in shorthand and make assumptions about what readers know and don’t know. In this case, I should have been more clear about the relationship between farming methods and urban societies.

First to her comment: She’s correct: The more houses, office buildings, and gas stations we build, the more likely we are to use what was once farmland. As I type this, I’m sitting in a house that is sitting on land that was part of a farm just twenty years ago. So, yes, I’m aware of the “urban sprawl” part of the equation. (And, because I live in Iowa, I’m also aware that, as Louisa points out, when people move to houses like mine, they often complain about rural smells and sounds.) (*2)

But I failed to make a more subtle distinction. Americans have chosen to live “in town” rather than “in the country.” Nearly 80% of us live in “municipalities” of one kind or another. Only two percent of us work as “farmers.” So that two percent has to figure out how to make food as efficiently as possible. If we shut down all the Ames, Iowas, razed the “sprawl,” and forced everyone to move to, say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, we’d still have the same equation: Nearly all of us would rely on a tiny minority to make our food.

But even if the agricultural two percent suddenly had access to farmland once devoted to houses and office buildings, it’s unlikely they would decide to send their cattle, hogs, and chickens out into the “pasture” to range freely.

Why? Because those are labor-intensive forms of agricultural production, and we’d still have just 2% of the population making the food. That’s a primary reason that farmers back in the 1950s embraced confinement as a way to raise livestock: they faced a serious labor shortage. They didn’t have enough “hands” to raise livestock the “old-fashioned” way. If they wanted to keep farming, they had to figure out how to do it without additional labor.

Why was there a labor shortage? Because after World War II, farmers’ sons and daughters decided they wanted to live in town, not on the farm. So --- as those sons and daughters left the farms, they became part of the “urban majority” who relied on farmers to produce food for them. But those farmers, in turn, were left short-handed and in need of ways to make their operations more efficient. (*3)

So when I write about the connection between life in an “urban” society and systems of farming, I need to be more clear about what I mean. City folks are not farmers. They rely on others to grow food for them. In an urban society like ours, most people have CHOSEN not to be food producers. The people who do produce the food are then faced with a quandary: How to make enough food for everyone?

It’s perhaps worth repeating the point I made in that blog entry: When a people choose to live in an urban society rather than an agrarian one, they also enjoy the benefit (luxury) of time for intellectual work. The farming two percent make it possible for the rest of us to sit around and invent iPads and smart phones, blog, write critiques of the food system, or whatever. We can engage in "other" work because we don't spend time growing or preserving food.

Again, the physical form of the urban setting is irrelevant. Sure, if we all moved to Manhattan, we'd free up land for farming. But it's unlikely we'd have more FARMERS. We'd still have 98% of the population living in an urban setting, and two percent making the food.

So. Memo to self: in the manuscript of what is becoming a “real” book, I need to be wary of skipping A so I can get to B.

Again, many thanks to Louisa for her help. __________________ *1: We writers hear this all the time: We can engage with readers! (Yes, of course.) We can use feedback from readers to shape our work! Umm. Okay? Maybe? Not sure. And I've been one of the doubters. But now I "get" how interaction can, in fact, shape my work.

*2: Indeed, that conflict was one of the first ideas that came to me when I decided to write this book. See this blog entry I wrote for Powell’s Books six years ago.

*3: Another point is worth mentioning: Even those “young” people who chose to stay on the farm were no longer willing to work 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. They were even more willing than their fathers and mothers to embrace labor-saving tools and systems of production, including livestock confinement.

Ohdeargod. Apologies for the RSS stream screwup

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Jack Curtain was kind enough to alert me to what I had not realized: A torrent of old posts landed in the Google Reader rss stream yesterday. That wasn't intentional. As some of you know, I just moved the website to Wordpress.com.

As is always the case, the move created some broken links in old posts. Yesterday I sat down to fix those (a tedious, boring task).

Unbeknownst to me, Wordpress zipped every. single. fix. out into the ether --- and into Google reader as a "new" post. All 90 or so of said posts.

I apologize. I don't know why that happened or how I could have stopped it. I didn't put new dates on the posts; all I did was "upate," so why they went out as "new" is not clear to me. But I also can't figure out why Wordpress keeps sending posts to Facebook even after I tell it NOT TO DO SO. --- so apparently Wordpress either has some goofball bugs (which seems unlikely) or --- there are some tricks up its sleeve that I've not yet caught on to.

In any case, THANK YOU, Jack, for taking time to let me know. And to the rest of you: My apologies.

"Death to Word"

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Death to Word? So suggests a writer for Slate. My question is: Why the HELL does anyone use Word in the first place?

If there is a clunkier, stupider, less elegant word processing program out there, I want to see it. (I don't want to USE it. I just want to see it.) (*1)

Way way way back in the day -- back in 1985 --- Word was a lovely, elegant program. Intuitive, easy to use. Smart. I loved it.

Then one day --- it wasn't. It was this incredibly, well, stupid program that was hard to use and made zero sense to me. I was annoyed. I even called up Redmond to ask "what gives, people?" (This was back when you could call Microsoft and get a real person on the phone. At that time the company had, what?, 15 employees?)

A nice guy at the other end of the line told me, with a sigh, that, yes, the company (read: Gates) had re-invented Word and this was the new version.

I've never used it since then, at least not intentionally. There are times I have to translate documents into Word format and it takes too long and causes me to swear too much.

So. Yes. Death to Word!

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*1: I read somewhere that that early version of Word was based on a program called Xywrite. I was not surprised to learn that the program I've been using since 1987, Nota Bene, is also based on Xywrite. NB is also intuitive, simple, elegant. (*2)

*2: For years, I resisted switching to a Mac, because NB was and is only available for PCs. But about a year ago, I thought "Doh! The really GOOD writing software is written for Macs! So switch, you idiot." So I'm waiting for the new iMacs to come out --- in June --- and then I will. And I will not be sad to say bye bye the world of the PC. I've used one since 1983, and owned one since '86, and they feel and behave like relics of that era.

James McWilliams, Meat, History, the "Contrarian" View, and Land Supply

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[UPDATE: Joel Salatin responded to McWilliams' essay with this post. It appeared first on Salatin's Facebook page, and then at Grist.] (How's THAT for a kitchen sink title?)

I'm a fan of James McWilliams, a historian whose last book was about our contemporary food system, but who has also written a brilliant book about the history of food in "early" America (that's the fancy term for the colonial era). He also writes op-ed pieces about contemporary food politics and system, and he's almost always on the "wrong" side --- so he's often referred to as a contrarian. (*1)

In any case, here he is in today's New York Times, pointing out that the more "natural" system of making meat isn't necessarily better than the existing "factory" system. In particular, he points out that it requires more land.

 If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

He's right, of course. And that's one of the aspects of our food system that critics rarely, perhaps never, mention: Where are the acres to raise all that livestock going to come from?

As I point out in my forthcoming book, one reason that the "factory" system of livestock production took hold, especially in the 1950s, was because of rising demand for what had been agricultural land. And, too, the demand for meat, especially beef, proved more than the existing western range could handle. (Commercial feedlots were the solution to both problems.)

Put another way: We Americans wanted cities more than we wanted "natural" farms. As a result, farmers could no longer enjoy the luxury of grazing stock on very expensive land. They had to farm "intensively" rather than "extensively."

That's an important point. And as I'm fond of pointing out, one reason that we have so many critics tapping away on their keyboards today is because the vast majority of us (nearly 80 percent) live in cities. And one fact about city folks so obvious that it's easy to overlook is this: They're city folks, not farmers. They rely on others (farmers) to produce  food. Because we city people aren't out toiling in the fields, we enjoy the luxury of time --- time to think, to criticize, to write.

So. Land for urban places? Or land for happy cattle and pigs? We can't "fix" the food system until we decide which is more important.

Which is one reason that I say: the only realistic way to solve the "problem" of the current food system is by re-thinking how, when, and why we eat meat.

And, yes, ohmygod, but I've missed blogging.................. SO happy to have some time to indulge!

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*1: A beautiful example of what Orwell had in mind about language and politics: when McWilliams is defined as a contrarian, the implication, of course, is that there's a received, "correct" view -- in this case that the existing "food system" is evil and that we should return to a "natural" system of making food. (*2)

*2: Which itself implies that somehow there used to be a more "natural" way of making food. Oh, if only people knew....