Thinking through Pollan’s Farmer in Chief: The Title
Given the rest of his article, I assume that Pollan intends his presumptive title for the President of the United States–farmer in chief–to contrast with the traditional role of Commander in Chief. And in offering the alternative, I assume he intends to set the productive, peaceful, domestic world of farming and food against the destructive, bellicose, international theater of war. Certainly later in the article Pollan focuses exclusively on the use of food for domestic consumption. If he mentions its role in international politics at all, it is in the context of the need for American self sufficiency in food.
Yet historically the contrast between commander in chief and farmer in chief has never been sharp, nor farming a purely domestic matter. In saying this I am not pointing a finger at the US. The Biblical references to swords into plowshares and plowshares into swords alerts us to the fact that war and farming have never been polar opposites and grim as it may be food policy and foreign policy had always gone hand in hand.
But to return to the US, in the nineteenth century, the exploitation of America’s vast and productive farmlands went hand in hand with the America’s foreign policy, used to produce foreign currency and to promote America’s interests. The sale of tobacco and cotton to Britain brought money into the young Republic. American cotton was essential to the Lancashire cotton mills so central to the English industrial revolution. Later in the century, wheat was added to the list of exports to Britain. The money that poured into the US was essential to the economic growth of the nation.
In the twentieth century, World War I, II and the Cold War all had their agricultural aspects. Hoover’s hunger map following the First World War was a dramatic demonstration of the realization that food aid could also be a policy too. Lend Lease in the Second World War sent shipments of wheat to beleaguered Britain and kept the Allied war effort going. Following the War when it looked as if there would be world wide starvation, Congress passed Public Law 480, a law that was perceived as brilliantly dealing with the problem of surplus US production, world hunger, and international policy at one go. The grain went to support friendly nations and to win the friendship of wavering ones while ensuring it did not just rot in granaries. This act remained embodied in successive Farm Bills until 1996. The failure of the Soviet Union to produce enough grain to feed its population meant that in 1963 it was forced to buy 150 million bushels of wheat at world market price of $250 million dollars from the US, a decisive point in the Cold War. (Just this year, Iran purchased wheat.)
America continues to be able to produce huge quantities of agricultural products, including food. That it will abandon using that fact in the service of international politics seems, shall we say, improbable. Farmer in chief and commander in chief are one and the same, not alternatives.
The title is additionally interesting to consider in the sense that names hold meaning.
Lately – even beyond the idea of chefs being the ‘new rock stars’ – which has been edging the meaning of the word ‘chef’ and the job itself into different directions-in-general for the past thirty years or so at least (one wonders where that started. Alice Waters? Julia Child? Neither one who actually was a working chef as the job description actually runs themselves?) – I’ve been having a sense that ‘farmers’ are on the slate to be the ‘new rock stars’.
President symbolized by a sense of Rock Star is just so much cooler than President symbolized by a sense of Commander – and more gentle in face. Rock Stars are all about rock and roll which is so cool! Farmers are about growing, which is so emotionally warming. Commanders. Well.
Commanders definitely lack that egalitarian grace.
Interesting comment Karen. But what kind of farmers? Not the run of the mill guys who get out there to grow maize. They tend to be stigmatized as pawns of agribusiness. Farmers increasingly in the popular imagination mean those who grow vegetables. This is an interesting inversion of the traditional hierarchy where vegetable growers were simply truck farmers (US) or market gardeners (UK).
Yes, vegetable farmers. But there’s more to it than that.
One has to be in the Wendell Berry mode to qualify.
And it’s okay (currently) if one only grows baby vegetables. As a matter of fact it’s a ‘plus’. Particularly if they are little zucchini or pattypan squashes. Growers of zucchini blossoms get extra points. But I suspect that will change soon and those who grow baby vegetables will be on the outs. Growing rugged big vegetables will be a better qualifier.
Farmer MacGregor will not make the cut, unfortunately.
Karen, I love your comments. You make me feel tentative and mild.
But I also agree. And I find it worrying that there is no idea whatever of what it is to be a farmer. Nobody’s fault. Just a chance in demographic.
Sorry for coming late into the game. I’ve been really busy with work.
I’ve read the article several times. I don’t even know where to begin. It reads better as a rousing speech. He’s tackling a lot of issues and piling them here and there into heaps. And making baseline assumptions using fuzzy, shifting definitions.
Overall I’d like to see more writers who “tackle” these “issues” directly confront the *politics and economics of food production; as well as the increased costs of human labor that “small” requires, not just on the production side, but to the end consumer.
I’m curious how he will continue to flesh out these ideas in particular.
1. “One Big Idea: most of the problems our food system faces today are because of its reliance on fossil fuels, and to the extent that our policies wring the oil out of the system and replace it with the energy of the sun, those policies will simultaneously improve the state of our health, our environment and our security.”
2. “Post-oil agriculture will need a lot more people engaged in food production — as farmers and probably also as gardeners. ”
3. “National security also argues for preserving every acre of farmland we can and then making it available to new farmers.”
4. “To change our children’s food culture, we’ll need to plant gardens in every primary school, build fully equipped kitchens, train a new generation of lunchroom ladies (and gentlemen) who can once again cook and teach cooking to children. We should introduce a School Lunch Corps program that forgives federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program.”
5. “Indeed, it enlists all of us in this great cause by turning food consumers into part-time producers, reconnecting the American people with the American land and demonstrating that we need not choose between the welfare of our families and the health of the environment — that eating less oil and more sunlight will redound to the benefit of both.”
*In particular American capitalism, corporatism and globalization
Mark Bittman’s article from the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12wwln-lede-t.html?ex=1381377600&en=f73fc073d57d1a85&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook
“Until 50 years ago, of course, every household had at least one person who took food seriously every day. But from the 1950s on, the majority of the population began contentedly cooking less and less, eating out more and more and devouring food that was worse and worse, until the horrible global slop served by fast-food and “casual dining” chains came to dominate the scene. One result: an unprecedented rise in obesity levels and a not-unrelated climb in health-care costs.”
Well, it all began when mom started working and there was nobody left to care about what the family ate…
Is he really implying that without “this one person” to care about what the family ate the inevitable path was gross consumption of the worst products of culinary modernism?
Neither Pollan or Bittman resolve the domestic servitude issues of consumers becoming “co-producers”.
Both interesting points, Ji Young, and as you know points to which I am sympathetic. I want to come back to both of them.
Yes, food/farming = war/foreign policy = food/farming…
I have been on the ‘receiving’ end of PL480 (Public Law 480) for a number of years. I.e., projects that I have been / am involved with that *must* use left-over crops from the US in order to qualify for very much needed food aid assistance for seriously starving folk. Often times the products are not what local folk can eat (hey, but can beggars be choosers?! – goes the bureaucratic response…).
Over decades, without local compliance, ‘we’ have been gradually changing local food preferences from indigenous and highly (disease/drought) resistant food crops – such as colocasia, millet and sorghum – to highly refined and fragile crops – primarily maize & milk powder & corn oil – the staples of PL480 and, in the case of the EU, powdered milk food-dumping.
However, it is now becoming increasingly understood that this food-dumping has deleterious effects on production and marketing of local crops – both in areas undergoing crisis as well as in neighbouring areas where humanitarian organizations could purchase foodstuffs that not only are more agreeable to local palates and (if grown) to local climates, but as an important by-product also stimulate production & marketing in these areas. Some NGOs – OXFAM and others – are now encouraging this latter strategy and are also actively lobbying Washington Powers to completely de-link food aid from crops grown in the US.
For decades, food has been used as an often (locally) disagreeable carrot to promote Western foreign policy goals. My first experience with PL480 was in SE Egypt / NE Sudan, in the Red Sea Hills & Red Sea area, where I had a project working with Beja and Ababdi tribes in the region. This was a USAID funded project, and one stipulation of the grant was the necessity of quarterly distributions of PL480 foodstuffs – enriched cornmeal and corn oil.
Getting some 100s tons of these products from Cairo down to the project area every 3 months – a minimum of 18 hours driving and most over rough and roadless desert – was daunting in itself. Lack of fuel, repair and security meant that I had to truck down fuel and mechanics, and parley with local military to provide guard duty. Once, a fully-loaded lorry simply disappeared into the desert. We never did find out what happened [imagine explaining *that* to a bureaucrat back in Washington!).
Then, the distribution process. I’d get the word out several weeks before anticipated distribution, because folks coming from distant camps would need about 20 day’s roundtrip [via camels]. Because of distances and lack of accessibility, one or a few men would come with camels to take back supplies for a number of families, bringing their ‘ration’ cards. Of course, there was no way to know what was eventually distributed to whom. In the end, the food distribution process served to strengthen the power and authority of tribal elite and enrich the pockets of local entrepreneurs, as mentioned below.
And how about the food itself? The maize meal was ‘enriched’, meaning that it had ‘funny brown things’ (as the locals said) mixed in the meal. People were really horrified because also, it was yellow maize, and only white maize had ever been consumed (and, not very much of that!). Trying to convince local shaykhs and religious imams that the meal really was fit for human consumption was an ongoing task and much did go to the livestock because of local fears. (This is when the esoteric came in very handily: reciting Qasidas from the Mu’allaqaat – famed pre-Islamic poetry that I’d learned while a grad student – proved an important entree in convincing locals that at least my own motivations were based on some understanding of local conditions…). Ah, but the corn oil was also viewed suspiciously, though not as gravely as with the meal. Over the months, I saw how local entrepreneurs manipulated these fears to pay very small sums to purchase these commodities – which they resold in the the markets in Aswan or in Sudan.
Little mention is made, in the discourse on food aid, about its disquieting political underbelly. And that’s where an important component of food aid politics and its links back to food aid foreign policy are to be found. Helping ‘poor people’ is a very political process. If at all possible, I do not support PL480 food assistance and its EU-counterparts (which often = dairy products, little use for populations that are highly lactose intolerant), but favour helping to develop more robust local food and livestock production and marketing practices together with supportive local policy formulation.
Pollan and others active in the emerging local food system movement might do well to bring subsistence-oriented farmers and herders from Africa as consultants to the new administration in order to train policy makers, educators and others involved in agricultural matters about the realities of food aid as well as local-level food production and marketing – especially the political and economic aspects – from an African perspective..