10 Ways to Learn More than Food Inc. Tells You
When I was in high school, the principal issued a call to action. If each of us would simply give up the the sweet roll (bun) that accompanied the mid-morning 1/3 pint of milk, we could do our bit to save the starving in Africa.
My sister refused, the only girl in the school to do so. Only 13 or 14 years old, she stood up in front of the assembled girls and said she would be quite happy to give 3d (or whatever a bun cost) to an African charity, that she thought this would be more use than denying the baker his usual trade, and that besides, she left home at 7:30 and needed something by 11 to keep her going. She tactfully omitted to mention that the school lunches were so unspeakable that the bun was her only food between leaving home and getting back at 5pm. I was so proud of her and so ashamed that I had simply bowed to majority pressure.
I’ve been thinking of that episode in the last couple of days in the run up to the release of the “documentary” Food Inc. Food is the new fur, as an article today puts it, the new celebrity cause. The hype increasingly means that it seems unthinkable not to support local, organic, etc etc. It’s white and black, white for the food activists, black for anyone who raises objections.
Indeed, in an effort to re-educate the blackest of the black–the “conventional farmer”–anyone who persuades this unwashed individual to see the movie gets a free copy of the book of the movie and Fast Food Nation thrown in as well, provided that is that the farmer will discuss the movie with a food politics blogger (the right kind of food politics blogger that is).
Fiddle with the words a bit and the message is the same as that at school all those years ago: then it was that only the the immoral would chomp on a bun instead of giving it up for the world’s starving, now it’s only the immoral who would defend conventional agriculture.
Still ashamed of my cowardice in school all those years ago, always nervous when the choices presented are black and white, long concerned the analysis that motivates the movie–“a cinematic mash-up of the best-selling investigative journalism books Fast Food Nation . . . and Omnivore’s Dilemma. . . is deeply flawed, I would like to stand up to this moral stampede.
That’s because, although the American food system is burdened with problems, I think the implicit program of Food Inc is worse. Not to put to fine a point on it, it scares me witless. And no, I haven’t yet seen the movie and don’t know when I will in Mexico. But I have been thinking about these issues for a long time.
Rather than rehearse old arguments, I thought I’d go through ten points I believe to be worth considering. We live in a complicated world and moments like this are perfect for trying to clarify one’s thoughts about big issues of politics, morality, philosophy etc. so that one can make one’s own decisions.
1. Be glad that finally food and farming are getting some attention, that canning and gardening and cheese making are soooo cool, that a very wide public is interested in learning more. This is a great moment to learn something about farming. You don’t have to just take what Food Inc tells you.
So many interesting possibilities.
Read blogs by farmers. Look at a few textbooks on farming. Look at some of the trade publications.
Ask your ag extension agent to help you see a farm. Farmer’s markets dont count. We’re talking about farmers who depend on the land for all their income (say a dairy of at least 500 cows, or maize over 1000 acres, or running cattle on even more land).
Learn to read the farm landscape when you drive, instead of seeing it as a blur. Road trips suddenly click into focus. What are the crops? When will they be harvested? Is the farmer a good one? We’re all smart shoppers (well, perhaps,), let’s become smart observers.
Seize the moment.
2. Think about title “Food Inc.” Inc is used as a slur word, intended to invoke an instinctive shudder. But hang on. Inc is just a reference to a corporation. Corporations are nifty ways of disentangling individuals and families from the businesses they run. Geez, even I am a corporation (or is the verb have?).
No corporation, dreadful problems of succession and inheritance. This messed up farmers and all other businesses for thousands of years until the corporation was invented in the late nineteenth century. Unincorporated farmers still have inheritance problems, take it from me. Nothing wrong with being a corporation in and of itself. Here are a couple of links to classic studies of the origin of the corporation.
In short, Inc is a put down of food only if the Incs in question are bad.
3. Figure out who is paying for Food Inc. Thanks to Ethicurean, my favorite food activist blog (even if I disagree with most of it) because it always gives references and details, the promotion is being handled by Participant Media, the company that also promoted Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. It’s headed by Jeff Skoll, founding President of eBay, and the Executive Vice President for Marketing is Buffy Shutt, formerly President of Marketing for Columbia Pictures.
I applaud their commitment to bring about “a more peaceful and prosperous global community.” I mean, who wouldn’t?
But that doesn’t mean that I have to agree with either their program of change or their strategies for implementing it.
And it does mean that you have a lot, and I mean a lot, of clout behind Food Inc. before you even get to investigating who is funding it as opposed to promoting it. Nothing wrong with that. Just don’t assume this is the little film maker against big, bad agribiz.
4. Give yourself a check list of words to get clear about. What does organic actually mean? What does “real food” mean? What does “conventional farmer” mean? What does “externalized cost” mean? What does “small farmer” mean? Is there as standard definition of “local?” What does “industrialized agriculture” mean? When were these terms invented? When were the practices behind them invented? Fast food, to take another example, has been with us since the first cities.
In my experience many of these terms (like so many we pick up because we read them in the media) either have political agendas behind them or have precise definitions that do not correspond to general understanding, or both.
Go to Joe Pastry for a week of straight talk on this. Or type these search words into my blog.
And while you are at it, think about whether big is BAD. It’s not necessarily so. Do I have to tell you that we really don’t want to be limited to doctors without pharmaceuticals, holidays in tents in the local park, and hand crafted air planes?
5. And while we’re at it, think about the other commonest slur word, agribusiness. Of course farming is a business. A farmer’s first job is to make enough to feed clothe and house his family, and, in advanced countries, send them to school, put away something for medical care, and old age. Many farmers also feel that in producing food they are doing really good work.
But unless they succeed as a business, that’s just pie in the sky. And because land, labor and capital all cost, the farmer has to cover these costs too. Nothing wrong with being a business. We just need well run businesses.
6. Look into the so-called Rovean-strength preemptive defense by the food industry that Ethicurean talks about, citing their blog site SafeFoodInc. I did. Among other things I discovered that they have a link to Luca Simonetti’s thoughtful post on Slow Food a couple of weeks ago on this blog.
I also discovered (apologies Luca) that site is really amateurish. It has way to go before it is Rovean strength. In fact, if I were Rove (no danger of that) I would take this as a serious denigration of my very considerable organizational skills. To say the least, until it lists the organizations it represents, the site lacks credibility.
In short, the Rovean-strength publicity at the moment is with Food Inc (see 4).
In fact, I am baffled that farmers and the food industry are lying so low.
7. Don’t forget that farming is not synonymous with food. Lots of farming (think cotton) is to produce other goods–fibre, fuel, shelter–and always has been. Farm products are not food (think maize) until they have been processed and cooked, and they never have been.
8. Remember that there’s a world outside the United States, that food is a major export industry, that actions taken in the US resound around the world.
9. Keep some sense of perspective. When Ethicurean (I suspect quoting publicity material) reports that the fact that “healthy foods are more expensive than fast foods is given heartbreaking flesh by a diabetes-plagued Latino family that has to choose between spending $1 on a fast-food hamburger or on two supermarket pears” my jaw just drops. No actually, much of my anger drains away and I laugh and laugh. This is just so ridiculous. It’s a failure of the American food industry that you have to chose between a hamburger and a pear?
The stereotyping. The assumption that a hamburger is automatically unhealthy. The hint that supermarket pears are not up to snuff.
There’s a whole world out there (see 8) where people would be thrilled to have either.
10. Think about re-reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and its comments on the tyranny of the majority. It’s under a hundred pages.
More links coming soon.
Great analogy with the buns, sort of like the old “clean up your plate, so the starving children in China can eat.” Never could figure that one out. Anyway, glad you’re putting your voice out there, because someone needs to apply brakes pretty soon. The momentum is building on this and that’s really scary, because not everyone can afford food int he first place, much less food that costs more because it’s produced by small local farmers. I’m not saying that small and local is bad — it’s good! BUT as a society we need to come to grips with what works for large farming operations as well as small farming corporations. There’s room at the table for everybody without each demonizing the other.
Brava! Yes, in a perfect world everyone would have great soil, an abundant water supply, live in a temperate climate and have the funds to pay their helpers a living wage, or have the $$$ to pay $6.50 for a pound of organic fava beans, $8 for a dozen eggs, $6.79 for a pint of raw milk, etc but…. Perspective is the key word.
Hi Rachel: I’m glad you read the Ethicurean, even if you mostly disagree with us. I’m sorry you decided to critique my review without seeing the movie first. If you had, you’d know that the family’s choice between the Burger King burger for $1 and the two pears was a pretty powerful moment in the film. We’re also not trying to “re-educate the blackest of the black” — the conventional farmer. As I say in the post — perhaps I should have said it better — I’m simply noting that the food-activist movement seems to be getting oversimplified into a case of activists (eaters and new small farmers) vs. conventional farmers. I happen to think we have a lot more in common, values wise, than we differ, and I’m just encouraging people to reach across the aisle and get to know conventional farmers.
I do spend a lot of time on farms, but they’re of the small, neo-organic variety. Recently I visited a relative who grows 500 acres of Monsanto corn and soy and fattens cattle on it. Our discussions were very eye opening to me. Unfortunately, the movie isn’t playing anywhere near him, because I’d love to know what he thought.
Generally, I’d like to see more dialogue, less name-calling from both sides (“ignorant city people!” “big bad corn farmer!”). So, even though I think you have greatly misrepresented my post about “Food, Inc.,” I’m happy to see the steps you list to get people thinking and talking about farming.
Farmers markets DO count. If they are certified, and the grower is represented at the market with his/her own produce, these are the BEST people to talk to. I know enough to ask Josh Thomas, whose father has been farming sustainably (without the organic certification) since 1971, “Would you let Lucy and Monty eat those [conventional] avocados?” and to trust him when he says “yes.”
Yes, fast food hamburgers ARE unhealthy. Do you know what they rinse that meat in? Do you know that CAFO cows and pigs stand in their own urine and feces, and breathing those fumes goes into their flesh? After eating clean pastured pork for a year, I tried a pork BBQ sandwich at a prior favorite joint, Armadillo Willy’s. I could taste the poo. It did NOT taste clean, and I will not be going back. And the filth is only part of the equation: there is the cruelty of keeping animals on cement, etc.
“Farm products are not food (think maize) until they have been processed and cooked, and they never have been.” This is COMPLETELY senseless to me. “Farm products are not food”? I know that’s English, but it is completely without meaning.
I will be seeing this film on the 18th, in the very good company of rightfully supportive friends here in Santa Cruz, California, home of the UCSC Farm & Garden, which is home to the oldest sustainable agriculture program in the country.
I loved Variety’s review of “Food, Inc.”: “Does for supermarkets what ‘Jaws’ did for the beach.”
And now off to eat some unprocessed, uncooked “farm products” (cherries and peaches) along with some eggs from TLC Ranch (5000 chickens: largest pastured egg operation in the country, and dear friends of mine).
Long live those who blow the whistle on truly evil companies like Monsanto! Sheesh!
Great article Rachel: your usual considered perspective. Thanks.
what we eat and where it comes from ultimately comes down to what we (want to) believe and how much we’re willing to pay for it.
people in the developed world should feel very lucky that they can make informed choices about what they eat, be it mcdonalds hamburgers or free-range meat bought from a farmer’s market. there shouldn’t be a guilt factor involved. i know my son would prefer the burger over the pears, while my daughter would do the exact opposite, yet these two children have been brought up in the same house by the same mother mother – they simply have different ideas about food and i doubt they will change in the near future.
this kind of discussion has forced people to think about their food, which isn’t really a bad thing. what is bad is when people try to sway you to their opinion without letting you exercise your right to choose democratically.
Excellent post Rachel. The steps you outline are thought provoking.
Thanks so much. I’ve been enjoying your posts on the Indian elections. Very informative.
THX4 the excellent thoughts, Rachel.
I fear the extremes — black&white, holy&unholy — and the fervor with which people at the ends of a spectrum so often seem to wish to push all people into their own form.
This post also reminded me that when I hear people rhapsodize about eating only ‘local’ food I think of the fact that, until fairly recently, people did just that of necessity and lack of transportation. With the availability of non-local options a host of dreaded conditions were reduced to the point where some younger people may not have even heard words like: beriberi, pellagra, rickets, scurvy.
Yes, too sad, the tyranny of the local. Thanks Kay.
Hi Rachel,
10 great rules!
My eye was catched by this passage in the first of your links:
“If you want to save fish stocks or improve conditions for livestock, do you take it to politicians or do you take it to television and cinema? The latter seems the better way to work right now.”
So far, I’d have thought that the transformation of politics into show business had occurred only in Italy and some other European country, but now it seems to me that this phenomenon is starting also in the US.
Gee, why bother oneself in trying to get your views shared by others, trying to speak to the real people, including those bores in the public offices in Seattle or in Washington, and convince them, trying to get a majority, trying to win a poll- in other words, why do politics? Isn’t it so much cooler, and easier, to shoot a photo of Greta Scacchi or Paul Mccartney? At least we’ll save the effort needed to sensibly discuss our ideas with the people who don’t share them (which also spares us the risk of ending by changing ours). Naaah, better take the issue to Tv or cinema.
This is another heritage of the Sixties and Seventies, and particularly of Situationism, isn’t it?
Thanks Luca. I have to admit I had not thought of stressing the celebrity angle in particular, but I think you are right about it. Here’s a link to situahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_Internationaltionism.
Kay Curtis says it like I would.
A lack of knowledge about history and nutrition is dangerous here, because for the first time ever we are providing (theoretically) food for most people on the planet. Since that’s never been the case before, yes, there’s a learning curve facing us as we try to figure out how to keep on feeding people, but with foods that optimize health and well-being, and still making food available to as many people as possible.
Absolutely. And mistakes should not mean a retreat from the project. They are bound to happen.
Tana Butler is mistaken in at least one of her statements. I hate to burst her bubble, but an awful lot of New Zealand beef farmers export beef to America especially for McDonald’s. That beef is raised outside, in the sun and wind and rain, and the beasts eat grass and hay. We don’t have such things as “feedlots” in New Zealand. Every single cattlebeast that is raised here and sent to America as beef to be turned into hamburgers is what Americans call “free range” and what we call “how on earth else would you farm cattle?”
I’m not so happy about their buns though.
Bronwyn, Thanks for this. It’s new to new and it surely will be welcome news to Tana. Are you from a farm background?
I think there is a fine balance between the tyranny of the majority and the Flat Earth Society.
Now, now Paul, you’re not gently hinting that I’m a Flat Earther, are you? If so, please explain what I am being so obtuse about.
As usual, it’s a bad idea to criticize a movie you haven’t seen.
Hello Grumpy, Welcome to my site. I agree that you don’t in general want to criticize movies you haven’t seen. But (a) this is not your regular movie but a piece of propaganda based on books that I know well and have criticized at length already. And (b) it’s not a criticism of the movie but a set of suggestions to set it in context.
Hence I plead innocent.
Great list, Rachel.
The financial backing aspect is so important and can be easily overlooked.
The ‘good guys’ (green; sustainable; organic; etc) vs. the ‘bad guys’ (agribusiness; inc.; etc.) takes me back to my Berkeley grad days, where the emphasis was on Recycling, etc. vs. Big Business, etc.
Variations on a basic theme…
These Ideal Types can help clarify issues, but – after all – are *ideal* and don’t generally represent the real world. But the latter can be a pretty messy place, if one is looking for simple answers. Your list helps to move in that direction.
Thanks Diana. Yes, the drive for simple causes is a powerful one. What seems to me sad is that in this case so many farmers who have dedicated their lives to what they thought was good work are being painted as callous, unreflective villains. Of course, the farm lobby has had a lot of power but even so. . .
Oops, I mean that your list helps to clarify – not (necessarily) to simplify… Better stop while I may be ahead!! :(
Rachel,
I agree that it’s good to have some perspective when going in to watch this type of movie. And I like to listen/read from both sides. However, after watching the movie, I didn’t feel it painted conventional farmers as callous, unreflective villains as you state. If anything, the companies’ practices are the ones that are more heavily criticized. Though the movie does suggest that we should seek out local farmers, buy organic, etc. I agree that it’s not always easy, practical or cost-effective. However, I didn’t come away from the movie thinking we have to eliminate businesses or corporations. I think it’s more about improving the practices. If the movie will generate some debate about food, I think it has accomplished soemthing.
Thanks for commenting, Paula. I really like your web site and enjoyed reading the comments there on your post on the movie. I agree that if the movie generates debate about food it will have accomplished quite a bit. I still worry about the message. Let’s keep in touch about the reaction.
Enjoyed this blog thanks – good work!
Well written blog. Stumbled upon it. But, you should really watch the movie before coming up with such a strong opinion. It actually touches upon some of the same areas as you.
You need to see the documentary before making anymore comments!
Thanks for the suggestion Brian. But I very carefully chose my comments to suggest context for Food Inc., not to address the content of the documentary directly. Thus I remain unconvinced that I needed to see it before making the comments I made. If I were to talk about the content of the documentary, then clearly I would need to see it.
Whereas I agree with some of your points, point 9 perspective please you’ve obviously never gone without. A hamburger will fill my belly and stave off hunger pangs for quite sometime a pear will not.
And sorry Rachel, I have to agree with Brian you need to see the movie
Hi Mark, thanks for reading my piece. Have you gone without? I am not poking fun at those who are hungry and I agree that a hamburger is more filling than a pear. But both, in world terms, are luxury foods. Tortillas and beans are the stomach fillers.
And now that I am briefly in the States and have access to the movie (which I did not in Mexico) I will see it. Perhaps I will be surprised. But my comments are directed at the assumptions that the advance publicity was taking for granted and as such they stand.