Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 332

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal," by Mark Bittman.

Food affects everything. Not only is it crucial to existence, but its quality can change us for better or worse. Yet over the course of modern history the nature of growing and producing our most important substance has been changed in ways that made increasing numbers of humans begin to eat manufactured creations that had little in common with the food from which they were made, while the land used for their production has been degraded and humans ruthlessly exploited. These were mistakes, and there were—and still are—many others.

With the development of agriculture—a mashup of two Latin words meaning “field” and “growing”—came the birth of societies and the invention of knives, axes, canoes, wheels, and more, each with profound effects on history. Humans built entire industries—entire civilizations—around their ability to bend the land and its fruits to their will. Land became the foundation of wealth. 

But agriculture has had a dark side: It’s sparked disputes over landownership, water use, and the extraction of resources. It’s driven exploitation and injustice, slavery and war. It’s even, paradoxically enough, created disease and famine. 

Simply put: Agriculture has, over the course of human history, gotten away with murder. With each passing century, it’s gotten better at it, until it became a justification for imperialism and genocide.

 

A dictionary definition of “food” reads something like “a substance that provides nourishment.” And until a century ago, we had two types of food: plants and animals. But as agriculture and food processing became industries, they developed a third type of “food,” more akin to poison—“a substance that is capable of causing illness or death.” These engineered edible substances, barely recognizable as products of the earth, are commonly called “junk.” 

Junk has hijacked our diets and created a public health crisis that diminishes the lives of perhaps half of all humans. And junk is more than a dietary issue: The industrialized agriculture that has spawned junk—an agriculture that, along with its related industries, concentrates on maximizing the yield of the most profitable crops—has done more damage to the earth than strip mining, urbanization, even fossil fuel extraction. Yet it remains not only underregulated but subsidized by the governments of most countries.

For decades, Americans believed that we had the world’s healthiest and safest diet. We didn’t worry about its effects on our health, on the environment, on resources, or on the lives of the animals or even the workers it relies upon. Nor did we worry about its ability to endure—that is, its sustainability. We have been encouraged, even forced, to remain ignorant of both the costs of industrial agriculture and the non-environment-wrecking, healthier alternatives. 

Yet if terrorists stole or poisoned a large share of our land, water, and other natural resources, underfed as much as a quarter of the population and seeded disease among half, threatened our ability to feed ourselves in the future, deceived, lied to, and poisoned our children, tortured our animals, and ruthlessly exploited many of our citizens—we’d consider that a threat to national security and respond accordingly. 

Contemporary agriculture, food production, and marketing have done all of that, with government support and without penalty.

Slavery’s impact can hardly be overstated. What began as a brutal way to produce food for the rich helped establish a pattern of global food production that became the norm. Food was no longer something you cultivated outside your door to feed your community. It was produced far afield, by exploited labor overseen by strangers, then shipped in previously unimaginable quantities to supply huge markets. It didn’t take long for the Americas to become the center of this kind of food production. And the costs to nature and humans were even more staggering than the profits. 

An exchange is defined as a trade for something of equal or near-equal value. In what’s usually referred to as “the Columbian Exchange”—one of history’s great misnomers, given the genocide that followed—Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century. The riches Europeans reaped included the land of two entire continents and all that was found there, including literal boatloads of silver and other raw materials of immeasurable worth.

It’s not likely that the colonizers felt remorse over the damage, because their methods were justified by the kind of thinking popularized by René Descartes, who in the seventeenth century unveiled a proto-scientific understanding of the world that divided the earth into two kinds of matter. There was sentient, alive, and intelligent matter—almost exclusively the minds of educated white men—and then there was the rest of existence, called “extended.” This simplistic view of nature is known as mind-body (or Cartesian) dualism, and its impact on even today’s thinking can’t be overstated. 

Descartes’s second category, the extended sector, included almost everything in nature: animals, forests, and rocks, as well as emotions and whatever is seen as “irrational.” It also included most humans, who were seen as bodies, lifeless containers for brains that were more “wild” than they were “thinking.” Women, uneducated men, and “savages”—all of these were “extended,” another way of saying inferior. 

Thus, all women and people of color were lumped in with animals (whom Descartes saw as noisemaking machines), minerals, mountains, soil, you name it—and all of this was placed under the domain of white men. Positioned as a form of scientific thinking, Cartesian dualism was really no more than an extension of the religious rationalization of white male supremacy. 

This way of thinking bonded racism, sexism, the destruction of the earth, and the enslavement of its people. As Naomi Klein wrote in This Changes Everything, “patriarchy’s dual war against women’s bodies and against the body of the earth were connected to that essential, corrosive separation between mind and body—and between body and earth—from which both the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution sprang.”

In all, more than a quarter of all of the nation’s land was given away or sold for cheap, and since much of that total (two billion acres) is unfarmable mountains or desert, that quarter represents the majority of arable land. If you are looking for the roots of today’s income inequality, you might start here, with a federal donation of land—the foundation of most wealth—to an exclusive club of white men.

In his book Stalinism, Collectivization and the Great Famine, my friend the Italian historian Andrea Graziosi notes the four key elements of this famine. First, Stalin and his regime executed policy with the express goal of breaking the peasantry. The state itself, Graziosi says, was essentially built upon a “protracted war with the peasantry.” Second, although the famine was not caused intentionally, it was willfully manipulated once it began. Third, Stalin used hunger as a punishment, terrorizing people who threatened his power and deporting millions of people to Siberia. Finally, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, this policy developed a genocidal quality. More than a million Kazakh nomads died of starvation in 1931 and 1932 after their herds were seized by the state. 

Most sources put the number of people who starved to death in the Stalin-generated famine at around seven million, although some estimates range as high as twelve million. Something like forty percent of the Kazakh population and, in some areas, up to a third of Ukrainians perished. Stalin’s “agricultural prosperity” left the Ukrainian countryside’s fields of rich black soil bereft of crops and people alike. Everyone who could have worked the fields had either died or fled to the cities or abroad. 

This was the first instance of a modern government using food as an internal weapon against a rebellious citizenry. But a trend was established. From then on, as economist Amartya Sen contends, famines didn’t just strike without warning. They happened only in the context of civil unrest, the absence of democracy, and outright war. In his analysis of famines in Bengal (1943), the Sahel (1972–74), Ethiopia (1972–74), and Bangladesh (1974), Sen concludes that food availability had no correlation with onset of famine. Political freedom did.

In the Great Migration, which took place roughly from the end of World War I until 1970, six million African Americans left the South for the industrial cities of the North, the biggest internal displacement of Americans fleeing their homes in history. Racism, Jim Crow tyranny, and perceived opportunity are most often cited as the main drivers of this migration. But it’s crucial to remember that Black Americans had been mostly farmers: at the beginning of the century, three quarters of Black households were in rural areas. So by depriving millions of Black farmers of their land, the government had used food as a tool to force them to flee.

 

In the United States, undocumented Mexican workers make up eighty percent of the farmworker population, and they’re literally irreplaceable: United Farm Workers reached out to four million American citizens to solicit farmwork during a period of historic unemployment in 2010. Twelve thousand people applied. Twelve showed up for work. None lasted a single day.

Every solution in the realm of food is interconnected. Like the other great battles we have yet to win—those for racial and economic justice, an end to gender discrimination, the existential struggle to mitigate climate change—they all circle back to the wealth of nature, and how we humans protect and share it.

There is already enough food (and enough of virtually every other crucial resource) for all humans to live well, and without ravaging the planet. To let desperation and myths of scarcity guide our vision is to fall into industry’s hands. Better to prioritize food security for all and intelligently use the abundance that already exists. Our greatest challenges are to do so with less harm to people and to the environment, to ensure that riches and power and privilege are distributed equitably, and to be guided by morality. 

It’s corny to say the earth will provide, but it’s true. What might be called the peasant food system feeds seventy percent of the world’s population with just twenty-five percent of its agricultural resources. Industrial agriculture uses the other seventy-five percent to produce food that reaches fewer than a third of the world’s people, in part because half of what’s produced by Big Ag isn’t even meant to feed humans. 

Ignored by state-funded research, fought by global finance, discouraged by most rulers, peasant farming remains more efficient than industrial farming. Were it given the kind of support that’s been lent to industry-backed farming—research, subsidies, cheap or free land, and such—it could become better still. Instead, those resources are siphoned away from the people who could build a real food system and instead used to ensure profits for industrial agriculture.